It’s a good thing we were stopped at a light when the man sitting in the passenger seat paid me that compliment.  It sounded like a line straight out of Jane Austen, and I knew the instant he said it that it was one of the nicest things anyone had ever said to me.  If I had been in a more cynical frame of mind, I would have thought that the guy was trying way too hard.  I mean, who uses the word “esteem” in conversation anymore?

And yet, I think for most women  esteem or respect is what we crave most in a relationship.  Jane Austen understood that and the great romantic relationships in her novels are all built on this foundation.  Sure, most of her heroes are dashing and the girls are often uncommonly pretty, but what really makes their love stories swoon-worthy is that the men respect– and fall in love with– the women’s brains.

Darcy finds Elizabeth’s looks only “tolerable”, until he’s had the opportunity to observe her wit, wisdom, and candor.  It’s only then that he realizes that she is the handsomest woman of his acquaintance.  And though Marianne is shocked when Elinor describes her feelings for Edward with the phrase, “I greatly esteem him,”  she herself ultimately marries the man she respects first, and only grows to love.

I think most women — whether  pretty or plain — spend a lot of time worrying about their looks and whether they attract the right sort of attention from right sort of man.  Our pink princess training starts early and is unrelenting throughout our lives. But the first desire of our hearts is always to be loved for who we are on the inside.  We want to be with someone who will pay attention to our opinions and engage us in thoughtful conversation at the breakfast table every morning for fifty years, regardless of how we look when we wake up in the morning.  Austen, though she never married, understood that esteem is the bedrock of true love and real domestic happiness.  We return to Austen again and again not because she writes fairy tales of poor, beautiful girls rescued by rich, handsome men, but because she writes fairy tales of smart women who make the smart choice of marrying where there is great esteem.

And what became of the man who paid me that incredible compliment?  It turned out, he’d never read a word of Jane Austen in his life.  He simply spoke as he thought at that moment.

Reader, I married him.

In the mood for more Austen. Go see Cincinnati Shakespeare Company’s lovely production of Sense and Sensibility right now.  Photo by Rich Sofranko.

So this week I’m determined to return to form– whatever that is at this point — and talk about what I’ve actually been doing in my spare time.

For the last month, I’ve been doing a fair bit of reading, crashing through several books in rapid succession (and dragging myself to the end of one book I wish I’d never started– Liar’s Poker by Michael Lewis.  I enjoyed two of his other works, The Big Short and Moneyball,  but this one is just too much about bond trading and nothing else.)  All the other books have been fiction, which is a change for me.  After several years of reading mostly non-fiction with the occasional YA genre novel and plenty of Harry Potter, discovering two new fiction works in a matter of days has been delightful.

First, I picked up The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern.  Set at the turn of the century (the previous one), the story follows two young people, Celia and Marco, who are chosen to represent rival magicians in a competition.  The venue for the competition is an amazing traveling circus, stunning in its all black and white design, with fantastical acts that seem almost like magic.  In fact, the magic is real and Celia and Marco are at the heart of it, dueling over years without knowing how or when the duel will come to an end. Morgenstern’s prose is delicate and delicious and her sense of theatricality is incredible.  Theatre artists will recognize in the author a fellow traveler who knows her way around in front of the curtain and backstage.  I read the book in a few nights, stopping only for sleep.  The plot is remarkably simple and straightforward– it’s a romance, of course– but the world of the circus is so incredible that I didn’t mind lingering there waiting for the story to advance.  In a way, the circus is the third main character and a physical representation of all of Celia and Marco’s ambitions, desires, and dreams.  It’s even called Le Cirque de Reves– and it is only open at night.

One of the side plots involves the fans of the Circus– the Reveurs– who follow the Circus around the world and write essays and articles about the different performers, tents, and acts.  Morgenstern cleverly turns the reader into one of the Reveurs from the beginning, alternating story chapters with a second-person visit to the circus through one breathtaking tent after another.  She casts a spell and creates a place that the reader wants desperately to be real– if only to escape there for a few hours.  I hope whoever picked up the film rights is hiring one hell of a director/designer/auteur. Tim Burton. Or Baz Luhrman.  Or Peter Jackson.

Immediately after The Night Circus, I picked up another book that had been getting rave reviews from friends and critics: Ready Player One. I’d hesitated initially because the plot revolved around gaming, and while I appreciate that video games as a medium are becoming amazingly complex in story and design, I’m definately not a gamer and have no taste for it. I shouldn’t have worried.  Ready Player One eases you into the dystopic future where everyone spends their time and money in an infinitely large virtual game universe called OASIS.  Our hero, Wade Watts, is one of thousands on a quest to discover the easter egg hidden by the game’s deceased creator– a creator obsessed with 1980s nostalgia, classic science fiction, dungeons & dragons, and all sorts of other geeky goodness.  In some ways, the novel reads as pure wish fulfillment for many of my fellow geeks– a chance to live inside the imagined worlds we’ve only glimpsed through favorite novels, films, and games.  The book’s a fun, propulsive read, chock full of winks to the 1980s of my childhood.

I read these two books back to back on my Kindle– which in itself is both magical and an electronic portal to other worlds.  Both are debut novels published just last year, and both have at their center alternate realities of extraordinary magic that offer escape from the dreariness of every day life.  Come to think of it, that idea is also central to another book I read a few months ago, The Magicians.  Are we more in need of this kind of escape than ever before?  Isn’t it strange that these novels revolve around a fiction inside a fiction– that we’re escaping into the world of the novel only to follow the characters we meet there down another rabbit hole?  And in the case of Ready Player One, a lot of that virtual world is built from thousands of other universes imagined by other artists. Curiouser and curiouser.

I highly recommend both of these books, and I hope I get a chance to talk with someone else who’s read them soon.

I know how difficult it is to come up with four sentences that encapsulate all the great reasons someone should come see your play/exhibit/concert.  Especially if your organization specializes in the classics, finding fresh ways to describe four-hundred year-old plots can feel impossible.

And, of course, your Artistic Director is urging you to include information about what makes this production special— the famous Broadway designer, the choreographer from France, the fact that all these actors are reprising characters from another play earlier in the season– all of which are wonderful things that make the production unique and are possibly the driving reason that this particular title is in the season.

And so you sit down to write “the blurb” (at midnight, after your house management shift and three committee meetings) and you find yourself writing an opening line like this (a few details have been changed to protect the innocent):

Carmen: Georges Bizet’s melodic score of opera’s most-recognized tunes augment Jean Pierre’s inspiring choreography in a stunning performance of this century-old classic.

Or this:

Three Sisters: Discover the humor and heartbreak of one of the world’s greatest plays, revealed through the lyricism of two leading voices in contemporary theatre: two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist Sarah Ruhl and director Les Waters, whose acclaimed collaborations include the Tony Award-nominated In the Next Room (or the vibrator play) on Broadway.

Or this:

La Traviata returns to our stage for the first time since 2008 featuring American tenor Bob Smith (“a sumptuously lyric tenor– Opera America”) and an all-star cast in a production directed by George Pierre.*

*This sentence is actually a mash-up of several opening sentences from various opera company blurbs– but really, they almost all read like this.

Bad news, folks.  Your audience lost interest in the first sentence and is now looking at pictures of cats somewhere else on the internet.  Not because your production isn’t awesome (it is!) but because you didn’t sell the story first.

We are living in a golden age of stories.  Between my kindle, Netflix, cable television, and my computer, I can access literally millions of stories whenever I want.  True crime, romance, science fiction, historical epics, westerns, biographies, and scores of mash-ups, re-tellings, re-imaginings, and re-makes.  And as writers and creatives find more and more ways to deliver stories, they get more ambitious in their storytelling– look at “Breaking Bad” or “A Song of Fire and Ice” or “LOST” or… you get the idea.

This isn’t bad news for the “traditional” arts.  On the contrary, this could be GREAT news because we have a truckload of great stories and a unique delivery system–actual breathing humans occupying the same room as the audience while acting/singing/dancing/playing instruments.  But instead of selling our great stories to the general public, we keep marketing our shows to the people we probably don’t need to “sell” to at all: our devotees.

Devotees care about casting and top talent. They will be impressed by review quotes from top national critics.  They will call the box office to find out if you are “messing up” Shakespeare by presenting it in anything other than Elizabethan dress.  Of course, you have to keep these people happy– they are probably the majority of your donors and subscribers.

But– since the Devotees are already, you know, devoted, they can be expected to read your entire blurb, go to your website, and corner your Artistic Director awkwardly at intermission.  They’ll dig for all that good information about what makes this production unique.

HOWEVER– new audiences–those magical and fickle creatures we all keep chasing with grant money and new staff members and free cocktail hours– have ZERO interest in your talking points– because they likely have absolutely no idea what you are talking about.

Your curious new audience member cannot name a single Broadway director or designer and or any playwright other than Shakespeare (who he remembers as being very boring in English class).  She does not know any of our insider language for describing art like “melodic” or “evocative” or “lyricism.”  He doesn’t know the other works by the author, doesn’t read the publications you’re quoting, and certainly doesn’t care how long it has been since you last performed this opera. She certainly is not so familiar with this “famous” work that you can assume she knows the characters, plot, and most famous passages.  So when she comes across sentences like the ones above, she is confused and bored and moving on.

That doesn’t mean these people are uneducated or undiscerning in their tastes. Being new to the art form means they have no point of reference.  And we can’t start the relationship by being patronizing and “educating” them about the art form– ugh.  We need to hook them into trying an experience that they will enjoy so much that they will want to learn more and try it again.

So what can we do?  Friends, we have to do what every other purveyor of stories is doing and sell the story first.  

Think of the voice-over for a movie trailer.  How do they all start?

“Cindy swore she’d never leave her job, until three adorable orphans arrived on her doorstep.”

“In a world where emotions are outlawed, they committed the ultimate crime: they fell in love.”

“He promised his mother that this was his last job.”

Trailers dump up us into the story at the inciting incident– the moment when the plot kicks the interesting characters into a new situation that requires them to act.  The writers of these trailers bait the hook with the story to get our noses out of our popcorn.  Sure, they’ll also show us the famous actors on screen and if Spielberg is directing, his name might be the first thing you hear. But in less than 10 seconds, they have to sell us on the story.

Great story hooks can create best-sellers out of  mediocre material.  The Twilight series is some truly terrible writing, but the basic hook– Girl falls in love with immortal vampire, can they ever be together? — is such a compelling idea that Stephenie Meyer is now a millionaire and there are entire shelves of Young Adult fiction devoted to supernatural romance.

We’re lucky.  We know that many of the plays, operas, ballets, we are producing are not only good stories but also good stories well-told.  Some of this material has been entertaining audiences for centuries– it’s that good.  So- why don’t we lead with our best foot forward? Why do we not put front and center the idea that compelled the original author of the work to write it in the first place? Surely, a plot or character that could inspire Shakespeare or Verdi to spend months writing, could also inspire someone to buy a ticket.

For the three examples above, I found good story nuggets buried somewhere later in the blurb (or on Wikipedia).

A feisty woman determined to maintain her independence is torn between two men obsessed with possessing her.

(Whoa!  thinks new audience member,  that sounds hot.  Bingo! Carmen is hot!)

Transplanted from their beloved Moscow to a provincial Russian town, three sisters—school teacher Olga, unhappily married Masha, idealistic Irina—yearn for the city of their childhood, where they imagine their lives will be transformed and fulfilled.

(Not much plot to lead with in a Chekhov play, but at least you’ve introduced me to three intriguing characters and their compelling and familiar situation. Nice.)

Violetta gives up her luxurious lifestyle as a kept woman to experience true love with Alfredo – until his family comes between them.

(Drama and romance.  Men, take note, this sounds like a good date night.– I also have to say– I had to look through FOUR different opera company websites before I found this sentence.  Every site went on about how La Traviata is one of the most famous, most produced and most beloved operas, with tons of information about the artists involved. Only ONE of them told me what the story is.  Opera marketers, I love you and I want to learn to enjoy opera.  But I’m not buying a $60 ticket to your show if you won’t tell me its basic premise in a simple sentence.)

We’re good writers– we know how to tell the story. We’re just burying it under a lot of arts insider nonsense.  Find the story nugget in your blurb and make it your first and second sentence.  Then pad it out with some genre/mood adjectives (heart-warming!  pulse-pounding! knee-slapping!) and then tell your devotees about the big name star and that great review quote.

If we really want to be making art for everyone– that is, if we truly believe that classical theatre, opera, ballet is still relevant to contemporary audiences, and as satisfying an experience as any movie, TV show, reality game, or internet meme– then we have to bait the hook with what everyone truly craves– a great story, well-told.

But now I’m a Blogger, which means my New Year’s Resolutions are going down here in print for all 18 of you loyal readers to see and possibly nag me about a year from now. So I’ve thought a little more carefully about what it is I’m willing to commit to and I’ve made a fundamental decision: I will not resolve to do less of anything in 2012. Many Januaries I have tried to commit to eating less, worrying less, being less stressed, making fewer commitments (ha) and all sorts of other reductive measures.  The result has always been that the more I try to stick to my resolutions, the more deprived, depleted, and depressed I feel.

So this year I am turning this equation on its head and making five (admittedly somewhat vague) commitments to add MORE to my life.  I want to approach my life from a sense of abundance, not scarcity, and see what happens.

Enough Drumroll.  My New Year’s Resolutions for 2012:

1. Write More.  On this blog, obviously.  But also I want to write more thank you notes, more emails to old friends, more love letters to my husband, more silly songs for my son, more funny to do lists that run my life.  Stringing words together makes me happy.  More words, more happiness.

2. Move More. Exercise? More, please.  Chasing Henry around the Park? More, Mommy, More!  Getting out of my chair at work every hour and stretching/tap dancing/wiggling my toes? More, more, more.

3. Spend More Time with My Girlfriends.  Twice, in the last year, I had conversations with smart, wonderful women who I admired and considered friends where we realized that we both had been avoiding calling the other, simply because we assumed the other person would be too busy to get a drink.  Ridiculous.  I need to talk to the women in my life and be there to listen.  The new picture frame on my desk at work has a picture of a friend’s wedding shower and a whole passle of great girlfriends who I love.  It’s there to remind me to just send them a message on Facebook already, what is this, the 19th Century?

4.Eat More Vegatables.  I am terrible at diets.  Three days in a row of depriving myself of fat, sugar, and carbohydrates and I am one cranky bitch.  So instead of trying to count more calories and eat less of the things I know are bad for me, I’m going to try and increase my intake of the things I know are good for me.  Because I like vegatables– I just tend to default to whatever carb is closest at hand.  So far, I’m replacing chips, bread, and french fried side dishes with a cucumbers, tomatoes, and green peppers. It’s a start.

5. Love More.  It’s a verb, not a feeling. If I do it more, I’ll feel it more and so will the people I care about the most.  More Hugs, More “I Love Yous”, More Kindnesses, More Forgiveness, More Listening.

That’s my plan.  I’ll keep you posted.  Happy New Year to all of you and thanks again for reading.

Now, almost a year into my new job, which I took in part because it was so very specific and well-defined, I have discovered a lot about who I actually am when I am at work, what it is I do well, and what I actually enjoy doing.  Here are a few things I’m observing about myself:

1. If I could do nothing but write all day, I would be pretty happy.  Whether it is press releases or blog entries or marketing copy or  talking points or funny little blurbettes for social media, I enjoy the craft of building sentences out of words.  I especially love writing the posts for the Making Waves series on the ArtsWave blog.  I’m playing journalist in a way– identifying a story, doing short interviews, digging for facts, and then trying to assemble it all into a 500-600 word essay on a deadline.  And I love it.    Wondering if I shouldn’t be specializing in PR or a  journalism (wait– are there still viable careers in journalism?)

2. I enjoy and am good at advance planning and developing projects from scratch– BUT I am terrible at and do not particularly enjoy managing overlapping projects as they evolve.  Given a few hours alone to think– or a 30 minute brainstorming session with smart people, I can map out a project, its goals, its budget, its target audience, its potential pitfalls, and its action plan pretty rapidly.  But keeping track of what’s gone to the printer and what hasn’t when I’m interrupted every five minutes by a different immediate concern– ugh.  Thinking about taking a project management class to see if I can work on this– suggestions welcome.

3. I’m a good listener, interpreter, and diplomat. I enjoy working with lots of different types of people, I love finding solutions to problems, and I have the patience to work with difficult personalities.  Must be the Mennonite upbringing.  Though, I do let loose with occasional snark.

4. I enjoy working with talented graphic designers, whose work seems to me a kind of alchemy. I wish my brain thought in pictures. Part of what I always loved about working with actors, too.

5. I actually work best from 8 am to 12:30 pm.  My brain really wants to siesta in the afternoon.  I get another burst of energy after dinner.  Need to figure out better ways to focus in the afternoon.

6. I need comrades-in-arms.  Co-workers isn’t quite enough.

7. A forty-hour work week really is glorious and I love my evenings and weekends with my family.  But opening nights at my theater are still painful– I miss that so very much.

8. The weirdest thing that I miss about my old job is ticket sales forecasting.  I really loved digging through data and coming up with new spreadsheets and formulas for predicting how many people would buy tickets to see Richard III.

9. The thing I never miss about my old job is the anxiety and stress of knowing that if I couldn’t find the money in time, 25 people I loved wouldn’t be able to eat.

10.  I still need a place/space in my life to talk about theater, and plays, and Shakespeare, and arts administration.  I don’t think that’s ever going away.

So… what job/career/life does all this add up to?  I’m enjoying my current work, and I think it suits most of these criteria/ambitions/foibles of mine.  But the question lingers.  Now that I’m not Managing Director of a theater, what do I want to be when I grow up?  And how has becoming a parent changed or curbed the scope of my ambition?

Kafka: Hell is Bureaucracy
Conversations with our Mortgage Broker August 15th through October 15th:

Sure, we’d love to give you a loan!  Please provide all these documents.
Wait– did we say these documents?  No, we actually meant these over here.  Which have to be notarized.  And overnighted back to us from Colorado. Again.
I’m sorry, the photocopy of your driver’s license in unreadable.  Can you please resend it a third time?
Doesn’t your mother have access to a fax machine?
Yes, we understand your mother’s head injury makes it difficult for her to complete paperwork and that’s why you got power of attorney documents in the first place, but we promise that as soon as she completes this 25 question first time homebuyer’s quiz, and provides her last four tax returns, and goes through this phone interview, everything will be fine.
Actually, now that we have all your paperwork, the loan is still not approved until the board of the condo association gets a revised insurance certificate from its insurance agent that meets the requiredFannie Mae formula that qualifies the property to be purchased under this special loan program.
Did we mention that the condo property manager is out of town for the week?

Sartre: Hell is Other People

I love my mother.  And I have a great deal of sympathy for her plight.  And I am glad that we can move her here so that she can spend more time with Henry.

But when she insists on sleeping on the couch in our living room, leaving dishes all over the house, watching MSNBC at top volume 24 hours a day (LITERALLY– I would wake up and find it still blaring at 2 am), losing her glasses/purse/teacup/cigarettes/underwear over and over again, and then making passive agressive comments about my housekeeping… I start to understand what Sartre was going for in “No Exit.”  With Mom taking over the living room, John and I have had no where to go– our bedroom is connected to the baby’s room, so once Henry is in bed at 7:30 p.m., we can only be downstairs and that means we can only be with Mom.

To top it off, this weekend we added John’s mother and sister to the mix.  I’m sure there a spouses whose two mothers get along famously and go shopping together and enjoy a good-natured rivalry in who can be the best Grandma.  However, John and I have two mothers so different that it is hard to identify them as being the same species.  Both of them wonderful women– just not meant to occupy the same room at the same time.

Beckett: Hell is Stasis.

We continued like this for almost three weeks: Mom in the living room, no word on a closing date, no hope or end in sight.  Every day Mom would ask if we’d heard anything.  Every day I’d report that we were still waiting.  Mom would then indulge herself in a round of catastrophizing: what if the condo association went out of business? what if she couldn’t get her mail? what if the moving truck with all her things arrived before we closed on the condo? (the truck was delayed by almost 10 days– a stroke of luck, as it turned out) what if she didn’t get the loan after all?  what if we couldn’t secure the sliding glass door to keep out burglers? what if she couldn’t open a bank account?  what if she never found a place to move into?  These episodes always end with her crying.

These runaway trains of anxious thoughts are yet another result of her insidious head injury plus mood disorder plus narcotic pain medication– I’d remind myself of this every time, and grit my teeth, and explain patiently that eventually, this too shall pass.  We will overcome every obstacle.  We can work around any problem.  The end is in sight.  We survived having my father live with us for four months, we can survive this. (Later, John notes that we have discovered the conversion rate: one month of my Dad living in the house is equal to one week of my Mother.)

But this Sunday night, when we’d made arrangements to lease the condo until closing could be settled and I’d taken yet another day off work to move her in on Monday, only to discover that the previous tenant had had the power shut off and it likely could not be turned on again for at least three days, I lost it.  I cried for about an hour and my very patient husband looked after me, while my little boy kept waking up every thirty minutes crying– Henry, too, has been overwhelmed by the anxiety and broken routines and general chaos of the last month.  For that hour, I indulged in my own catastrophizing: what if I never got her out of here?  what if I’d made the biggest mistake of my adult life?

But I got four hours sleep. I got up Monday morning and I convinced Duke Energy that I had to have power that day.  The power got turned on. The bed got delivered.  The cable company agreed to come back in the afternoon after I had to cancel them for the morning.  Mom and I bought groceries and cleaning supplies.  I unpacked all my mother’s plates and teacups from Sweden.  We found the router that had to be mailed back to Colorado.  We found her pillows and her glasses and her insulin and her coloring books.  I spent 12 straight hours on my feet, but at 7 pm I left my mother’s condo and went home and sat on the couch with my husband– alone at last.

“The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh.”
― Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

I remember I had my hand on the doorknob to leave the apartment when something about Matt Lauer’s tone on the Today show made me stop.  He had a breaking story. They didn’t have footage ready. They’d be back after the break.  I should have gotten in the car and headed for work, but I waited, curious to see what was happening.

As soon as I saw the live footage of billowing smoke over New York, I stuck my head in the bedroom to wake up my boyfriend: “A plane hit the World Trade Center.”  We sat and watched, listening to Katie Couric muse that the pilot must have had an accident, while Matt Lauer grimly pointed out the fact that the sky was perfectly clear. We watched the second plane hit and my boyfriend, Matthew, said simply in a light voice, “We’re under attack”, stood up and went to the kitchen to call his Aunt in New Jersey.  I was struck by how quickly he seemed to understand what was happening.

I still had to go to work.  I listened to NPR on the long drive, as Bob Edwards struggled to stay on top of the story.  The Pentagon correspondent left the air suddenly to evacuate the building.  I parked in the garage, turned off the car, hurried to get to the street.  I hit the street and found I could still hear the radio coverage.  The cafe next to the theatre had turned on its outdoor speakers so that everyone on  could keep listening to the news on NPR.  But there wasn’t anyone on the street.  I’ll never forget the eerieness of that moment– walking alone down a sunny, empty street listening to the steady stream of horrifying news.

Entering our basement offices, we all started to exchange scraps of information, rumor, speculation.  The ancient huge TV from the 60s that we occasionally used as set dressing was being coaxed and cajoled into producing a picture.  Frustrated, we finally left it and went to the Artistic Director’s crowded office at the very back of the space and huddled around a tiny black and white counter-top set.  Around 10 am, the smokers took a badly needed break.  I stayed alone in the office and watched as one building transformed suddenly into a column of ash.  Had I seen that?  What happened?  I ran up the back stairs, pushed open the door: “One of the towers collapsed.”  No one believed me. They said I had to be wrong– I had never been to New York, I didn’t understand how large these buildings were, there’s no way one of them could collapse. I was being naive and hyperbolic.  Stung and humiliated I said, “Look, there were two buildings on fire and now there’s only one”, and went back down.  We all watched the second tower fall.

Our Managing Director tried to start the work day and sent us to our desks.  I couldn’t concentrate on contracts and study guides.  I kept refreshing the CNN website, looking at the photos.  The rest of the day is a blur.  I don’t remember when I finally got in touch with Letty Tomlinson, my friend from college whose husband worked in the Pentagon, or when we finally heard from Marni in New York, but the relief at knowing they were safe allowed me the first deep breaths of the day.

When I got home, Matthew and I sat on the couch in silence and watched the news.  Tom Brokaw had taken over. At some point late in the night, I went to bed alone.  Matthew sat up all night.  He would rarely leave the TV for the next week.  I found that I could not bear to see anymore.  In some ways, that estrangement became permanent, though the relationship went on for three more years. A few days later, when air travel resumed, I would see an airplane in the sky and feel suddenly afraid.

At the theatre, we tried to make sense of our business and our art: other theatres were raising money for the Red Cross at their performances– we would, too.  Should we go forward with our planned production of Twelfth Night scheduled to begin rehearsals next week?  After spirited discussions about the possibility of mounting a different and “more timely” show, we would ultimately stage a somehow elegaic Twelfth Night in autumnal colors.  Viola and Olivia’s mourning took center stage, Feste seemed to have a broken heart, Belch and Aguecheek felt mean, and Malvolio’s last line, “I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you” chilled the room.  Audiences laughed some, but they also cried, and the production ended with Viola weeping in the arms of her long lost brother.  What else could we do?

Songs of Adolescent Pining Played Repeatedly on Cassette Tapes Late into the Night (High School 1991-1995)
1. Lida Rose/Will I Ever Tell You from The Music Man
2. Dream a Little Dream of Me, the Mamas and the Papas
3. Wouldn’t It Be Nice, The Beach Boys
4. How High the Moon, Ella Fitzgerald
5. Please, The Nylons  (man, I’d forgotten how much I loved the Nylons)
6. I Dreamed a Dream from Les Miserables
7. Sigh No More Ladies, from the Much Ado About Nothing Soundtrack (Emma Thompson looks like a bronzed Greek goddess in the opening shot, remember?)

Songs of Longing and Heartbreak  Played in Crappy Apartments (College 1995-1999)
1. If I Ever Lose My Faith in You, Sting
2. Me and Bobby McGee, Janis Joplin
3.  Driving with the Brakes On, Del Amitri
4. Crash Into Me, Dave Matthews Band — as my friend Andrea once observed, all college boys of this era believed that playing Dave Matthews at a girl would get them laid. Sadly, they were often right.
5. Waiting in Vain/Walking on Broken Glass/No More I Love Yous, Annie Lennox  (The albums Diva and Medusa are just about all that got me through the summer of 1997.)

Songs of Small Hopes and Big Desires on Mix CDs (Early CSC Years, 1999-2005)
1. Come by Me, Harry Connick, Jr.  (One of his most underrated albums)
2. A Sunday Kind of Love, Etta James  (One of her lesser known songs)
3. Ray of Light, Madonna
4.  One, Aimee Mann from the Magnolia Soundtrack
5. Dance Me to the End of Love, Leonard Cohen
6. The Wood Song, Indigo Girls– when I try to explain how much I was in love with my job at Shakespeare, this song is better than anything I can say myself.

Songs of Surprising Sweetness and Joy on My iPod Nano (Late CSC Years, Marriage, 2005-2009)
1. It Had to Be You, Harry Connick, jr.
2. I’ve Got My Eyes on You, Good Night and Good Luck Soundtrack
3.  Linus and Lucy, Vince Guraldi Trio  (Yes, this was our wedding recessional.)
4. I’ve Got You Under My Skin, Michael Buble

Lullabies I Sing to Henry (2009-Present)
1. Lida Rose/Will I Ever Tell You from The Music Man
2. How High the Moon
3. Dream a Little Dream of Me
I hadn’t realized that Henry’s lullabies were my favorite love songs from high school until I started this project.  There’s something infinitely sweet for me in that discovery.  I think of the girl I was when I sang those songs to myself, and the future I was yearning for that I despaired of ever finding.  When I sing them for Henry, I think I sing them for that girl, too, like a long distance call to the past that says, “Just you wait.  Your life will have more love than you can imagine.”

I hesitated to answer the question. I realized I wasn’t sure how I was doing in my blog/personal experiment.  So, I’m doing a little check-in.

Since I started, I’ve done several of the things on my BIG list, mostly in the read, watch and de-clutter categories.

READ: I finally got around to reading The Help– the first adult novel I’ve read in a long time.  I was surprised at how much it got to me– especially the relationships between the maids and the children they cared for.  Extra dose of working Mommy guilt, coming right up.  I also read a very funny book on writing film scripts, and yes, more non-fiction on art crime.  I think I’m finally getting to the end of that binge– the books are starting to be thick with references to other art crime non-fiction, giving me a strange sense of deja vu.  Right now, I’m musing picking up The Magicians.  Anyone recommend it?  Also, it’s getting to that time of year when I re-read certain books– that’s a list I’ll post soon.

WATCH: I’m five and a half episodes into Mad Men.  My thoughts so far: the production design is exquisite, and the cinematographers know it.  I appreciate the necessity and period appropriateness and character work that’s in all the smoking, but it still makes me choke a little bit.  I am amazed that something that has such a languorous/glacial pace has become so popular.  I like it, but I’m not enthralled the way I was with Lost or The Wire.  Do I just need to give it a little more time to turn up the heat?   I also must confess that I’ve spent some extra hours watching Project Runway and Top Chef: Just Desserts, but made John turn off the appalling trash that is Dance Moms.

DE-CLUTTER: I have to give myself props here.  I’ve made real progress in several parts of my house.  I’ve also gotten into some regular routines of tidying up every evening which are keeping the house more manageable and less embarrassing.  Our Voldemort strategy changed the way my husband and I talked about and worked on the problem, significantly reducing the tension around the issue in our household and improving our weekends.  However, I have been ignoring the back bedroom and it’s getting to be the Room that Must Not Be Named or Viewed by Anyone. I’ll see if I can make progress this weekend.

LEARN: After the crochet experiment, I turned away from this list.  I’m hoping to return to it in the fall (the crochet and this part of the BIG list.)  Though, scoring a baseball game may have to wait until spring.  A new add to this list, learning to play the piano again, currently has the most attention.

TRY: My mother’s move to Cincinnati has certainly given me ample opportunity to try talking to her more than once a week.  I don’t think it’s doing me (or my mother) much good at the moment. Listening to music with intention has been a really lovely re-discovery of a part of my heart too long asleep.  I’ll do a post on that soon.  Writing this blog has reconnected me with several old friends, which has also proven to be a great way to be re-introduced to my authentic self.  I haven’t really tried yoga yet, but I have attended a showtunes Zumba class for four weeks in a row which makes me feel joyful, strong, and extremely sweaty.  I can’t imagine doing that in my old job/life– I simply never had the energy and the regularity of schedule.

So, if I had to give myself a grade so far– I’d say it’s a B/B-.  I need to blog more often, but I am tending to my own space, needs, and desires in a thoughtful way– possibly for the first time in my life.  My mother’s arrival this fall will put these new routines to the test, but I feel confident that my friends and family (that’s you, dear readers) will help keep me on task.  If only by asking me, “So how’s that blog going?” Thanks for reading and commenting.  It’s good to hear from all of you.  The very nature of this blog is self-centered in the extreme, but I try to think of posts as those little, quiet conversations that I’ve had with so many of you on a late summer night, where you’ve been generous enough to listen to me sort out my own thoughts in real time.  I love those conversations and I miss having them with each of you.  So, I’ll meet you here every once in a while, okay?  Thanks for listening.

My parents started me on piano lessons when I was in the fourth grade.  I never really enjoyed them.  My hands are tiny and my fingers short– it’s difficult for me to play even an octave with one hand, and hard to play complex chords.  Plus, playing required a dexterity and fine motor coordination that I simply did not have. In short, it was something that did not come easy to me, and as a kid, I really had no interest in spending my time doing anything that I could not be proficient at with a minimal amount of effort.  Hence, no sports, no crafts, and no piano.

I spent about five years resisting my mother’s attempts to get me to practice the piano.  In hindsight, I can imagine her frustration.  I was clearly musical, and intelligent enough to learn.  They had invested money in getting a piano and in weekly lessons.  But anytime she asked me to practice, I engaged in every possible unpleasant child avoidance tactic: whining, procrastinating, avoiding, etc.  My father, a fan of ragtime and Scott Joplin in particular, always said that I could quit taking lessons when I could play “The Entertainer” for him.  Even given this possible out, I stayed away from the piano. Finally, my oboe teacher, Carol, (I wanted to play in the band with my friends at school, but not enough to spend time practicing the oboe they bought me either) took my mother aside and said, “She’s a singer.  She wants voice lessons.”  My parents listened, I got to take voice lessons with the woman who had been my elementary school music teacher, and it set me on a collision course with TCU’s music program, the theatre, and destiny.  The piano got a lot more use in high school as I worked on my choral music at home.  I also found that years of piano lessons had given me a considerable advantage in choir, as many of my fellow singers learned primarily by ear or didn’t know how to sight read. But it would be years before I finally thanked my parents for the piano lessons.

In college, I found that much of the music my parents had listened to that I had claimed to find “boring”– bluegrass, folk, ragtime, hymns — became a type of comfort food that I sought out whenever I felt homesick– which was a sort of permanent state after my parents separated.  My senior year, my good friend Jeff Brewer introduced me to the wonderful movie “The Sting” which features great Joplin rags, especially “Solace“– a lilting, poignant tune that we wound up using in my senior thesis.  I fell in love with the song, and always loved running into it unexpectedly– like in the first ever episode of The Muppet Show, when Juliet Prowse dances to it with a group of weightless lime green giraffes.

The first night the piano moved in, I found a website that offered free sheet music and printed out “The Entertainer” and “Solace.” I also bought an “American Family Songbook” that includes a wide range of traditional American music from hymns to blues to children’s songs to Christmas songs. Some of Henry’s favorite lullabies are in there– The St. Louis Blues, The Band Played On, and Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.  My Dad’s 60th birthday is December 17th and I’m going to try and learn “The Entertainer” by then, as a way to say thank you for giving me a foundation in music.  I want our house to be the type of place where we make our own music, and for Henry to remember singing Christmas carols together.  I’ll never be a virtuoso, but if I apply myself, I can make it through simple pieces so that we can all sing along.  Hopefully, it will create the kind of memories that my children will be homesick for when they go to college.