Things I Love, Part II: Food

One night, not long before I moved to Albuquerque, I cooked a sort of goodbye feast for me and my ex-boyfriend. The meal was made from the spoils of a day up on Arthur Ave, and contained unnecessarily excessive riches in the form of cheesy breadsticks, pasta, sausage and heavy cream. By the end, we were both stuffed, but I still wanted the chocolate I had bought for dessert.

"Not me," said Andrew. "I'm too full."

"Well, I'm going to have some," I said. "Sometimes I think I'd really excel as a competitive eater."

"Yeah," Andrew agreed.

"HEY!" I said, "You're not supposed to agree with me! That is NOT a good boyfriend response!"

"What?" he asked. "I love you, but do you want me to lie to you? Do you want me to tell you that the other night you didn't eat an order of cheese fries, a bacon-wrapped chili-cheese dog, three sliders, and another order of fries?"

My response? "In my defense, it was only two sliders."

Okay, yeah, I really love food.

I love eating food, I love cooking food, I love watching food on TV, I love talking about food. I loved waiting tables for a surprisingly long time, partly because I like talking to people but partly, I suspect, because I love food.

A number of people have suggested that I become a chef, or at least go to culinary school. I cannot state emphatically enough that I DO. NOT. WANT. THAT. I love cooking; it makes me very, very happy, and I don't want to turn it into something that doesn't. Cooking is an art, and if there's one thing I've learned about making art on a serious or competitive level, it's that you have to cultivate a willingness to hate yourself a lot. Pursuing something that requires such a high level of passion and self-expression is always going to be a love-hate relationship. And right now, my relationship to cooking is love-love.

Besides, I don't just love food, I'm interested in it.

Here's what I mean. When I was thirteen, I became a vegetarian. Back then, I wore my little thirteen-year-old heart on my thirteen-year-old sleeve, and I couldn't bear to think of all the living beings that were dying just so I could enjoy my Chickent McNuggets. Fast-forward seven years later: I'm twenty, I'm overweight, I'm lethargic, and I want a change. I've tried changing my diet and eating healthier before, but with little success. I have a sinking feeling I know what I have to do. I start eating meat again on a trial basis. And I immediately feel better, more alert, and more energetic. So, dilemma: do I sacrifice my morals or my health?

Over the years, as I grew and evolved, so did, obviously, my relationship to vegetarianism. Although I still cared - and care - about the well-being of all living creatures, the choice had become less about poor Wilbur and more about the spiritual and environmental consequences of eating meat without thought. We as a society just consume - just destroy and consume, and we don't really understand or appreciate how much we consume and destroy, because we've created system where we don't have to be aware of it and we don't have to give anything back in return for what we take. We just take, and we don't give back. It throws the whole system out of balance and that imbalance must certainly be destructive both to the world around us and to our own spirits. So far, my response to a system that I had observed to be broken had been to remove myself from it as entirely as possible. But didn't it make as much or better sense to try to bring balance back to the system by being a part of it? By being appreciative and aware within it, and attempting to give back as much as I took?

Okay, I thought. I'll eat meat again, but only if I do so respectfully and mindfully, and only if I accept the sacrifice that's been made for me, by sacrificing of my own time or money or whatever else I can to give back.

Friends, let me tell you: easier said than done. In the entire time that I lived in NYC I almost never found myself with sufficient time or funds to consume as mindfully as I wanted. I soothed myself by saying I was making up for it by having no car and living (through little choice of my own) incredibly austerely. But it's never felt like enough, and perhaps it never will feel like enough, and so I continue every day to strive toward honoring that promise.

That promise, coupled with my deep love of food, has made me increasingly obsessed with things like small farming, local and seasonal food, sustainable, organic practices and basically anything else that moves us away from the huge, corporate monoculture that is stripping our country's resources bare. It's something that I believe is vitally important, mentally, physically, spiritually, and environmentally. And, while I hope I've always been a conscious consumer, I've never had the time and money to give the cause the attention I know it needs to have.

And now... well, at least I have the time, and that's somewhere to start.

What Next?

Something I read while meandering the interwebs struck me recently. I thought it was from this poster, but I guess I'm reading/latching on to way more inspirational garble than I realized. Anyway, the sentiment that struck me was something along the lines of, "Do what you love and the money will follow."

I suppose it makes since that a thought like that would stand out to me, as I've been back in New Mexico for about a month and a half, and did not expect to be jobless and adrift for so long. (Being jobless and adrift is why I left New York, people!) So you could say I am currently deeply ingrained in the process of figuring out how to make the money follow and, if we're being totally honest, what exactly I love in the first place.

Upon reflection, here's what I think: if I had read this in New York, I would have been angry, because doing what I want to do without working about the money was a luxury I simply didn't have. I wished I had it a million times over, every time I saw an internship I couldn't apply for, a volunteer opportunity I couldn't make time for, a class I couldn't take. And now I do have that luxury. Having that luxury is a big part of why, at almost 30, I moved back in with my parents.

So why am I worrying so much about getting a job?

With that in mind, I've been thinking about things that I could do, would do, if I weren't worried about making money. It's time to change my attitude. Full speed ahead.

Closing Doors

On Saturday, September 25th, I shut the door and switched off the lights for the very last time in the place I've called my home for the past four and a half years.

After we left, Andrew and I stood on my roof quietly for a moment, watching the lights of Harlem twinkle in through the dark patches created from the neighborhood's newly-constructed high-rise condos. 

My roof.  I had my 25th birthday party up here.  I brought up milk crates, and we sat on them in the glow of a string of twinkle lights and some cheap tap-lights from the 99-cent store.  I brought my sisters up here to watch the fireworks on the 4th of July that they visited.  I drank beers here on a blanket with my best friends.  I did yoga up here.  We kissed up here once, on a grey day after we saw St. John's Cathedral.  In the dark I could still see its massive silhouette on the hill, stacked on top of us. 

"I've never left something so permanently before," I told him.  "Really?" Andrew said.  I kissed him again, like I did on that grey day, and we went back downstairs.

Since leaving, I've experienced a curious mixture of grief and elation.  Sometimes I'm struck so intensely by the strangeness and the sadness of the fact that I'll never again enter that room, with its bare window, cheap Ikea daybed and the TV tray doubling as a nightstand.  Other times, I think about the fact that I'm utterly unattached, unbeholden to that space, to its particular dust and clutter, its mice and its rent - and the thought makes me giddy. 

I always meant to buy curtains, replace the TV tray with a real nightstand, but somehow never got around to it.  It wasn't a priority.  During my tenure in NY, I encouraged in myself a sort of monk-like asceticism; I had neither the money nor the space for a lot of stuff.  But as I shut the door on on my room for the last time, a thought came to me, spontaneously and unbidden: never again.

Never again do I want to live so impermanently, in the empty expanse of a space I always meant to make my own.  Never again do I want to live the the shadow of promises I've made to myself. 

It's funny.  Through my self-imposed asceticism, I thought I was cultivating an appropriately monastic spirituality.  New York, I thought to myself, was teaching me how to detach from materialism.  I thought about the spiritual lessons New York was teaching me a lot.  Patience.  The value of hard work. 

In hindsight, though, I wonder if these things that I thought were teaching were actually tearing down: all those moments waiting for a subway or walking behind someone slow were wearing down my patience to a tiny, raw, nub.  All the times I had to work so much harder for what I wanted than I would have anywhere else... maybe it just made me tired.  And I wonder if my bare personal space actually set me adrift in some way.  I wonder if we need things in the same way we need stories - to tie us down, to tell us who we are.

I go back and forth like this, wondering if New York strengthened me or unmoored me - or maybe both.  I guess I'm about to find out.

Rapture After the Rapture

For all my joking about it, I am strangely grateful that nobody got raptured yesterday.

"Don't tell anybody, but I'm kind of scared," I told my friend in the car yesterday, as the hour approached 6pm.

"Why?" he asked incredulously and, let's face it, probably a little disdainfully.

"Because, okay, I don't believe in a God that condemns anyone to an eternity of pain and suffering in general, and I certainly don't believe in a God that chooses not to reveal himself to his creation and then condemns us to that same eternity of pain for not believing. It's like some sadistic test, it doesn't make sense to me. I can't get behind that."

"Right."

"But we don't know. Maybe there is some perverse, sadistic, self-involved divine entity up in the clouds that wants us all to suffer fire and brimstone for not worshiping at his feet. How do we know?"

"That's true," said my friend.

"We don't know anything. Maybe the Greeks were right, how do we know? Maybe it's Zeus up there - why not? Why assume that God, if there is a God, is ultimately a good, loving or fair?"

Why, I sometimes ask myself, this faith in justice? There's something in us that believes innately in fairness - life SHOULD be fair, and (maybe I'm just speaking for myself) there's a little part of us that is surprised every time, over and over again, when it's not. And God is the ultimate Should, the way it's supposed to be, the path we always see unfolding before us but never manage to travel down.

But listen. We learn early on (and then again and again) that life isn't fair, despite this thing inside us that tells us it should be. Why, in that case, believe that God is?

For my part, I choose to have faith in something greater than ourselves and to believe that it is ultimately good, loving, and, yes, fair. I believe this because - honestly? - it seems like a happier way to live than believing in the alternative, despite the fact that, when you think about it, any of it could be true. So I suppose that today, the day after "Apocalypse Not Yet," I'm grateful because, for a little while at least, I get to keep my faith in the way things should be.

Thoughts Before the First Rehearsal

My posts have become less frequently lately, as I've become distracted by the business of preparing for my two upcoming projects, James Comtois' Captain Moonbeam and Lynchpin followed immediately by the Lincoln Center Directors' Lab. And I mean immediately; Captain Moonbeam closes on June 26th, the Lab starts on the 27th.

Anyway, instead of ignoring the blog while I focus on my projects, why not use the blog to think about them? After all, this space is, if nothing else, a place where I can give voice and structure to thoughts that would otherwise float nebulously through the haze of my mind, their whispers quickly extinguished by a mild cough or clearing of the throat. It feels strange to talk about this stuff while it's still so very much in gestation in my head but there's no rule about it, is there? Who says everything has to be polished product?

…There's not a rule about it, is there? I feel particularly strange blogging about Lincoln Center, like maybe I'm not supposed to. This probably stems from the fact that I still sort of imagining it as this Super-Cool Secret Club while I've been trying to poke my nose through their curtains, hoping the Cool Kids will let me join. But that's just silly, right? It's just a workshop; it's not a Super Secret Clubhouse. I can talk about it if I want to, right?

Basically, briefly, there's this. They emailed us a play about a month or so ago with the instructions to read it, think about it, just marinate with it a bit (I believe the specific instructions were to "noodle around with it" but I marinated instead). A few days ago, we were each email with specific segments of the play that we're to prepare to spend a day (6 hours) directing with a room full of actors, directors, a stage manager or a designer.

That's all I'm going to say on that for now; with Captain Moonbeam at the forefront of my priorities I haven't managed to do much more yet than read my segment, but I have a feeling my thoughts on the process will be a post unto themselves. Actually, that's not a bad idea - blogging about it might be exactly what I need to organize and prepare.

So that leaves Captain Moonbeam. We have our first table reading on Tuesday of next week, and I'm trying to organize my thoughts for that. What I want to do - what I always want to do at the first reading - is spend some time talking about what the story is - why it deserves to be told, what about it makes it worth hearing.

For Captain Moonbeam I think it's ultimately a story about redemption; it's a journey toward faith, finding an understanding of some sort of goodness in the world worth hanging onto, fighting for even. Unfortunately, in this story at least, all that comes at a price that makes it bittersweet, or even just plain tragic. I think this play very much addresses the question of the "better story," as Yann Martel calls it in Life of Pi:

I can well imagine an atheist's last words: "White, white! L-L-Love! My God!" - and the deathbed leap of faith. Whereas the agnostic, if he stays true to his reasonable self, if he stays beholden to dry, yeastless factuality, might try to explain the warm light bathing him by saying, "Possibly a f-f-failing oxygenation of the b-b-brain," and, to the very end, lack imagination and miss the better story.

The first thing we've got to do is have a conversation about the archetypal significance of comic books, and comic book adventures. These ideas about goodness, order, selflessness and nobility - they're all symbolized by comic books in this play, and the type of world the comic books portray within them. So how do those comics resonate for us, and what do they represent for us as a culture?

In stark contrast to that comic book world, there is another version of reality in Captain Moonbeam and Lynchpin, a world where people are miserable, petty and self-serving; a world where people can fall ill for no reason, your best friend, or even your own father can just abandon you one day and leave you all alone. Is that the world we're believe in? Or is it the comic book world, where heroism thrives and goodness and nobility prevails? If we don't believe in it to some degree, why do we have these stories at all?

And where does that leave us with Alex, our protagonist? In the end he just wants the better story. And can we blame him for that? No, really - can we? It's not a rhetorical question. How are we suppose to feel about what becomes of Alex by the end of the play? Which is sadder, that he believes in such a noble world, or that we don't?

I hope I'm not getting to heady for what's ultimately a pretty and weird short play. Still, it's important to get that toe-hold on what makes the story worth telling, and I think this is it.

Is It Enough?

I've been somewhat lax about posting this week, a trend that might continue for a while as I struggle to get my two feet back on the ground. I'm discovering the downside of temping - that is, when your assignment ends, then you don't have a job. Today marks day three of sitting on the sofa in my jammies, wondering if I'll have the opportunity to make money again before the rent is due. You'd think that this would be optimal time for blog-writing, but alas, process of switching between applying for jobs and worrying about applying for jobs has occupied nearly all of my time.

It's the kind of gray day with no rain, just that ubiquitous chilly mist, that, on days when I do have responsibilities like work and shows that drag me out into the elements makes me curse the heavens and wish for nothing more than to be curled up on my couch with a blanket, a mug of hot tea, and maybe the 6-hour BBC miniseries of Pride and Prejudice. What am I saying here? "Appreciate the opportunity you've been given"? or "Be careful what you wish for"? I don't know.

Anyway, on to something a bit more topical. I've been following the response to this post in the HowlRound blog, wherein Mat Smart posits that playwrights who fail do so simply because they're lazy and/or untalented.

All right, I'm not a playwright, but I think I can extrapolate to the theater sector at large here. This ruffles my dander a bit, partly because it is somewhat inappropriate to declare the system to be fair when there are clearly issues of race, gender at class that stack the deck. I mean, come on, Mr. Smart - just take a look 50/50 in 2020 for a quick sec and then come back and talk to me when more than 25% of professional opportunities are going to women. Of course gender inequality is only the tip of the iceberg - it's just the advocacy group that I happen to be involved with. But I'm not going to dwell on that, because Isaac Butler and Joshua Conkel have done a more than adequate job responding to that particular grievance.

I also want consider the fact that this post rankles because, well, I pretty much have a running inner dialogue telling me exactly what Mat Smart is telling me here. I'm too lazy, I'm not talented enough.

Isaac Butler quotes the following passage from the original post,

You have to love the actual working on the thing—the actual writing—so much that there is an inevitability about it all. Every day you spend six hours writing, eight hours temping, three hours sending business emails and you know it’s not enough. You’ve had a ton of workshops at fancy places where you’ve stayed up all night writing for weeks on end. You’ve finally integrated that big note. It is not enough. Writing a play, revising it, really working on it, staying open to the good and bad criticism, really reworking it, getting it out there, seeing it through to production, dealing with poor casting, weathering pans or rave reviews, reworking it, getting it done again, reworking it, repeat for the next script, repeat— all this is an act of love. It has to be. In the end, our approach to our own work is the only thing we can control—and I believe that you have to love the doing. You also have to love the chase, love the absence of any resemblance of fairness, justice, or due course. And as long as it doesn’t make you too desperate or crazy—there is a nobility in this endurance, in this brand of foolishness. There must be a sense that “I am going down with the ship.” And frankly, it is a commitment that I don’t see many emerging playwrights make.

And then says,

I actually agree with Smart about much of the above, but to me this is simply a list of symptoms that the system is broken. Any system that requires you to work seventeen hours a day all year long on the basis of "love" is a system that doesn't work.

I have to admit, reading that first paragraph by Smart sort of terrified and saddened me. I have made, and continue to make, a lot of sacrifices to theater. I have dedicated a lot of my time to the pursuit of both the art and the profession in my life. But Smart's essay makes me ask: do I do all that? He says, "Every day you spend six hours writing, eight hours temping, three hours sending business emails and you know it’s not enough." Well, I know Smart is probably hyperbolizing for effect, I know he probably doesn't spend every day working seventeen hours (he is hyperbolizing, right??) And there have certainly been days like that in my life, but they haven't been every day. The more common days have been the days that I've come home from waiting tables or temping, rehearsing or seeing shows or reading plays, knowing I could do more, that there is more to do, but watching TV instead because I am just tired. But the question nags at me: have the former type of days been numerous enough? Do I need to work harder? Am I just too lazy?

The commitment that Smart speaks of, the "I am going down with this ship" mentality," that he doesn't see in enough playwrights is a commitment that I don't know if I can make anymore. I know there was a time in my life when I could, and did, but now? I simply don't know.

Am I a traitor to my art? Am I the kind of fair-weather amateur that is the reason that someone saw fit to write such an article in the first place?

That doesn't seem fair. I love theater. I've loved it longer and more constantly than anything else in the world and I would be a lost soul without it. Butler doesn't think it's fair. He says, "Any system that requires you to work seventeen hours a day all year long on a basis of 'love' is a system that doesn't work."

But at the same time, the system doesn't work. So... where does that leave me?

Yoga Lessons

During a recent yoga class, whilst in half-pigeon, our teacher advised us to back off the position if we felt a great deal of pain.

"Now, there's a difference between pain and tenderness," he clarified. "Tenderness we deal with - pain we don't." Oh, I thought, a tad let down. It's not that it wasn't good advice - of course it was - it was just that in this class (and possibly in the yoga world at large) there is a lot of emphasis in the connection between how we respond to our yoga practice, and how we respond to life in general. You know, calm, focus, presence of mind, even in face of painful experiences - that sort of thing. An ability to lean into the pain and accept it, rather than pushing against it.

So it was with a little disappointment that I acknowledged our instructor's advice; while very practical and appropriate for the yoga practice itself, it didn't seem to translate well to the yoga-as-life metaphor. To say that we "don't deal with pain" - isn't that completely backwards? Isn't the learning to deal with pain rather than backing away from it exactly the point?

But then he continued: "Tenderness is normal - natural. We want tenderness. But pain, pain is not natural. Pain is your body's way of saying Stop doing this, you're hurting me."

Huh.

Maybe it does translate after all. Perhaps there is a wisdom in knowing the difference between the tenderness that is simply the business living, the natural result our spirits stretching and tensing in the world, and real pain - pain that shouldn't be. And further wisdom in understanding that that pain is not an unbearable burden, but rather a way of communicating to ourselves, stop doing this, you're hurting me.

Subway Stories, Vol. 3

Earlier this week, I rode the subway with a man named Jeff Boss. I know his name is Jeff Boss because he announced it as soon as he entered my car, along with his candidacy for President of the United States as well as for the United States Senate.

Jeff Boss, according to his flyers - and also his website, which you can view here - witnessed his sister-in-law, a top-ranking NSA official, arrange the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center. Although he didn't understand the meaning of her conversations at the time, after the attacks it all became clear. After narrowly escaping his own death by arriving late to his new job (presumably given to him by the same government-connected family members?) at the WTC on Sept. 11th, he survives to tell his story, only to be thwarted by the NSA at every turn.

There are two obvious options here: either he's telling the truth, or he's not.

As I watched him from across the car, debating passionately with a young man who regarded him with patience and skepticism, I could almost see these two options stretching out in front of me, two separate but parallel stories, both passing through the same plane of reality in which Jeff Boss stands on a New York City subway car desperately clutching his flyers and his truth, while the world around him dismisses him.

Consider the first story: Jeff is telling the truth. A few days or weeks or months before September of 2001, he happens to stumble upon his sister-in-law - who actually IS an high-ranking government official - on a very confidential phone call, during which she actually IS helping plan or facilitate the terrorist attacks on behalf of the U.S. government. How he happened to simply stumble upon such a sensitive conversation, let's not ask. Mistakes get made, Sister-in-Law screwed up. She doesn't know how much he heard or understood, but she can't take any risks. Panicked, she calls a colleague, or maybe a superior. A few more calls are made, and Jeff has a new job that assures his presence at the WTC at the time of the attacks. But, as fate would have it, he is running late that day and is spared. Why doesn't the government just try and kill him again? Let's not ask that question either. Maybe now, if he had already told somebody what he knew, his death would look too suspicious. Maybe Sister-in-Law, wracked with guilt, steps in and says look, we don't have to kill the poor guy. It's easy enough to discredit him. Whatever the case, now no one will every believe what Jeff Boss - who is not crazy - knows unquestionably to be true.

Or, there is the more likely story, the one I choose to believe: Jeff Boss IS crazy. Yes, he does have a family member (maybe his sister-in-law, maybe not) with high-ranking connections, but their worst offense is a little nepotism - they happened to pull some strings and get Jeff a job when he needed one, working at the World Trade Center. Now maybe this is a better job than Jeff deserves, and maybe his family member's neck is sort of on the line for him, or maybe Jeff is just sort of a notorious deadbeat, but whatever the case, he is told sternly and insistently that he must not be late on his first day. So of course, he is late. And as it happens, his irresponsibility saved his life. Overwhelmed with survivor's guilt, he tries to give meaning to what happened. What kind of asshole is late on his first day of work? he thinks. And why was that asshole spared? From the depths of his incomprehension and shame, he creates this delusion.

The fascinating thing about these two stories is that one or neither of them might be true, but both of them cannot be. These stories define two entirely separate, both somewhat sad, worlds. And I can never be sure which one I live in. I can guess (and I have), but I can never know for sure.

A world in which the nation I believe I live in is ultimately good and free and democratic is concretely, quantifiably different from a world in which this same nation would, like a dictatorship in a captive country, murder its own people to get and retain power. And yet, from my vantage point, they both look exactly the same.

Maybe this is where I get a little too existential for my own good, because here is where I start thinking about God. With God, like with Jeff Boss, we have two options: either It exists or It doesn't. And a world without God is an entirely, unequivocably different world from a world with God. And yet, both look the same to me. I've often wondered, how is that possible? And the question has bothered me. Yet here is Jeff Boss on the subway, showing me how it is.

And what does that mean? What do I do with that, if anything at all? I don't know, but there it is, standing in front of me with a flyer in its hand.

August Wilson's Place in School

Earlier this week, David Snead, the Waterbury, Connecticut superintendent of schools ordered Waterbury’s arts magnet high school to stop its production of August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone because of the appearance of the N-word in the script.

While I understand the superintendent's decision to stop the production, it has me deeply upset. Of course the word should be categorically repudiated; it should never be appropriate in conversation, nor ever regarded casually. But for these reasons exactly, I think it is so important that this show be performed, even (perhaps especially) on the high school level. Mr. Snead, for all his well-meaning attempts to protect his students, and his community at large, from such a hateful epithet, has ironically done so at the expense of a real understanding of the power of language and the importance of narrative.

As one who has spent my life in reverence of these two things, language and narrative, I find that incredibly alarming.

I am not African American, and I recognize the fact that, as much as I can sympathize, I cannot possibly fully understand the weight of the word. Still, I hope that does not keep me from acknowledging, to the best of my abilities, the centuries of hatred, bigotry and oppression bound up in it. It is the recognition of its ugliness, not a casual indifference to it, that makes me as passionate as I am.

I am, and always have been, in awe of the magnitude of language, both of it the power it yields when wielded well, and the impotence it creates when wielded poorly. Rough and inexact as it might be, it is the only way to connect that ethereal thing caught inside my flesh with that in yours, the only thing that keeps us all from becoming so many satellites, spinning helplessly inside our own orbits.

Language is the sharpest tool we have available to us, and I’m not the first to say “the pen is mightier.” But, just like an untrained joker playing with a sword - be careful with that, or you’re going to put your own eye out.

Here is a story to illustrate what I mean. It’s not of the word in question, but of another inappropriate and hateful word, also often spoken or spoken of in fearful, hushed tones: the C-word.

The C-word is not the same as the N-word; it doesn’t mean quite the same thing, nor does it have the same deep-seated history of hate attached to it. But, as a woman I have more experience with it and a more personal connection to it, and so this is the word I have a story about. And I think it serves to illustrate a universal point.

So, needless to say, I do not like the C-word, or, at least, the attitude with which it is regarded in our culture; it rankles my feminist sensibilities. It troubles me that the worst words we have for one another as women in one way or another refer to our sex or sexuality. It suggests a fear and loathing of female sexuality that, frankly, as a society we should be beyond. And at the worst of all of them, for some inexplicable reason, is the C-word.

Funnily enough, though, I often hear, even among my thinking, considerate, female peers, the following sentence: "I don't want to say it, but I'll say it. I NEVER use this word, but I'll use it for her. That woman is a..." well, you know what.

I understand the logic of not saying the word, of abhorring what it stands for and refusing to allow it to enter your vocabulary. I also understand the idea of reclaiming the word, of attempting to strip it of its power through new context and use. (After all, why can we call a man a prick or a dickhead with relative impunity, but it is so unspeakably awful to call a woman the other thing?)

But to halfheartedly do both - to save the word for very special occasions, for use only on the worst offenders - is to bestow power without understanding why, and ultimately give strength to its ugly meaning, and to those who would use it hatefully.

My point is simply this: words can be powerful, and to wield that power with no knowledge of its history and social context is to potentially add fuel to the fire. And the N-word, whether we like it or not, is a very, very powerful word, so we must be very, very careful.

I know that Mr. Snead is only, understandably, trying to exercise that care. The New York Times reports that, “According to the newspaper... Snead said this week that educators should not do anything that might encourage people to use the word.” However, it strikes me that fearing that watching an August Wilson play will encourage people to use the N-word is a bit like worrying that asking a depressed friend if he’s suicidal will put the idea in his head.

That is to say, it won’t, and avoiding the uncomfortable conversation will only make it worse.

We are coming up on a generation for whom the struggle for civil rights in America (and thus, this word) will mean something entirely new. And after them will come a generation for whom it will mean even something else. It is of vital importance that we continue communicate the gravity and significance of that struggle, lest we re-ignite old flames of hatred.

Textbooks and history lessons are fine communication tools, but I honestly and passionately believe that the most important instrument we have to ensure that our collective history is remembered and appreciated is our stories. That is why I do what I do.

And that's also why I believe it's more than important for these teens to have the opportunity to perform and appreciate the work of August Wilson, a master storyteller - it's necessary. More necessary for them, our youth, perhaps, than any other group.

Through lessons and books we learn the facts of our history, through our stories we learn the truth. Our stories provide us with an emotional connection to the past, to people and experiences that we would otherwise never know, never fully understand.

What's more, as I understand it, the drama teacher at this school approached the performance of the play with extreme sensitivity and respect. She sought approval not only from the school’s principal, but from the parents of the students involved, for whom she actually went through the trouble of having the play read aloud. She even received approval of the production from a former N.A.A.C.P president. Lessons were planned for the students to provide the appropriate history and context of the racism that is experienced in the play, as well as talk-backs and other post-performance discussions and Q&A's. The rehearsals were even open to the participating students' parents. I cannot think of a better, more visceral way of understanding our history and our society.

I’m told that the Waterbury Board of Education discussed the situation yesterday, although I can’t find any information on the outcome of the meeting. I hope that the decision was reconsidered. If it’s not, I worry it will set a terrible precedent for American high schools. August Wilson is not only one of the most celebrated playwrights of the 20th century, he also gave a vibrant and resonant voice to a group of people and experiences that have otherwise marginalized, oppressed and ignored by the American theater tradition. Yes, Wilson uses a terrible word in Joe Turner's Come and Gone. But he does so with all the understanding and gravity and context we that we can ask for, that we can hope to communicate to future generations. We cannot lose him; we cannot keep him out of our schools. It would be an unspeakable blow not just against the arts, but against our past and against our future.

UPDATE (1/20/11):

The production will go on as planned.

Additionally, here are some links to more excellent commentary about the situation:

Leonard Jacobs' blog on the Clyde Fitch Report.
Howard Sherman's comments on the American Theater Wing blog.
Howard Sherman's wonderful letter to the Waterbury Board of Ed.

And the original post in the New York Times Artsbeat Blog.

New Year's Reflections

As the first week of 2011 draws to a close, I figured I may as well hop on the blog-train passing through and post my reflections on the passing year.

I've seen quite a few people use this space recount their favorites of the numerous shows they saw this year. That's not going to be me. I saw more shows this year than any other year I've spent in the city and it still doesn't seem nearly enough. I managed to actually see two Broadway shows (Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson and In the Heights) before they surprised me with their closing, a feat I had never achieved before. I made a point to check out In the Footprint because, you know, I love the Civilians. And I was saved from lamenting the Little Foxes by an unexpectedly and unnecessarily generous gift (one of the best gifts and best theater experiences I have ever received, not because it was good (though it was) but because it made me inspired).

I've reconciled myself to the fact that I just don't have the time or money to see everything I want to. But that still doesn't ease the pangs of having missed Gatz, Brief Encounter, Scottsboro Boys and Our Town. Among others.

Others have looked back to tally their professional achievments. That's also not going to be me. It's not that I have too few to speak of, although that certainly could be argued. No, it's because a seismic shift in priorities took place this year, and in the wake of it it's difficult, if not impossible, to measure my life or my year in terms of What I Accomplished.

For a long time I've been gripped by the feeling that I need to do something, a sensation that has not diminished with time. If anything, in fact, the vice has only tightened around me with every year. Not knowing, though, exactly what that thing is (but suspecting it's theater-related), in reality that impulse has translated to figuring out what I want to do. And then doing it. Along those lines, most of my resolutions for the past five years have resembled something along the lines of, "find direction, motivation, and inspirataion."

[And let's just get the irony of a director in perpetual search for direction out of the way now: ha! There.]

I've been resolving to get at these things for so long that it sometimes comes as a surprise to remember that my New Years' resolutions didn't always look like this; the switch happened sometime in college.

Growing up, I was always highly academic. Shy and booksmart, obsessed with ideas, and far better at expressing myself through pen than through spoken word. Although as early as 7th grade I considered myself a devoted bride of the theater, a career in academia would have probably been a more natural fit. Until, about halfway, through college, something went out of me. Some motivation or fire was gone. I didn't want to write anymore, I didn't want to think. I wanted to do. I was tired of big ideas, I wanted big actions. I was restless. I wanted to get to work, somehow, on all the things I'd been thinking about for so long.

In hindsight this restlessness, and the ensuing need to make effective use of my life, has been a result of many long years of waiting. As I mentioned before, I committed myself by the tender age of 12 to a life in the theater and never looked back. Why? Well, I loved theater, for one. I mean, I truly loved it, more than anything else I had ever done. But for another, I was acutely aware of the fact that I was going to spend the first 18 years of my life spending the majority of my days doing something that had been decided for me and over which I had no control - that is, school. Now I was a good student, and I didn't mind going to school but I studied well and worked hard, so that I could spend the subsequent years doing something I really wanted to do - something good, in every sense of the word.

Unfortunately, when you sign on to a life in the theater, well, maybe someday you'll live that dream, but first you're signing up for a lot more stuff that you don't particularly want to do - not to mention a lifetime of self-doubt, of wondering whether you really should be doing it in the first place. The intricacies of this choice, of course, eluded my 12 year old self, and by the time I figured it out, I was in too deep.

So there I was, out of school, done with thinking, ready to get into the nitty-gritty of whatever it was I was supposed to do with my life. The only trouble was, I still had no idea how to accomplish it, or, really, what exactly "it" was to begin with.

I was so distraught that I even directed a play about it in 2008. Called What Work Is, and inspired by a book of poems by the same name by Phillip Levine, the play was an attempt to understand the relationship between work and identity, especially when so many us spend the majority of the hours of our lives doing jobs that, I'm sure, if asked, we would say does not define us. How does that (pardon the pun) work?

What Work Is was not my most successful endeavor, if you measure success as well-constructed, engaging, well, good play. It was my first attempt at "ensemble creation" and it had it's ups and downs. But it was the most personally cathartic creative experience I've ever had. I learned truths about the nature of work that I could have never expected.

Some of the most moving revelations for me (and, incidentally, some of the strongest material in the play) came from the poem The Right Cross. From it, I learned that there's work, yes, but then there's work, and there's also work. There's the kind of work that you do because you have to - the kind I do a lot - and there's the kind of work that is so exciting, it feels like play. That's the kind I suppose I aspire to.

But then there's also a kind of work that you truly devote yourself to - both the pleasure and the pain. Work that extends beyond the polarizing concepts of work and play. This is the work that fills your entire being, a union between body, mind, and soul. It is work that overcomes you with a sense of purpose and perfection when you surrender yourself fully to it.

With that kind of work, I think, it doesn't matter what the work is - what really matters is the surrender to it. Understanding this answered a lot of questions at the time about the way work defines a person and itself, and about what it means to live a full and present life.

Ah, if only I had applied the lessons I learned in 2008 a little bit further, because now, in 2011, I am discovering anew that it really is about simply. doing. the work.

All of these years, I've troubled myself with the questions of what am I going to do? and how am I going to do it? I've thought mightily about these questions and never come up with a satisfying answer. So this year, I'm forgetting about the questions all together. Instead of resolutions for abstract concepts like motivation, and inspiration, I'm striving for a more proactive position. My list this year includes things like volunteer more often, and spend more time with friends and loved ones. Real, concrete ways to connect more with my world and with myself. To love deeper, to consider more carefully, to care more. I'm surrendering to the work. The rest, I have faith, will take care of itself.

Tangled (Or: How I Spent My Christmas Vacation) Part II

Unbelievable as it is, I’m not quite through with Tangled. This second part of my saga is the alternate-title part of it, the part where I explain that (if you’ll recall) I saw the movie on borrowed time, and how both the movie and the time, along with some unexpected Christmas joy and a few strange and chaotic days of traveling gave a world of perspective to the addled state that was my mind in 2010.

To start, the luminarias: in New Mexico, we have a tradition (perhaps my favorite of all traditions) of setting out luminarias on Christmas Eve. They’re little paper lanterns, made simply with brown paper lunch bags filled with sand and lit from the inside with a candle. They are spectacular.

The whole city does it. Some houses, like ours, modestly line their lawns with a few dozen luminarias; other neighborhoods work together and go absolutely crazy with them, and the effect is breathtaking; an infinitely unfolding, softly glowing pathway of light as far as the eye can see.

My dad usually takes the lead on the luminaria set-up at our house, but he had a hip-replacement surgery close to the holidays this year and was thus unable to take on any holiday responsibilities other than sitting on the couch and/or shuffling about in his walker and enthusiastically delegating to me and my sisters. So, the luminaria duties (among others) fell to me this year.

Also to me: last minute Christmas Eve dinner shopping. So, on Christmas Eve morning I headed over to Smith’s to pick up the remaining items on our grocery list, stopping first at Walgreens on the way over for luminaria candles. But Walgreens, as it turns out, was out. No problem, I thought, they’ve probably got some at Smith’s anyway.

Nope. Not only was Smith’s out of candles, but the entire store was a crowded mess. And not a crowded New York City mess either, where even in the worst areas the congestion is equal parts tourist and pissed off New Yorkers trying to get to work. No, nobody in that entire store seemed to know how to walk or stay out of everyone else’s way. I called home, and asked my sisters to go out and get some candles at the hardware store down the street, since it looked like I’d be at the store for a good long while.

But when I got home, I found both my sisters plopped on the couch, in exactly the same place I’d left them.

“Didn’t you get the candles?” I demanded.

“No,” said Sarah languorously. “Luminarias aren’t really that important to me, so I didn’t want to go.”

“Well the are important to me!”

I left the house again for the hardware store. They were out of luminaria candles there too. And out at the nearby dollar store. And out at the farther-out-of-the-way hardware store. Finally, in the sixth store that I tried, I found some.

We lit the candles before church and followed their glow across the driveway as we headed out toward the car.

I noticed how ours touched against our neighbors’ on both sides, so that you could hardly tell where ours ended and theirs began. Oh, this, I thought. THIS is why the luminarias are so important to me.

I can feel the whole community through these lovely, glowing lanterns. We’ve all done this together, lit these candles in the darkness. Together they make a bright path, lighting the way toward some kind of saving grace. They connect us in our hope to our neighbors, to the whole city, to the world.

There's a beautiful scene in Tangled, in which Rapunzel watch the thousands of lanterns that are released by the kindom on her birthday in the hopes that she, the lost princess, might return. It's easily the most enchanting moment of the movie. I mean, look at it.

It's only a short sequence, but before the lanterns are released, we see the King and Queen, her parents, look sadly at one another, still grieving after all these years, before launching their lanterns into the air, an act of reckless, unfounded hope. Their lanterns are joined by rest of the the kingdom's: a mass of tiny glowing testaments to their hope, a community united, their light persevering even in the darkness.

Of course they reminded me of the luminarias. Not just in look, but also in the spirit of the action, the coming together to light the darkness in a shared expression of faith.

I thought back to the pastor’s final words on Christmas Eve: “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness does not overcome it.”

For a long time I’ve been preoccupied with the overwhelming weight and mass of darkness in the world. It leaves me icily numb, unable to see a divine order, as much as I look for it. If you took all the darkness, all the evil in the world, I often think, and put it on a great big scale against all the lightness and good, the light may well triumph. But if it did, I think it might only be for coincidence.

The awful unfairness of the world is a pretty obvious thing to be so hung up on, but there you have it. It is, and I am.

But, say what you will, whatever light and beauty that does shine in this world, it’s true – the darkness does not overcome it. And maybe that’s enough. Maybe it’s more than I realized. The darkness does not overcome it.

In entire the 72 hours after Christmas, nowhere I ended up was where I expected to be at any given point in time. I thought I would be detained several days due to the storm, but found myself booked the following day on a flight to Newark instead. When my Denver-to-Newark leg of the trip was cancelled, and I watched passengers frantically vie for seats on flights as far away as a week, I figured I was about to spend an unplanned week-long vacation with my Grandma in Colorado Springs. And when the customer service representative bizarrely, miraculous put me on a flight – the only flight – into LaGuardia that day, never did I expect to make it all the way back to New York only to get stranded in Queens. But I did.

It was truly an exercise in patience, but I tried to be calm and accepting of every evolving circumstance. I’ve had a lucky streak of eventless flights in the past year or two, and this kind of thing is bound to catch up with you eventually. And who are you going to be mad at here, anyway? Weather is weather.

But when I finally did end up stuck in deep Queens on Tuesday, LIRR-less and unable to get to work, I was disgruntled and overcome with guilt. I would have been okay with staying Colorado Springs with my grandmother for a week, in fact (much as I DID need the money this week) I was a little disappointed to NOT see her and all my aunts and uncles and cousins after all. And I took a seat on that miracle flight into LaGuardia from somebody who really needed it. And! After all that I couldn’t get to work the next day ANYWAY.

I’ll spare the details, because they’re unimportant, but as it turns out, I needed that unexpected snow day in Queens more than I ever could have guessed. I spent the day re-defining a relationship with someone from whom I had parted on sad, ambiguous terms and without that time together, I would have been lost.

I still think spending an extra week in Colorado would have been wonderful, but it occurs to me now that perhaps anything that might have happened would have been wonderful. It occurs to me now that I needed that entire travel fiasco more than I ever could have guessed. I needed the space to discover opportunities and possibilities in the midst of total chaos, uncertainty, and inconvenience.

On the 26th of December, the day of the blizzard and my original flight, I woke up early with a lump in my stomach as I gathered my suitcase, headed for the airport, and contemplated saying goodbye to my family.

Instead I enjoyed an extra day of rest, a fantastic movie with my sisters, and an unexpected feeling of peace.