Dear Readers, all eight of you. My writing mentor, the Duck, says I have to write every day. He says no one goes to the Olympics by skating one day a month. He says write what you had for breakfast if you have to. Ok, Kefir and berries with stevia and flaxseed. Everyday. Yes I don’t think that my daily food intake will provide quite the scintillating writing topic though. Write every day I must from now on. But where to write? Do I buy another nifty new journal and put pen to paper and do it long hand? Do I just random people emails all day? No. I decided I will simply put another category to my page here and call it the Daily Booze. So here I go. Dateline today. This one’s for you, Duck.
My playroom is coming along fine or the studio or whatever it will be called in its next manifestation. I go into the room and I am thrilled to see the new colors and then I cry to see the new colors. There is such history to this 25 year room in my life and for those no longer living here. It began as a studio for Andy, our musician house partner to me and Craig, 25 years ago on March 25, the same day as Andy’s birthday. Seven years later, when Andy moved out, it morphed into the playroom for my Marco who was three at the time and then also his brother Max when he came along a year later. The ghosts of Grandma Anita having tea parties with Max and Marco in there resonate with every stroke of the brush of the newly mixed paint. A lovely color that Michael, my business partner, turned friend, turned handyman, came up with by mixing the remnants of gallons of left over paint from Craig who could never part with a can of paint, good or bad. It’s a fitting symbol for mixing of the lives that lived in this room for all those years. Some gone for good like my ex and Andy. Some on hiatus I hope like my older son Marco living with his dad. What shall this room become in its new manifestation. I don’t know. I truly don’t. I sat in there today so peacefully while Michael painted his ‘holiday’ spots as he calls them for what seems like the umpteenth time to me. But perfectionism is good in work so I can’t complain. Just glad he’s not getting paid by the hour. It’s exciting too, not all sad, to see what that room becomes. My Max is left, thank goodness.
This weekend, practicing my empty nest routine, just underscored that I don’t want one ever. .I like the sound of noise and people and laughter and chatter. I have no interest at this late date to learn to live alone. If I have to nab a few homeless folks from under the freeway, I will gosh darn it. If not this place will really become Grey Gardens and I’ll have to buy a bunch of turbans.
A play filled weekend though it was. And that brings the joy these days in a life in transition. Friday night’s Don’t Hug Me, We’re Family, with my long time best friend, the ever Zen like Pat McKane was hilarious in it’s spoof of theater music against the back drop of a small Minnesota town. The irony of the fast talking New Yorker and his wife dropping in to cause commotion was not lost on this New Yorker who married a Minnesota boy for 27 years. St. Patty’s day the next night was a hop between friends with the cheer moms at Keegans for an early celebration. Then a trip to Andy and Renee and Avenue A to meet Ms. Robin and her new beau who is as sweet as can be amidst the backdrop of so much green and glitter courtesy of Miss Marilee and Miss Lisa Matthews.
Sunday and plays reigned once again, as Sandi one of my most steadfast playgirls, and I went to the Echo to see a wonderful play called The Undivided Heart. What a poignantly orchestrated piece of theater set to the scandal of a pedophile priest and a younger priest looking to publish the story and his Zen toting brother and his Buddha and a town poisoned and dying from tainted water. In the hands of a lessor playwright and director this could have been a mess. But it wasn’t. The director, adorable, asking us at intermission if we liked it. Yes, yes, stop being so needy, we love it.. At the restroom door we chatted with this lovely lady who when I asked who she was there for, as is often the case in theaters with 40 people in the audience, said she worked the lights on the play. Why was I here she asked. We are professional playgoers I replied. And it’s true. For less than the price of what most people pay for a movie and surely a lot less that the most addicted television viewer pays for TV, we go to play after play and play. I sit a lot and wonder what should I be doing in these retired years. And a little voice always answers: you don’t need to do ANYTHING anymore but go to plays and concerts.
Midnight Missives and Musings 