9.1.02 – the first day of school

and so i’ve arrived on the east coast. i am renting a room in a neat turn-of-the-century farmhouse in west roxbury, a suburb south of boston. the people who live here, the parents-of-my-brother’s-former-fraternity-brother, are very sweet, and the house is comfortably cluttered, with creaky old staircases and slating hallways and a black(ish) cat, brownie, whom i am trying to win over with love and bits of food. outside my window there are great big leafy trees, creating the sense of cool, green calm in my bedroom – i have arrived just in time to enjoy the fall weather. today i will go out and explore the city, and tomorrow i go into rehearsal at the chamber repertory theatre. gulp. i feel like it’s the first day of school. i pack my peanut butter and jelly sandwich and wonder, what if the other kids don’t like me? what if i get beat up while waiting for the bus?

8.31.02 – i have always depended on the kindness of strangers

reader marymary writes in to note that i sound sad and harried the past few days, and to offer recommendations for sushi in boston. sad and harried is an accurate description of the past few weeks. now that i’ve landed in boston the harried part is over, but i am still a bit sad, and lonely for my other half, my soul mate, whom i last saw thru a blur of tears waving behind the security checkpoint at the boise airport. i will investigate the promise of good sushi, however, and so thank you in my best tennessee williams accent: “ah have always depended on the kindness of strangers...”

8.30.02 – now you see it, now you don't

Twelfth Night closed last night. from my seat in the stage manager’s booth i can see over the set to the desert hills beyond the theatre. at dusk most nights i can see deer – sometimes a dozen or more, with half-grown fawns – frolic in the little dry glen behind the dressing rooms (in this picture, it’s just over the top of the blue backdrop).

while watching the final performance of any show, i always have a moment where i stop and catch my breath and wonder at the temporal existence of this art form. thinking, right now, at this moment, this work of art exists, but it has no physical body – it exists thru the bodies and voices and thoughts and emotions of actor and playwright and designer and director and audience member, and later tonight, it will no longer exist except as something that each of us experienced, took part in, created, were a part of for a couple of months, maybe only a couple of hours.

perhaps an obvious conclusion, but i always marvel at it just a bit. what was twelfth night is now bits of broken up blue plywood in sticking out of the dumpster, it's lighting instruments neatly stacked and gels filed away in folders sorted by color, it's satin doublets and feathery wedding dresses that, out of context, have no significance. it’s like a body when the life has gone out of it – it’s still made up of cells and blood and bone, but without life its an empty shell. twelfth night now exist only in my memory. but i experienced it. i was there. i was in that moment. and everyone of the thousands of people that saw or helped create this show, they carry that moment in them, too.

8.26.02 - these things happen to me

me: "i have to buy some bleach because i washed my red tank top with my whites and now everything's pink."
andy: "really? i thought that sort of thing only happened to people in sit-coms."
me: "what, and you always sort your laundy by color?"
andy: "of course. you don't?"

foiled by blockbuster again: we rented donnie darko last night, and when we got home discovered that the tape had been swapped with corky romano. we tried to watch tv, but i have the 3-channel-All-Star-Trek-All-The-Time tv package, so we were forced to watch corky romano. and it is an awful, awful movie. almost awful enough to be funny again, but not quite.

i move to boston in four days, so i'm a little frazzeled right now. posts will likely pick up with much greater regularity as soon as i isolate myself in a city where i have no friends. until then, it's packing and bowling parties and sushi and theatre and getting my nose pierced with hannah. if i don't chicken out.

8.21.02 - good day, sunshine

we rocked the crossword and the daily jumble over fried eggs and hashbrowns at our favorite table of our favorite diner, and it was an excellent start to the day.

andy says my new haircut is very "continental", which i think he means as compliment, altho it's hard to tell - after all, sexy skinny french women live on the continent, but then, so do great big german beer maids with hairy upper lips. i'm just pleased that i no longer have a mullet.

8.20.02

mari's been here visiting, so i've been playing host and getting to show off my hometown. there was swimming in the shockingly brisk payette lake, having our hair cut at the foofy salon that insisted on putting lipstick on me before releasing me out the door, shopping for my bridesmaid dress,feasting on mexican food, drinking kalimotxos at the basque center, picnicking while watching Macbeth at ISF, and there was much reading-of-harry-potter-and-drinking-coffee for mari while i was in rehearsal for Charlie Brown.

i keep hearing my new roommate, kevin, tell his friends in new york how stunningly beautiful idaho is, which pleases me. some pics that mari and i took while in mccall:

8.12.02 - from bohemian artist to residence motel in just one day: a packrat's guide to redecorating

i have a new roommate. it's been nice, zeke getting his own bathroom and bedroom for the whole summer, but not totally unreasonable that the theatre would want to move another actor in here with me for the remaining few weeks that i'm here. i warned the company manager that i was going to take all the common area furniture and kitchen utensils with me, and she assured me that she'd contracted with a company to equip the apartment with furniture, etc, for the guy moving in (kevin).

furniture guys arrived at seven this morning with two sofas, end tables, dining room table and chairs, cooking tools, coffee maker, broom, vacuum, bed and dresser, shower curtain, you name it. 30 minutes and they were gone, leaving a fully furnished apartment behind them. i hauled most of my stuff out of the kitchen/living room last night, and this morning i got up, looked around, and my lovely bohemian pad had turned into a residence motel.

the chinese lantern looks awkward hanging directly over the table lamp, and the japanese wall hangings are out of place next to the bland-colored geometric-pattern sofa and love seat. i suddenly feel better about the chipped blue china dishes i got after my grandmother died, this mismatched towels, a bean bag chair from my college days hanging beneath a pink chinese lantern, an armchair that's more holes than upholstery, filched from my parents' garage. the toy collection (Nunzilla the wind-up nun who spits sparks, my freud doll, my power puff girl that says "i think they're asking for a hiney-whoopin!", the yoda doll that came to my S.A.T.s with me, my beanie babie chameleon...)

i guess i'm not ready for grown up furniture, even if it is nicer than my stuff. my furnishings have character. they have stories. the armchair (zeke's favorite) was the first piece of furniture that my grandparents bought after they were married. the 13" tv tucked into the fireplace i won in a bet with my younger brother. the toy collection that sat on the trunk-draped-with-tie-dye-tapestry-coffee-table look out of place on the new oak end table.

i wish i'd thought to take before and after photos.

it makes me realize that i'm more stuff-oriented than i try to be. not that i need expensive, or impressive stuff. but i cling to the stuff that is imbued with emotional content. i used to always flinch at how much stuff i had whenever i'd pack up and move - flinch because some part of me was saying "ha! see how materialistic you really are? you need all this STUFF!" but now i realize that it's insecurity. it's hard for me to carry everyone and everything i love inside my heart, without physical reminders of them. i like the idea of being totally free of these emotional bonds to physical items, but it seems like a less lofty goal to me now. this stuff represents the people i love, and since i can't cram them all into my life at the same time, i cram their stuff into the same room.

8.8.02 - journeys

i'm still having trouble getting back into the swing of writing every day. i went from having no free time to having free time and no structure, which means that my days are seemingly gobbled up with the mundane: going to the gym, loading the dishwasher, shampooing, eating breakfast, reading in bed. three days in a row with no shows, so andy and i went up to the cabin in McCall. more mundane details made an utterly pleasant weekend: sleeping late, watching movies (Amelie - A+, The Man Who Wasn't There - C), wandering thru the little town drinking coffee in the light afternoon rain, hiking (we saw a bear!), swimming, cooking macaroni and cheese, sitting on the porch in the evening sun, playing the guitar and watching the aspen trees shiver in the breeze. my uncle described them to me once as digital - the leaves flip between silvery pale green and dark forestry green, like ones and zeros, ons and offs. if you relax your eyes a bit, and focus on some still part of the tree, like the trunk, the whole tree seems to shimmer. i wonder if you could comprehend all those numbers, the millions of ons and offs every second, if you'd get some mathematical pattern that makes up the form of the tree.

andy is reading The Hobbit to me aloud; my head is filled with goblins and giant spiders and dwarves and it's difficult to resist the temptation to read ahead when he's not here, even though i've already read it and know what adventures await mr. baggins and company. tonight i will content myself with Siddartha and an early bedtime. my lazy summer is nearly over; in three weeks i leave for boston and new adventures, and the following weeks will be filled with packing, planning, and preparing to close yet another chapter of my life, and open a new one.

8.5.02 - feeling sorry for myself

through sheer stupidity, an act of malice, or god's will, i managed to lose my wallet today somewhere between when i left the moxie java in mccall and when i arrived back in boise. spent the afternoon in line at the DMV (i'm SO photogenic when i'm pissed off) and trying to cancel credit cards. wells fargo picked today to take their entire computer system down, so at the moment some hooligan may be on a shopping spree with my bank card and there's nothing that i can do to stop him since everytime i call customer servie they apologetically tell me that they can't cancel my cards until their computers come back up. no money, no insurance card, no blockbuster card, no more phony student ID card. and no wallet.

suffice to say i'm having a BAD day. and i have to go the mall and buy a bridesmaid dress, of all things, tonight.

8.2.02 - shiny happy people

happy news all around. hannah, my super-cool roommate/co-worker from Buffalo and Boise, got a job working at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival! she rules. now i will have a happy, hippy, theatre town to go hang out in when i'm unemployed next winter. go hannah.

and callie is getting married in six weeks! and the theatre i'll be working for gave me the weekend off to be in the wedding! getting six bridesmaids to agree on dresses, via email, is not an easy task. but at least we've moved on from "orange/fall-themed fall sundresses" to something in garnet and satin that i'll probably never be able to wear again but will be much easier to purchase. kudos to callie, who is dealing with grad school proposals, a new house, a new puppy, younger siblings who have decided to move in, and somehow still manages to send out wedding invites. remind me to elope, when the time comes.

and mari is coming to visit soon! in her wonderfully-wise-mari-way, she writes,

you realize sometimes how love can light someone up, happy little chinese lanterns.

i can't think of a better way to phrase it.