In, Out, Up and Up

In Valencia, the air is sweet from groves of orange circles on green blurs as I drive the curves of one California highway. In Arkansas, gnarly balls of thicket tumble across faded gray concrete highways while cows stand in dark dirt, munching on feed and cud. In New Mexico, distant mountain ranges conjure country pride through the belting of "purple mountains majesty" out unwound windows. Primary colors painted on gas pumps in Oklahoma. The way my pulse pounds in Santa Fe, unaccustomed to the high altitude. My tall brown leather boots in a vegan restaurant in Santa Barbara, California where a small town rally about undisclosed monosodium glutamate (MSG) in packaged food travels between the lips of wealthy hippies while packs of posters are distributed for hanging. I feel the eyes of a nurse in blue scrubs land on my zippered cowhide. "I bought these boots last year, before I went vegan." I prepare to say and, "Most people are eating the meat so I'm just making sure the cow's skin isn't wasted." But no fight progresses past her fleeting glance and my soft tacos arrive to distract me with juicy jackfruit, guacamole, black beans and salsa. We climb copper boulders at a rest stop in Arizona. I photograph Scott's silhouette, capturing his rolled shirt sleeves, angular chin, reflective rimmed glasses and the digits of his long curved fingers. I photograph a fat black crow on a telephone line. I photograph toilets: rest stop toilets, restaurant toilets, hotel toilets. But a toilet is a toilet is a toilet, I learn. I don't know why I thought they would change state by state. In Crossville, Tennessee, the battery light on the dashboard shines. Southern hospitality saves us on this Sunday morning in holy Tennessee where rain is turning into snow. A mechanic drives to his shop, replaces our alternator and charges just $55 for an hour and a half of labor. In Oklahoma City, we find a restaurant oasis, Matthew Kenney, where an eager red headed waiter tells us about his favorite menu items. Scott and I share a smoothie of raw chocolate, almond milk and banana. I order a butternut squash soup and for my main course, a dish of curried kelp noodles with vegetables. For dessert, we share a delectable chocolate chai sampler. Two hours east of Amarillo, 60 mile-an-hour winds push the driver's side window to sink slightly, causing an irritating whistle. Scott cranks the manual lever again and again, creating brief moments of quiet. However, the cranking eventually causes cracking and the disappearance of the window into the door. Gusts of cold roar in. We pull off the highway. It's nearly 4PM on Presidents' Day and all the auto shops who answer our calls can't help until the next morning. So we bundle up. I get into the driver's seat, pull back onto the highway and grip the wheel with my gloved hands. The car wavers in the wind and I imagine we are picked up and tossed into the spinning blades of the wind farm fans. Chopped into tiny pieces, our wet remains sprinkle over the mile long cow ranch we pass and into the vents of the many mysterious metallic barns we see. In Oakland, California, we meet Scott's brother and his wife, the new owners of this car we've been driving for 3,600 miles. We meet at their city's Saturday farmers' market where a middle aged man sings Jamaican songs and beneath tents are piles of citrus, herbs, and strawberry samples. In San Francisco, they buy us burritos and beer and we sit in a park on a pink and orange sheet while a middle aged man with a case of Pabst Blue Ribbon under his tattooed arm hollers "cold beer". A little later, a twenty-something stoner with a queer smile and a black backpack crouches beside me and offers to sell us some drugs using lingo we are unfamiliar with. Shrooms and weed baked into brownies, he translates. "No thanks." Another dealer quietly carries brass hot pots of drug infused chocolate truffles. He is the classiest dealer around, wearing a straw pointy hat, a button down shirt and sun kissed skin. The park is packed. Gathered groups sit in rows, all facing downhill away from the sun. It looks as if we are watching a show. And we are, I suppose, watching and simultaneously performing the show of strangers. A frisbee flies for a fast pup. An amateur tightrope made of yellow car straps wraps two trees. Someone's bottle cap pops behind us and lands at the center of our sheet, causing us to look around and receive a jolly apology. A baby in pink overalls waddles by alone before flopping her diapered bottom beside two snuggling lady lovers. After a brief chat, we watch the baby stand and begin retracing her uphill steps when three drunk girls bend low to ask for her momma in high pitched voices. The baby walks on. The drunk girls follow. The baby's mother stands with a wide smile to the right of us and when the drunk girls see her, they laugh. They thought the baby was alone, they say before collapsing back onto their blankets, all secretly sad for babies of their own. Guitars, bean bag football, an old Asian woman collecting cans, miniature canines, and toe nail dirt. This is my new knowledge of sunny Saturdays in San Francisco. In Knoxville, Tennessee, we drink local beer from pint glasses and go swimming in the hotel's indoor pool. At a gas station in Montville, New Jersey we fill the Geo Prism's gas tank and empty our pee tanks in the convenience store restroom. The small car is fun to drive, but "We're dead if we get into an accident." I say, my shifty eyes bouncing from blue tooth talking drivers to a guy with an orange kitten on his lap to the sunlight splashing the scaffolding of the bridge in New York and to riverbank hills covered in houses. The car's four wheels drift with my eyes into sleep strips, lane lines and steering wheel jerks. "You might want to stay in your lane." Scott says before "Break lights. Breaaaaak lights!" Scott and I perform a firm hand shake at every state line. I drive 80 miles an hour when the speed limit marks 75. It feels like flying. We pass cargo trains, eighteen wheeler trucks and trailers towing trailers. We see black bulls, brown horses and hundreds of billboards for burgers and Cracker Barrels. The car shop in Amarillo, where we get the window wedged shut, is a dealership and while we wait we chat with the waiting room hostess. A sweet old woman adorned with big shiny jewelry and a southern drawl, she owns a jewelry business and a window cleaning company. She works at the dealership for fun. I can tell she wants to chat so when the sun starts to rise behind the buildings across the street, I stand up and initiate conversation with "pretty sunrise." My obvious remark is all she needs to get chatting. A widow of a "real cowboy" she lived in New Mexico for twenty years, she says after my mention of our next destination. She used to go to the rodeos, sip whiskey sours and watch her man down in the ring. Somehow the conversation turns to restaurants. "Can't get a bad meal at Cracker Barrel." she says, "they have everything." and "You don't have Olive Gardens in Massachusetts, do you?" and "Oh you probably don't like cat fish, but we love it down here." When it's time to leave, she wishes us luck and I tell her it was nice talking to her because it was. We listen to an entire book on tape. We listen to Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley and Patsy Cline in Tennessee. We listen to the wind and we hardly talk or think about the future.  


The night before our road trip's departure, my family gathers at a Chinese restaurant for Mom's birthday. My little sister, who is amidst a graduate school course about race and equality, speaks of her shock. She's learning about the harsh truths of current racial inequality in this country. Man created racism. She tells us. We are all exactly the same on the inside. I tell her that I actually watched Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s I Have a Dream speech on my computer that afternoon. I had been watching one lecture and it inspired me to look for more inspiration. I wasn't planning to watch the entire speech, but I couldn't help myself. When King begins his famous August 28, 1963 address at the March on Washington, his eyes carefully follow his written word, his nervous tongue tripping a little and echoing through the huddled group of microphones at his mouth. Soon, he becomes more comfortable at his familiar place behind the podium, referring less to the pages at his fingertips. He rallies listeners for his dreams to be fulfilled. The camera goes to the gray statue of our 16th president, Abraham Lincoln. Stoically, he sits as a massive reminder of his abolition of slavery one hundred years before at the conclusion of the American Civil War. Where will America be in 2063?  I wonder. And will we ever all be "free at last"?  


What if Scott and I were black? What if we were lesbians or gay men? What if we were of Mexican, Iranian or Kenyan descent? Would we have taken this trip from our liberal city in the Northeast, down through the southern states and up through California? What would have happened when Scott walked into that gas station where that group of middle aged white men sat drinking coffee and telling jokes that started with "those black boys"? Would we have felt unsafe in Knoxville, Little Rock or Amarillo? We have friendly faces, kind smiles and innocent eyes, but is our peach colored skin all strangers see? Is our skin the reason why the persons we pass return our smiles and gentle speech? Is our skin color the reason why so many go out of their way to help us when we have car trouble? Is our skin color the reason why those three hicks with individual facial ticks in that Arizona car shop charged us $40 for an oil change?


In Santa Barbara, I have never seen such flaunting wealth. This is probably where celebrities shop, I imagine, looking around for rock stars, basketball players and famous film actors. We pass four old-fashioned movie theaters with bright bulbed marquees on our way to dinner. We see gold and crystal chandeliers glowing in arched entrances and beneath outdoor staircases. We see stores, restaurants, and ice cream shops equipped with high fashion window displays where gravity is redefined, color is reexamined and money is of no object. Yet across from these shiny windows, leather skinned homeless men and women sit on wrought iron sidewalk benches beneath oval antiqued streetlights holding cardboard signs for food. The next morning, I go for a jog. I pass a church lawn where, behind its high hedge, tents are being shoved into hitchhiker sacks and stolen shopping carts.   


In Oakland, before our red eye flight back to Boston, we attend my brother-in-law, Jonathan's planetarium show. We sit in the front row on reclined cushioned chairs and learn how scientifically miraculous our planet is. At the end of the half hour show, curious children raise their little hands and inadvertently trick Jonathan into articulating the speed of light by way of Einstein's Theory of Relativity. A little while later, he sets up a telescope and points it to our cratered gray moon. We are so small, aren't we? An idea which can be very hard to grasp. It's like when you're in high school and your boyfriend breaks up with you or your mother sends you to baseball practice with the wrong kind of pants and all the senior baseball jackass jocks relentlessly tease you. It is nearly impossible to look past one's awkward teenage ecosystem of broken naivety, savage rumors and spiking hormones to see flat empty highways, fog ringed mountain ranges and strangers. And yet, even after graduating crowded cafeterias, American History classes, and Algebra graphs, it seems we still struggle to see past our picket fences, car doors and country lines to comprehend really how alike we all are. We are all souls stuffed into bodies made of livers, lungs, joints and hearts. We all walk this planet in search of acceptance, sex and survival. We are all born of mothers, begin as babbling babies and waddle around as defenseless children. We all suffer heart ache and growing pains. And we all must choose between slowly dying and constantly growing. Personally, I want to learn the past; expand upon my present perspective and develop an extraordinary future. Because I only have this one chance with this body, with this family, with these friends and I know that I can only do it here, on this one spectacular and extremely exhausted Earth. 


I'm not going to waste any time dying.  

At a rest stop in Shenandoah National Park, I take a picture of Scott and he takes a picture of me. In my picture, I am laughing because I am farting and the thunder of my toot echos through the valley below. In Lexington, Virgina, we find a coffee shop and walk circles around a neighborhood, stretching our car cramped legs. At the Grand Canyon at sun rise, I sit on a rock at Mather Point willing the rising sun to pink my purple lips and soothe my quivering muscles. We drive the coastal highway, Interstate 1, up and up California where the views of the Pacific Ocean give us new images for which to judge future landscape beauty contests upon.  

One Hopeful Herbivor

I am so lucky to live in this progressive time where bright GREEN signs all point to an upswing from our country's disease riddled depression and lead to the ultimate destination of dirt and kitchen sinks. Farms and rooftop gardens where carrots, kale, tomatoes, spinach and grains are grown. Apple orchards, raspberry bushes and pear trees adorned with brimming baskets and baby teeth and fingers the color of blueberries. It is vegetables steaming on stovetops, pots of brown rice simmering, butternut squash soup steeping, and a wide bowl of crisp salad sitting. In the sunshine, my hope balances high on tight ropes made of strong veins and poised bones where one day I can stop fearing my father's prostate, heart and arteries will prematurely fail or rot and that my mother's breasts, blood and brain will knot into tumors and dementia. Hope that my sisters and brother will experience true energy, enthusiasm and open mindedness for an alternative. Hope that they will all live long lives at home and not in hospital beds. Hope for everyone throughout the world to embrace individual empowerment through healthy living. Because it doesn't matter what your culture, race, gender or genes are. What matters is how you choose to treat the vessel of your soul.   

"People are sensitive about their food choices." Scott tells me. "Don't be a preacher." He is warning me, reminding me of the last time I went vegan five years ago and began bombarding the email inboxes of my family members with films about animal cruelty.  Hidden camera footage of pigs packed in filth, chickens trampled by the cramped chaos of factory farms and cows screaming while they wait in line to have their hind legs yanked and their throats slit. If I am a preacher, then these pages are my church for I have no interest in contributing more quiet to the gluttonous greed of big American businesses crushing the ignorant citizen with addictions, misinformation and disease. 

I grab a cheddar cheese stick from the dairy drawer, husk the wrapper and chomp. I order a 6-ounce beef burger on a bun with a side salad. I pinch and peel smoked salmon flesh from its shiny cardboard and lay it across chive cream cheese on a toasted everything bagel. I grill turkey burgers and garnish them with strips of pork bacon and crumbled blue cheese. I fill my belly with three egg omelets of oily roasted red peppers, goat cheese and breakfast sausage. I gnaw on the bones of my crispy roast duck legs and spoon creamed spinach and garlic mashed potatoes into my mouth. I experience a fluctuating body weight, energy levels, butt dimples and face pimples. 

Then I am shown the documentary film, Forks Over Knives and it teaches me that the animal dependent diet is what has caused the health of our human race to plummet so considerably over the past century. The film presents irrefutable scientific and historical studies linking the consumption of meat and dairy with multiple degenerate diseases. 

The first time I went vegan it was from the book, Skinny Bitch. I was twenty-two at the time and too embarrassed by the book's title to ever tell, but I liked cutting meat and dairy from my diet. It felt good. Like I was rejecting the entrance of bad food into my body. Yet after a year and a half I quit out of guilt. I didn't want to be an inconvenience to hosts anymore, my mother in particular. "You're comin home? Awww shit, Rachey, what am I gonna feed you?" She'd say surrounded by miniature cups of strawberry banana yogurt, deli salami, and swiss cheese. "I'll be fine." I'd say, packing pita chips and peanut butter into my purse before boarding the bus for Boston. The book convinced me why I shouldn't eat animal derived foods, but I was too naive to learn how to eat nutritionally. Rice and beans, soy milk and cereal, apples and honey roasted peanut butter became my daily diet. When I gave in to scrambled eggs on Christmas morning, I felt enormous relief. I could agree with my family about food again. Scrub away that sticking point and talk about something other than Tofurkey and hummus. But I am twenty-eight now and no longer feel impulsed to agree with everyone about everything. In fact, I think to agree with the majority at this point in our health history, would be quite stupid.   

The documentary teaches me of a civil war in this country. A war between the ignorant sick citizen and the big wigs of the meat, dairy, processed food and pharmaceutical companies. The war is fought with false public announcements of big business favored food pyramids and of national advertisements asking if we've got milk and if we were aware that beef was for dinner. Years later, commercials for Lipitor, Viagra, and Slimfast litter our eyes and ears while we fight about the kabillion dollar health care bill in this country. It's a war that isn't so easily seen if looking for bullet wounds and cannon ball cavities for this battle field is across our innocent insides. At the front lines, our arteries are splitting into heart disease, prostate cancer, high blood pressure, chronic fatigue and diabetes. Our pores are impoverished from necessary nutrients due to malnutrition and dehydration from energy drinks, lattes and liters of diet soda. Our discolored skin sags and our bellies jiggle while we steer motorized carts up and down grocery store aisles, wheezing while we reach for cans of beef stew, clam chowder and boxes of Oreos. When we reach middle age, dementia begins to tangle our minds like silly string as we forget our insurance cards at the pharmacy again, our hands red with white stripes from sinking bags of orange bottles.  We're losing the war because we aren't even putting up a fight. We are literally purchasing the weapons of our enemies and pushing the barrels into our mouths because we either don't know better or because we fear change and admitting we were misled by our mothers, health professionals and by our commercialized culture.  


I'm choosing to spring from this infested environment of refined sugars, packaged obesity, inevitable arthritis, and unrelenting misery and give my body what it truly need: plants. Since my introduction to this knowledge, I feel like the world makes so much sad sense now. Standing back, I see widespread physical damage, prevalent psychological destruction and an undeniable surge in disease-related deaths. 

This enlightenment first began when I quit coffee a few weeks back and my energy skyrocketed. I stopped trying to self-medicate my mood with cups of caffeine and my reward was a real sense of self empowerment. Clarity dragged me out of my hazed state and reminded me that health is not achieved through medicine cabinet chemistry or creamed coffee, but through whole grains, vegetables, and fruit. I have been a vegan for a week now and I feel consistently energized and balanced, like I am no longer forcing my body to fight what I feed it. 

What do you tremble?

What do you tremble? Are you all afraid? 

Alas, I blame you not for you are Mortal 

and Mortal eyes cannot endure the Devil. 

Lady Anne 

King Richard III 

William Shakespeare 

Over bridges floating on fog, we drive to Brooklyn in the rain. I have spent the morning rehearsing my audition in the living room beside the glowing pellet stove where a mug of honeyed herbal tea sat steaming. I swept the floors, gathered the trash, washed the dishes and walked the dogs. I wrote a list and packed my bag. In Clinton Hill, we park the car and walk to a cafe around the corner. The sidewalks are slippery and cracked, the buildings beside them mismatching as if school children had dressed the bricks and wood, not grown men with hard hats, receding hairlines and hammers. We walk fast, an old instinct crafted while living in this city for twelve months, five and a half years ago. Suburban white kids we were with hidden maps and persistent paces. We were never not new, yet after a few months we were elbowing tourists and weaving through dense train cars as if we had been conceived in Chelsea, born in Queens and raised in Greenwich Village. 


At the cafe, we wait for our friends, Claire and Jay. I order a ginger tea, Scott a chai. They are served in pretty white porcelain cups. The cafe is lit by copper chandeliers and the day's shy sunlight who still, at 4p.m., hides behind the dime-colored clouds of the morning. A big mirror with a tarnished gold frame is mounted on the wall behind the register, a list of menu items drawn in marker at the top. The bottom reflects the barrister's bum cleavage, pressed and bolstered between his belt and the hem of his tee shirt. Beside our table, stacks of vinyl records rise, jagged. Three record players with speakers sit idle, wires plugged and wrapped like a stringy oil spill. A stanchion rope of rippling book pages and twine drapes to prevent curious, entitled fingers. After a couple hours of reading old magazines and playing Scrabble on our phones, we order a cheese plate. Purple pitted olives and navy blue figs pile in two ramekins, slices of brie, mozzarella, and jack cheeses lay like fallen dominoes, and a baguette rests on a bed of mixed greens. After I wipe away the crumbs, I sketch Scott's face onto a paper napkin with wet black ink. 


It's work just to get a haircut in this city, remember train fare. Work to lug groceries and hampered laundry. Work to pay rent. Work all the time just to pay rent. I remember. I did it once, briefly. It can make people hard, in a way. It did us. In this mighty metropolis, shields of tension began layering across our young bodies like metal molds. By spring, we were armored knights. It's survival. Don't fuck with me, you learn to show with a facial expression and the secure nature with which you walk. If from out of town originally, as many residents are, there is an undefined pressure to look like you belong.


When I worked at the grocery store in midtown years ago, a customer asked me if I was from Seattle. No, I told him, Massachusetts. You're certainly not from here, he said next, looking around to the braided, boisterous Harlem girls and Brooklyn boys who surrounded me at the other registers. I was a quiet girl. My hair dark brown, eyes blue, skin pale with pink cheeks. When I began working there a few asked if the other white girl in our department was my sister. "Hey. Y'all sistas?" Kristina was 6'2", maybe taller. She kept her yellow hair long and in an enormous mess of a nest perched at the top of her head. She wore big red glasses and strange clothes. She was a funny girl. A photography student. No, we're not sisters, I'd tell them. 


Drowning in the city's vulgar current, too proud to holler for help, too shy to show our teeth, we fled for Boston. 


Our evening in Brooklyn is spent eating out. With a scratchy throat threatening a full body invasion, I don't order wine. Instead I keep the model/waitress repetitively retrieving the water pitcher. Years ago, I would have drunk less to prevent such a pretty person from working so hard for me, but I've since lost the desire to disappear beneath pressed white linen, silver candlesticks and extravagant tips. 


That night, we sleep on a slowly deflating air mattress, while the steam heat resembles river rapids and the bellows of Brooklyn blow in from the open window behind our heads. At 6:30a.m., I hear four horn beeps, a pause, then "shut the fuck up!", then another horn beep, then "fuck you!" The exchange makes me smile as I read encouraging phone messages for my morning ahead. At 7:30, I roll onto the floor and gather my brown polka dotted dress, my olive green tights and my tall leather boots. In the bathroom, I wash and dress. When ready, I walk out. Scott gazes up from where he lays across the pink velvet couch. I tell him I'd like to leave earlier than we had planned, just in case. "Today is all about you." He says, sitting up. While I pack, he unplugs the mattress, folds our borrowed blanket, and piles the pillows. Jay walks out of his bedroom and asks if I'd like him to put the kettle on. I would, thank you. 

At the top of the stairs to the inbound subway station, I pause to pick up an empty soda can that's tumbled from a homeless man's shopping cart. I hand it to him and smile. He thanks me and smiles back. 


Underground, Scott and I lean on tiled walls, whispering. Nearly every woman who walks by "checks" me out, Scott says. My yellow coat is like the sun rising amongst a sea of sleepily rocking ships after a raucous storm of cannon balls, coffee and eye crusties. Everyone else here is on their way to work. I am headed to my graduate acting school audition. The train is ten minutes tardy. People peer down the railroad tracks, willing the tunnel to illuminate. When it arrives, we squish onto the last train car. We giggle as the train starts, remembering that lurch we have grown so unaccustomed to after living with cars in the country for three years. When a seat opens up, I eye a stalky square woman who's standing near by to see if she'd like to sit. She waves me off. I slide down and press my caboose onto the slippery plastic seat. At the next stop, the elbow of a business man punctures my personal bubble, allowing stress to spill in. I reach into my purse to pull out my headphones, but first look to Scott who is wedged between the sliding door and strangers. He smiles, his blessing to press play and close my eyes. 


As we drove through Brooklyn the day before he told me he no longer saw the beauty in the city. I was quiet before disagreeing. The filth, I said, the diverse buildings, the crowded street corners and florescent bodega signs are beautiful in an unequivocally raw way. I didn't convince him, but I wasn't really trying. This morning, while straddling strangers on the subway, he begins thinking these thoughts again when a delicate white feather floats past his face, glides over to me where I sit with my eyes closed, circles my face and then lands on the woman's coat to my left. Oh, he sees, there it is. When he tells me this little story later on our drive home, goosebumps rise across my arms and over my back. "Maybe that means someone was with me." I say. 


In midtown, we find the building. We're thirty minutes early, but we go in anyway. I walk up to the front desk. "What are you here for?" A big security man asks. 


"I have an audition in RipleyGrrrierrs Studios" I say, stumbling. Not a good sign. I need to warm up. Do some tongue twisters. He waves me on. 


"I'm with her." Scott says behind me. 


In the restroom on the sixteenth floor, I look to my reflection and begin reciting my first monologue, Lady Anne from William Shakespeare's King Richard III. "What do you tremble?" My hands do, yes. "Are you all afraid?" Very afraid. I exit the bathroom, walk over to Scott, smile, give him my yellow coat and a kiss and walk away. I say hello to the others in the waiting area, sign in and begin stretching in the side hall. 


My name is announced. I walk into the white audition room and over to the table. The first gentleman smiles to me. With a slight tilt to his head, he embraces my hand with a calm security. You can do this, he is saying with this gesture. This isn't scary. We aren't scary. I recognize him from the program's website. He is the chair of the department. The second gentleman introduces himself and shakes my hand. They ask what I will be performing for them. I tell them. My introductory words come out as I have rehearsed them. I can do this. "Would you like me to begin now?" I ask. 


"Yes when you're ready." 


A mirror spans the wall to my left, the direction I plan to address my imaginary characters (the men holding the casket of my recently deceased father-in-law, King Henry VI). He and his son, Edward (Anne's husband), have both been murdered by Richard. Before my speech in the play, Richard has ordered the men carrying the body to wait. These men, as they should, fear Richard tremendously. I, Lady Anne, want him dead. I turn around, take a deep breath. This is it. I turn back to face my audience of two and begin. 

"What do you tremble?" I hear my voice shake. "Are you all afraid?" I bark now, determined. "Alas, I blame you not, for you are Mortal, and Mortal eyes cannot endure the Devil." I look above the table to the wall to address Richard (the man I call devil). There is a stain on the wall. Look at that stain. It looks nothing like the lamp in the living room at home. Stab that stain with your words! Stab it. My voice sounds foreign with a harsh echo lingering around me like a static cloud.  This is not as good as I've done it before, I think next instead of what I should really be thinking, which is to tell that stain to leave me and my imaginary friends alone. "Avant thou dreadful minister of Hell; thou had'st but power over his Mortal body, his Soul thou canst not have: Therefore be gone." Now I am truly quivering. "Foul Devil, for God's sake hence, and trouble us not, for thou hast made the happy earth thy Hell: fill'd it with cursing cries, and deep exclaims: if thou delight to view thy heinous deeds behold this pattern of thy Butcheries." This is when I look down to Henry's body and see that it is bleeding. Richard is to blame for this. But when my head bows, I catch my own body's posture in the mirror and am pulled again to the mercy of my thoughts. Focus, you damn fool! Focus. "Oh Gentlemen see see dead Henry's wounds open their congeal'd mouths and bleed afresh." Make him melt. "Blush, blush thou lump of foul Deformity: for 'tis thy presence that exhales this blood from cold and empty Veins where no blood dwells. Thy Deeds inhumane and unnatural provoke this Deluge most unnatural." Plead for help. "O God! which this Blood mad'st revenge his death: O Earth! which this Blood drink'st, revenge his death: either Heav'n with Lightning strike the murderer dead: or Earth gape open wide and eat him quick, as thou dost swallow up this good Kings blood which his Hell-governed arm hath butchered."  

When I finish my second monologue, one of my eyes has dripped a long tear. I wipe it. Damn dried out contact lense. The man on the left agrees that his do that to him sometimes too. We are talking now about why I'd like to go to graduate school. I tell them the specific training I am looking for, about my original one-woman show and that I am only applying for their program. I'm twenty-eight, I tell them, if I am to go away to school, I only want to attend the program I am most interested in. I manage to tell them about the theater company I've helped establish and organize and the certificate in theater management I have completed. Conversation, in stark contrast to my monologues, is easy. They like me and I very much like them. But today is the first day of auditions. They have a week in New York City before going on to Chicago and San Francisco. I believe they accept two, maybe three females into their program every year. They audition hundreds. As I am walking out of the room, the director of the program asks if my husband is an actor too. "Yes, but he's pursuing directing." I say. "He's applying for graduate schools in directing. A couple in San Diego." I say before blurting something awkward about how "that would be my golden..." I trail off before I can remember the word, scenario, meaning if Scott and I were to both be accepted to schools in their southern California city. I wave at my words like a stinky fart, thank them, wish them luck and walk out of the room. 


In the hall, I tell the guy who's about to go in for his audition that they're very nice. "Seriously." I tell him, as if to my past self. "Don't be nervous." 


Outside, a soft breeze cools my cheeks. I look up to catch it. Through the tinted windows of my plastic sunglasses, I see soft sunlight cascading across the avenue's angles. I hear sounds rumble from subway grates, honk from raspy horns and click from soles on cement. I ask Scott to lead me to lunch. From 39th Street to Soho, we weave through midtown's crowded sidewalks like shoelaces in search of loopholes. Photographing colors, referencing street maps and pointing to the places of old memories, I introduce New York City to my new unabashed self. 

"What do you tremble? Are you all afraid? Alas I blame you not for you are Mortal..." My Lady Anne record plays on repeat for ten days until one optimistic thought reveals itself as if it were some hidden message embedded in the iambic pentameter.  I, the actress, was nervous to perform this audition and upset by my jitters, but a similar crippling fear could just as well have overcome Lady Anne when forced to face Richard, the ruthless murderer of her beloveds. Maybe the audition actually went well. This thought, whether true or utterly false, has at least the force to flick the turntable's needle to screech and leave me with the quiet hum of spinning vinyl.    

Cracked and Crashing

One awaits the next triple shot cappuccino, cigarette break, fudge gorge, bulging blunt, bottle of wine, pint of beer, shot of scotch, line of coke. Awaits the next sexual encounter with a stranger in a barroom bathroom. The next purge into a potty. The next slit into soft forearm skin. The next theft of x-rated magazines from corner stores, bicycles from dimly lit front porches, unlocked cars from grocery store parking lots. One anticipates, participates and then is (sometimes) pummeled into pits of regret from these ritualized tactics that make life bearable. One contemplates quitting an addiction, but if there isn't a vacation planned, a raise in order or any sort of prospect for golden happiness, what then is to prevent this person from creating small joys out of harsh adrenaline rushes and chemical dependencies? 

I believe a life without daily coffee consumption is a life without joy. Every obstacle, gloomy moment and irritating task can be overcome once I've prescribed myself an appropriate dose of caffeine. We, coffee and I, fix everything. We say witty things to people we're partying with for the first time. We tell old friends we're eating brunch with that we love them. We go grocery shopping. We write for five hours. We take enormous emergency poops in the park. We crash. We weep, shakily spouting that nothing is working, everything is stupid, and that I had to shit in the woods again.   

The day my tongue turns tan and coarse as a cat's is the day I decide coffee and I are in an abusive relationship. I need to take a break to gather my thoughts, I tell her. She isn't happy. Sends aches to my temples and seductive cravings to my mouth to meet her in the kitchen to get completely cracked out on her silkily intoxicating caffeine. I crave her with a sick constancy. But I am determined, at this time, to not allow winter to suck me into coffee cups, wine tumblers and beer bottles. When I quit, I am rewarded with rest. My ticker slows to its proper pace and my brain exhales, its little thought projectionist whooping in delight, relieved I no longer require him to run seventeen images at once with an internal dialogue of lists, worries and wonders. I feel my age of twenty-eight now as I welcome a little pessimism, sleepiness and secluded silence back into my life. 


Coffee has been unexpectedly quiet since those first days of my detox. I'm sure she'll make one or two final pleas for a pleasurable and then remorseful reunion. We'll see how I do. My track record proves me weak. I sucked my fingers until I was nine years old. Like many others, there's just something in me that yearns for the comfort of a reliably familiar ritual that can temporarily separate me from the commotion of life.

The Throw Up Towel

Along the back wall of the pharmacy, I find what I'm looking for: that finger cuticle-cutting tool. I buy it. At home, I open the package, remove the curved blade from its sheath and start shaving off dead skin. I am negligent, though, and blinded by eagerness to feel the nerves above my nails. And just as I finish my pinkie, I realize my index and middle fingers are bleeding. A deluge, really, as if I'd plucked two sandbags from the center of my skin's flood wall. I tear off a paper towel and attempt to sop up the red, but the blood won't clot. I keep my movements inconspicuously nonchalant, leaning against the kitchen sink while I talk with Scott and our friend, Sheila. But Scott notices and points it out, the edges of his mouth curving like a frowning clown in disgust. I hold up my red and white paper towel like an unwanted trophy. If you can't hide it, flaunt it. That's the saying, right? I then turn to the faucet and become an abstract painter, splattering the sink's surface with a watery crimson. After several minutes, the blood won't stop. I excuse myself. 

In the shower, a red river runs toward my feet. After ten minutes, I leave the steamy tiles. Still bleeding, I stretch over the white bath mats for the sink. There, I drip onto the fat angel babies who fly amongst golden clouds in the sink's somewhat silly scene. I hold my hand under rushing water, but still, I bleed. I pull open Band-Aid wrappers and press the sticky sections around and around the tips of my two sore fingers. Four bandages total. 

Later that night, before climbing into bed, I decide to free my fingers and take off the bandages. My fingers have stopped bleeding, but my nails are stained red. I tongue them clean, which I immediately regret. Then I climb into bed where I start to feel a bit queasy. The boys I nanny for had had some kind of stomach bug while we were separated by vacation. This nausea, I tell myself, is probably just a slow festering infection of the mind. I pick up my book, but after a couple pages have been flipped and pressed, another chapter digested, I close it and place it onto the corner of my bedside table. Scott comes into our room then and strips down to his underwear, a nightly ritual. In the winter, he climbs into the covers, clinging to me in my soft cotton sweatpants and long-sleeved tee shirts, waiting for his body heat to soften the icy sheet that drapes around him. Sometimes, despite the cold's threats and my angry pleads, he'll flap the covers, fanning cold air over my goosebumping limbs to line the comforter with the sheet. He has some Obsessive Compulsive Disorder tendencies. Last night, he climbs in and does his flapping thing, then makes some comment about how much I love him, to be cute. "I don't feel well." I grumble, curling my knees into my chest. He picks up his huge hard cover fantasy book about dragons, violent kings, and mystical creature armies, and starts talking about something. I don't know what. I'm not listening. I'm concentrating on my insides. Then I'm flipping back the covers, feeling sure that this frightening feeling, this metallically mouthwatering, rumbling tummy feeling is in fact happening. I run for the door that leads to the backyard. I rip it open and run outside. It's cold out, somewhere near 9 degrees. I am running to save the rug and my pajamas from the vomit that is reverberating and rising from my belly to my esophagus. 


Oh how I fear throw up. 


I haven't vomited for twelve years. The fear I have of puking no doubt stems from my mother, an openly gaging "would somebody please take care of that kid" kind of woman. She's not ashamed, nor proud. Just the way she is. Worst than my fear of personal puking is the retching of my mother. The sound of her repetitive dry heaves always seemed worse than actual vomit because it was the anticipation of vomit. Only this was no boy who cried wolf type of story. I never doubted the possibility that dry heaves could lead to wet spew. With four kids and a dog, it happened somewhat often. Every time the dog pooped in the house, for instance, she'd call my father from the kitchen telephone. Dad worked an hour away in Boston. "Marrrrrk, The dog shit (heave heave) damn it! The dog shit in the house again. Would you do something please?" I'd hear those heaves from my bedroom and wait for a splat on the kitchen tiles. When Mom would return to her senses and hang up, she'd holler for my brother to help. "PATRICK!" The only boy. I don't think he ever actually had to clean it up because I'd always hear the paper towel roll rapidly unraveling, some plastic spray bottle squeaking, and my mother gagging. She once puked in the side yard after we got home from somewhere. It was dark and I could hear her heaving into the bushes. I felt helpless. But that was the only time I witnessed my mother's produce actual barf. 


When I was a kid home with the flu, it meant a day of Sesame Street, Saltine Crackers, Ginger Ale, and laying on the couch with a towel stretched over my pillow. Not an empty paint bucket from the garage or an old cooking pot from beneath the kitchen sink. No, we were given a stiff cotton bath towel for if we "couldn't make it". And one sick day, I couldn't make it and threw up on my towel, cupping the sour sludge from beneath. My dry-heaving mother came running, leading me to the toilet where I could respectfully finish my virus's exit strategy. 


"Brush your teeth!" She'd instruct afterwards. I did as I was told, jabbing my cheap bristly toothbrush along my slimy teeth and washing the spit up from my chin. I then turned and picked up the THROW UP TOWEL to wipe my face. In our mad rush to the potty, Mom had thrown the vomit rag onto the hamper across from the sink and when I picked it up, tepid orange vomit splashed down toward our feet, causing a squealing fit flecked with my mother's horrible heaves. 


I think she feared the cleaning up of vomit, like the dog shit. I think the scariest thought going through her head was, WHAT IF IT GETS ON SOMETHING! This fear always turned into frenzy whenever anyone debilitated by sickness in my family suddenly stood from the couch and mumbled anything like, "I think I have to...." 


"Bathroom! GET TO THE BATHROOM!" She'd shriek from where ever she was cleaning, napping or reading. 


Last night, fearing I will not make it to the toilet, I run outside. I stand on the stones of the back garden, holding my  hair back. I separate my feet, squat my legs and bend forward. I imagine the baby carrots I have just eaten splattering across the stone wall in front of me and I try to remember where the hose is hooked up so that a quick and thorough clean can happen post puke. Scott says something to me then. Something about the bathroom and whether I can make it. I look back. He is standing, shirtless, pants-less, behind the glass door to our bedroom. He is shivering. He then tells me it probably isn't good that I'm standing out in the cold. Fed up and afraid he might see me upchuck, I walk around the side of the house. The door behind me closes. Good, I think, let me do this ALONE! I can do this. IcandothisDAMNIT! But then I start to feel the puke pass, like a ship dodging a dock. I decide to go inside to do the deed properly, into the porcelain potty. Scott has run inside to get dressed into sweatpants and a sweatshirt. He meets me in the kitchen. He doesn't know quite what to do. He looks a bit lost. Behind him, I beeline for the bathroom, close the door and kneel on the floor. I lean over the seat and purposefully inhale the smell of the toilet water. I breathe it in to encourage my rumbling tummy into discharging its yuckiness. Look at that lonely bowl of water where people POOP and PEE all the time! Remember what diarrhea looks like? Smelllllls like? Doesn't that make you want to puke? COME ON! Do it, body. Do it.  ... Nothing happens. I could never be a bulimic. I stand up, disappointed in myself for the drama I have caused. I leave the loo. Scott holds forth a glass of crushed ice and a glass of water and we walk back to bed. 


Once between the covers, I tell him that I'm feeling better. But then I notice that one of my previously bleeding cuticles is leaking blood again. I ask Scott for a few tissues from his bedside table. He gives me two, murmuring something about how that won't be enough. Still visibly disgusted by my blood, I see. Well, this little blood is NOTHING compared to what comes next. We hear it first, a painfully long puttering. The dreadful farting has begun. You know the kind. Those warm "LEAVE ME ALONE MY STOMACH HURTS!" kind of farts. I flap the blankets and the hot air that escapes is like a rotting skunk covered in pooping maggots. He waves his hands. The stench won't leave his nose alone, he says. A few jokes about shitting my pants pass between us as I doze off to dreamland. 


It appears I've left one gagging caretaker for another. 

Solitude

Penny whines to wake me. "Quiet." I mumble, muffled, my face smushed within the furrows of my mother's guest room pillows. With eyes still crumpled closed, I curl back the covers like a stiff salty wave. I unfold and press my glasses to my eyes and stand. Eyes open. I stumble into sweatpants. Turn the door handle and pull. With stubbornly straight legs, I rock down the stairs. I bend and break Beau free from his rocking crate. We roll to the front door, our feet hollow beer barrels tumbling downhill. "Wanna go outside?" Claws scramble and scratch the stone foyer floor. Socks scuffle solo to the kitchen. COFFEE! The brown drips into my mug while I sit nearby on the pot, draining yellow. Beau clobbers the front door. Wipe. Flush. Wash hands. Pour cream into cup, watch it swirl and sink into new color. Let the dogs in. Sit and settle into the leather recliner. Move my computer to beneath my fingertips. The dogs sprawl onto the couch for first nap of the day. I sit writing. At noon, I stand and raise my hands high as if on a mountaintop. Dogs fall off the couch, excited to the point of humping. It's time! They're thinking (as much as dogs can think). But I'm not quite ready. I turn and run up the stairs two at a time. They follow. A three-beast stampede. Bathroom. Contact lenses, toothpaste, spit. Bedroom. Bra, sweatshirt, gloves, sunglasses, vest. Jump down the stairs. Scoop up my sneakers and sit. The dogs circle under my knees, knotting tails before I can loop my laces. Tied. Winter hat. Leashes from the junk drawer. LEASHES!  Beau is leaping now like a dolphin. Penny tries to remain calm. "Sit. SIT Beau!" He twirls. Sits. I reach for his collar, but he poorly anticipates the click and is leaping again. "SIT!" Sitting. Reaching. Grabbing. Clicking. Penny remains sitting, as if Showing Off were the command. Headphones playing my new favorite album: Metals by Feist. Loop the leashes around my left hand. Down the driveway. Up the street. Smelling mailboxes. Peeing on everything. We walk for two hours along the horse trails, which are adjacent to most of the nearby roads. I avoid the blue cement when I can because Beau, the Border Collie, tries to herd every passing car. As trucks rumble toward us, he crouches in the dry winter grass and just as they pass, he sprints toward their sides. I squeeze his unintentional near-suicide around my hand, scolding his stupid habit while the large metallic sheep slow before continuing on their way. We trek down to the reservoir. It's a particularly windy day and I want to watch them hunt waves on the small sand. Four days, I live alone. Leashes tug me through thick grassy paths, along back roads and through my loosened thoughts. Home now. My cheeks pinked, my nose wet like the dogs'. I flick on the lights and separate muddy sneakers from socks, remove my fleece hat from saluting static and gloves from my cold, yellow fingers. I fill a tall glass with water. Penny drinks from her bowl. Beau slurps from the toilet. I'm eating mostly Christmas leftovers this week. I went to the grocery store on Tuesday, but got only dog food and lettuce. I find half of a baked chicken in the fridge. Put it in a pot of water over medium heat and empty a bag of baby carrots, some chopped celery and minced garlic. I build a fire in the fireplace. Sticks, chopped wood and numerous wooden matches. Nothing catches. No more newspapers. We burned them all. I dig wrapping paper from the trash cans in the garage and used tissues from the bathrooms. The chicken simmers on the stove. I sit back down to writing, salty corn chips beside me. The dogs fall back into sleeping, their feet jerking through dream games of chase. My mind traps and maneuvers thoughts into words and eventual sentences. I eat supper around 4PM because there is no one else to consider and cook for. Except for the dogs, who get big bowls of kibble as the sun dunks behind the rows of lanky trees in the front yard. Later, I turn on the television when the wind startles the pups into barking. Old reruns from the 90s. I glance up often before submitting entirely to the blissful escape that is a good sitcom. When I tire of typing and laugh tracks, I stand and let the dogs out one last time. They refuse. I don't blame them. The cold air feels hard, but I won't have any accidents at 4am and so I shoo them out, pushing their behinds with my shin. I turn off most of the house lights, but plug in the Christmas tree. I then call to my companions. I escort Beau to his crate and lead Penny upstairs. It's windy again, which means she's going to push her furry face between my ear and shoulder. I don't mind. And in the morning, she'll wake me with whining and I will do this all again. Happily.

Solitude selects me, sucks me from the traffic of life and spits me out onto this simple schedule of dog walking and words. 

Fitting to Float

Women write on their cardboard signs that they are pregnant and hungry. Men write that they are veterans in need of cigarettes and coffee. Anything helps. God bless. The man with the red handlebar mustache sits outside the pharmacy everyday on a black milk crate. He used to nod at me, when I lived downtown and walked Penny early every morning. And because one time, Penny barked at him and I scolded her for it. I think he appreciated my taking his side. 

So many stand atop railroad cars, sleep in suffocating automobile trunks and ride in rubber rafts to live here, to have what I have. Here I sit at a beautiful Apple computer. Designed, I'm told, by a real American ass hole. I used to fear being hated. I don't so much anymore. I see now why people in other places would hate me. I can see why the man with the red handlebar mustache would hate me, walking by with no money for him. But then anger creeps in to replace my old fear of being disliked. Not for Red Handle Bar Mustache Man for he seems entirely down on his luck. I once saw him at a creek a couple miles out of town, sitting beside a little blue tent, staring at the water. That was last spring. He has a limp now, a long walking stick and a full beard. When I see his bagged eyes and slow stagger, I want to save him with split pea soup and french bread, but I’m too shy to ask if he has any allergies. He doesn’t nod at me anymore. I never saved him. One early morning, he was walking out of a coffee shop while I was walking in. He had a small paper cup of coffee and was thanking the barista quietly and yet profusely for it. My anger does not creep in for him, but for when the word, pregnant, is written onto flattened cardboard boxes.  Perhaps it’s a desperate lie for money or the result of rape or cheap prostitution. In those instances, I have only sympathy. But to the homeless woman who chooses to have unprotected sex and gets pregnant. To her, I want to yell that I’d rather her malnourished fetus curl into eternal sleep rather than grow up sitting beside her handwritten signs and coffee cans of change. 

Does this make me into another American ass hole? Does it classify me as a cruel conservative who's too advantaged to see the poverty at my feet? Does that barbaric fetus talk label me a crude liberal who's too headstrong to sympathize with pro-life protesters? Why do we simplify our opinions to fit them inside defined groups? Why do we want to label ourselves with bumper stickers, politicians, dog breeds, television news channels and religious affiliations? Is it to choose the right answers? As if our lives will one day be returned to us with a letter grade and corrections written in red ink? Is it to organize our minds by filing away our metaphysical questions into perfectly alphabetized folders in order to reserve all other brain space for nonsense? Because when we define ourselves through labels and affiliated groups, it lends some comradery, but it also alienate us from the views of others. I admit that this is a natural human trait, declarations of belonging. I remember rattling “I’m Catholic," "my favorite sport is basketball" and "I'm a girl." I understand the importance of simplifying things for children. But once we become young adults, isn't it time we stopped trying to fit our every thought into generic boxes? Can’t I just float, landing only occasionally? Be open to the perspectives of others? I'm tired of conservatives snootily saying that their way is the only right way. I'm sick of the liberals assuming that those who do not rally beside them are apart of some separate species of the privileged heartless. I hate homophobic jokes and blatant fears of Muslims. I don’t like bullies. I hate litterers. I believe in gay rights and racial equality. I believe in women's rights, but cannot wait to be a stay-at-home mom. So, try to label me. I believe in abortion for rape victims, but do not believe it should a means of birth control. I believe in sexual health education. I believe in teaching our children how to take care of themselves. Teach them the proper way to brush their teeth, wash their feet and distinguish unsafe social situations.

I recently read a small article about Purity Balls in The New York Times Magazine. Formal events where young girls make yearly promises to their fathers to remain virgins until they are married. Oh my. If my father ever said he wanted to give me a necklace in exchange for my public vow to reserve my virginity for my future husband, I would have shouted, "WHAaahT? No Dad. GROSS!" My mother tried giving my little sister, Samantha, and I the Birds and the Bees talk while we sat in bathing suits in her big bathtub when I was somewhere near eleven years old. She pulled out a picture book and read, "When two people love each other very much….” We wailed with embarrassed laughter. The picture on the page was of a man and a woman lying side by side under bed covers. The next page showed the woman, man and a newborn baby. Samantha didn't understand. She kept that book under her bed, confessing years later to flipping back and forth between these pages, bewildered. "How did they go from hugging to a baby?"  

Now I love my awkward childhood of fumbling discussions, reddening cheeks and accusatory teasings. I embrace it. However, I must admit that I didn't know what sex was until I was nearly doing it. Though I suppose that’s probably most people. SURPRISE! That’s going into there! I also received no forewarning about the arrival of pubic hair, acne or armpit sweat. I’d try bringing up pubic hair in conversation. It took years to find out that others had it too and that that brillo bush of mine was for life. (I had high hopes that it would fall out at the conclusion of puberty.) I was not an openly curious child and I feared genitalia. I didn’t seek out pornography, I ran gawkily from it, mumbling unintelligible excuses to myself. It was a somewhat fierce fear, if I remember correctly, of the unknown penis. But I was a kid who embraced her naive youth, content to grow up at her own leisure pace. 

You want your daughter to wait to have sex? Tell her why. And if she's too stubborn or embarrassed to listen, sneak those pictures of herpes warts into her magazines. Have a few laughs. Figure out how to make it something you can talk about. Don't just sit back blaming Hollywood’s boner-inducing music videos and movies about perfectly dramatic (never awkward) airbrushed teen romances. Just accept that you'll never be able to completely control what your children are exposed to and be available for translations. Then boost their self-confidences so that they are ready to face peer pressure. Praise them. Personal empowerment is the best instrument in preventing groups of self-conscious children from following a few power tripping kids into hazing, pregnancy pacts, blow job parties, schoolyard gangs and Internet bullying. Even by the tender age of 12 many are mature enough to see the flimsy construction paper foundations that hold classroom cliques where snotty monarchs willy-nillily order the lynchings of innocent reputations. 

We all want so badly to build tribes around us, recruiting warriors to pick up the night shift every fortnight and help hunt buffalo. Except this is our new age survival. No longer are we forced to fight with bows and arrows to protect our tepees, caves and horses from strangers. All we have left are our words and when others try to fight us for them, we strike back with defensive insults and accumulating volume before retreating back to camp where we can safely criticize our enemy. I think we should all stop feeling so overprotective of our opinions. Just let them out (omitting, of course, anything offensive) and let others show you theirs. What’s the worst that can happen? You learn how to listen? 


Imagine a world where it was understood that individuality was something to shine and not snuff or paint beige. We would have so much more color. But instead we grow anxious when our sons do not marry their girlfriends or when our daughters are not pregnant by the time they are thirty. Why these unsettling feelings for when others are not settled? When Scott was a schoolteacher, it was so nice to say because others would exhale inside his seemingly safe permanence. No one would ask about his stress-induced misery so we kept it mostly to ourselves and when we decided he would quit, we kept that to ourselves too. We all want to believe that everyone has everything sorted out. But don't you see the crackling in this white picket fence mentality? Why not allow every life to be questioned and adjusted without judgment or fear? Why is it that as long as the women wear lipstick, snowman sweaters and bake a pie for Christmas and the men stand in circles, drinking scotch and talking about “the game,” everything is hunky-dory? Why ignore the elephants in the dining room? Why not feed them some of those delicious peanut butter balls and really get to know one another?

The Applicant

October 5, 2011

This winter, I am secretly applying for graduate acting school. However, if you are reading this before March of 2012 then this secret has escaped my rattling mouth like a brown bear from a birdcage.

The reason for this uncharacteristic decision to not tell my family, for I tell them nearly everything (except for that terribly awkward queef I emitted a few months back)is because I cannot, during the early vulnerable stages of this venture, receive any critical commentary. For everything my family says about me marches directly to my heart and either guards it or guns it down. "Why?" Is all they'd have to ask before I forfeited all plans. Surely, they'll scorn me for sliding a queef into that parenthesis up there, but that's nothing to fret my feelings over. Just a little sneaky shocking prattle about an eighty-six second vagina fart that flew around the room like a birthday balloon before deflating me into a frenzy of silent cackles and a pile of crumpled bones and wrinkled repugnance. See how poorly I cradle my private matters between the snow white bunny slopes of my 34B-sized bosom?

Let's see how long I last with this secret stuck between my two front teeth.

*****

October 13, 2011

I am pursuing a career in the theater because, for me, theater is like a cup of coffee after a restless sleep. It bursts into my body and energizes me with an extraordinary injection of intellectualized passion. I am pursuing a career in the theater because not only does it nourish my soul with perpetual inspiration and exploration, theater then decorates my world with vibrant light and articulation. It is here, inside this figurative and focused stage light, where I hope to live a long life, articulating ideas, emotions and experiences.

I want to be prepared to join with other theater professionals in sustaining this beautiful, raw, traditional, challenging and essential human art.

*****

October 14, 2011

The M.F.A Acting Programs I plan to apply to. 

1. University of San Diego/Old Globe 
2. A.C.T. American Conservatory Theater 
3. Yale University 
4. University of California (San Diego) 
5. Brown University 
6. University of California, Irvine 

***** 

November 1, 2011

University of San Diego/Old Globe asks me why. Why have you chosen to seek further training at this time rather than pursue work as a professional actor? 

My first attempt to be a professional actress, when I graduated college six years ago, was a bit of a flop. And that’s putting it kindly. I moved to New York City because that’s what actors did, I thought. But after one year, I found the theater scene to be much like a monster on a pedestal: big, ugly, mean and out of reach. I had an insufficient resume, bland looking headshots and absolutely no theater contacts in the city. After a few months, I mailed these aforementioned headshots and resumes to sixty-seven talent agencies and theater companies. I was clueless. After one year, I moved to Boston where I started taking improvisational classes, acting on an adventure boat in Boston Harbor and performing a little Shakespeare. However, after two years of the amateur theater community doing plays I wasn’t entirely interested in and the big professional theaters only hiring equity actors, I moved from Boston to Western Massachusetts to start The August Company. From an idea in a living room to six fully produced productions, I’ve gained a lot of experience helping build this company, both on and off stage. One major lesson I’ve learned is how to create theater relationships. How to meet, mingle and reach out to other theater, music and art makers/lovers for collaborations and bilateral audience support. As an actress with the company, I’ve learned that I possess the talent, confidence and drive necessary for a successful career in the theater, however, for my heart’s sake, my second venture into the professional theater scene must have a significantly higher potential for success than my first attempt six years ago. I am seeking admission to your thrilling, prestigious program because I want to be submerged in a constructively rigorous MFA Acting program where I can elevate my craft from raw and talented to honed and professional.

*****

November 18, 2011

Scott and I put together a one woman show of my writing for a local fringe festival. I perform it twice. We set up 45 mismatching chairs into our borrowed loft four stories above a quiet mill city's streetlights. For the first night, we have an audience of 60. The next night we have over 90. Those without seats sit on the floor at my feet or lean on the brick pillars and white plastered walls. By the end of both performances, nearly everyone is standing, applauding. And my little life feels forever changed.

The morning after my second performance, my sisters and mother press me for my plans. They think I should take my show to Boston. "I'm actually applying for graduate school too." I tell them, a mug of coffee pressed to the bottom lip of my careful words. They aren't surprised and the reveal of my secret is pleasantly anticlimactic. They are even encouraging, happy to hear I don't just plan to follow Scott.

*****

November 29, 2011

A suddenly strange snow storm on October 29th of this year sends a tree from the backyard to crack and crash onto the roof above our heads, piercing a two-inch branch through the white speckled ceiling like a fat needle. There had been booms all evening. Tree trunks and branches, soft still from summer, rocking when the wind blew and toppling from the weight of their dry leaves, flocks of fragile cradles. When the biggest boom hits, I am without a shirt. Ceiling dust drops like shrapnel onto us and Penny, our petrified pup, leaps onto my pillow. I tell Scott he really needs to stop kissing me and turn on the light. "I have ceiling on my skin." I say, stumbling to stand. With my glasses pushed to my face and a light on, I scan the ceiling for damage. At the site of the tree branch, I exclaim something and put on my underwear. Once dressed, we move to another bedroom like a pack of refuges, finding safety beneath clean bedcovers and the second floor. All night long, the dogs sleep close while outside, snow glitters the gutters, drapes the driveway and layers onto the roof of this house where we are so lucky to live. And yet, despite this suddenly strange snow storm two nights before Halloween, the weather has been warm. So warm they've sent the clipboard-carrying global warming interns back to the sidewalks. So warm I expect the smell of spring to surprise me. Say it snuck by winter somehow. Despite the weather's contrary behavior, most days I wear gloves and my new yellow coat. Yellow buttons and patterned polyester lining, I bought it primarily for the month of February, the time when I start to worry that sunshine is a myth. Besides these sixty-five degree days, firewood across the county has been split and piled into jagged jigsaw puzzles, wrapped with blue tarps and weighed by flat tires in preparation for this winter we await. My 6am mornings are dark blue and make me want to hide inside a hibernation. Make me want to wear fur lined snow boots, wool socks and fleece rimmed hats while I hunker down, slurping beef stew and poetry about pecan pie and adulterous nightmares. Makes me want to make a baby quietly in a hospital bed before excusing myself from myself. Because in this rhetorical recipe for my future, I left out a key ingredient. I let myself forget these words I write. These words that expose my tender soul, my rash sense of humor and my continuous curiosity. In the making of my courage and conviction, I then spilled the contents of my sweet marriage, which is my home of all homes, onto the dusty tiled floor as if it were just a box of quick bread mix and not eight years of delicious devotion.   

The Friday after Thanksgiving, I stay at my parents' house while Scott leaves for his. I take Penny out on her leash. I walk five miles, bobbing on the foot train of my free thoughts, while tracks are torn and rebuilt to accommodate my quickly changing answer to "what if...?" After an hour and a half, I walk into the living room and collapse into a sitting slump. With white and yellow papers in one hand, a pen in the other, my mother looks up over her red rectangle reading glasses and asks, "What's going on? You alight?" I weep through a summary of my scattered worries. If Scott and I both get into schools in different cities... What would we do? "You can't live apart." She says. "You wouldn't stay together." Leaving Scott would require me to become a complete ignoramus, but I genuinely fear I'll put myself behind him instead of beside him if I do not pursue this. And that is the moment I discover that the biggest reason I wanted to apply for graduate school was for marital equally. The "if he gets to apply, why can't I?" conundrum. 


Later on, I send my brother a text message. "If I want to have a career like Spalding Gray, I don't need, really, acting school....would you agree?" Gray was a renowned writer, actor, performance artist and monologuist. 

"No, you need to live."

By Monday morning, I am ready to declare my new anti-decision. I write my friend who has agreed to write one of my letters of recommendation. I say, "After hours and hours of internal debate, I've come to the conclusion that graduate acting school is not really what I want after all. I know that I would love to attend, however I think the smartest thing for me to do is continue on my Puddle path." 


Tuesday morning, I receive an email from another old professor who has offered to help me find some audition monologues. He emails me Tuesday, of all FLIPPING days, and says he's got some material for me to look at and would I like him to mail it to me. I email him back, thanking him, but also telling him that I will not be applying to graduate school after all. I have one application out already to the University of San Diego/Old Globe. It's a two year intensive program where if, for some insane chance, I am accepted, I would be one of seven students, receive free classical training and perform at The Old Globe Theatre. It is the only program, at this point, that I would really and truly want to attend. I tell my professor that I'll check back with him if I get an audition.

That afternoon, of all FREAKING days, I receive a voicemail from University of San Diego/Old Globe. I have an audition in New York City January 24, 2012. I email my professor back and ask if I can get those monologues. Then I call Scott and blab to his answering machine that I'm just going to see what happens. Just going to see!