I meant to write this post this yesterday, but it’s been a crazy week at the theatre factory. I’m utterly exhilarated, totally exhausted, and trying to write a hundred miles an hour.

Yesterday I took a brief break from Lion on the Cheesegrater. Not entirely, of course–BUT after another inspiring rehearsal and script meeting I jetted to High Concept Laboratories to play with my Vintage friends in an entirely different capacity–the third annual Sonnet Fest. I’ve been doing Sonnet Fest since before I ever met the Vintage folks, when I was living in Rhode Island, and since then it has become one of my favorite standing one-night-stands. I love that Sonnet Fest gives me the chance to kick back and get in touch with my ridiculous side, and I am still invariably the tamest act of the night.

On our first fling I wrote a little play called Sonnets from Last Night (I’m dating myself now; this was back in the heyday of that website Texts From Last Night–does that still exist anymore?). Last year Lady Gaga met Billy Shakes as sixth graders, and this year I got to explore one of my favorite themes, Dinosaurs As They Relate To Unrequited Love.

I suppose this is the time to confess that I love dinosaurs, but not in the way that I would ever want to do any actual research on them. I check http://trextrying.tumblr.com/ with embarrassing regularity. I like the idea of dinosaurs. I firmly believe dinosaurs capture our existential ache, our questions about extinction, and our fears of dying alone. And scaly. I’ve now written about this topic in at least two plays and maybe three blog posts (sorry, dear readers). I promise, after this, I am done. I will move onto other themes.

But I love Sonnet Fest because there are dragons, Josh Dumas making sweet love to the guitar, Serbian local-access cable cooking shows, and my boyfriend can, the piece before mine, have the brilliant idea that we should cast the entire audience as the Sonnet XXIX-reciting Tyrannosaurus Chorus and they were totally game. I owe some big thanks not only to the Vintage crowd and my intrepid cast, but also to the brilliant video designer Davonte Johnson for pinch-hitting and turning the world upside down on command, and my beautiful, incisive, T-Rexified director Lavina Jadhwani, who was busy saving orphans and didn’t get to see the performance.

No but really, T-Rex trying to bench press is both adorable and heart-wrenching. Just saying.

Of all the terms for illegal drinking establishments that came to be under the Volstead Act, my favorite by far is the blind pig: patrons would come to the saloon nominally to see the main attraction (like a pig or a tiger) and would receive a complimentary beverage, getting along the technicalities of the liquor laws. Not so long ago I worked at a place that did essentially the same thing.

There’s a bar a half a block from my apartment that I have been eying for years–since long before I lived in the apartment, when my fella lived there alone and I was a tourist in his life. In many people’s lives. Now it is our apartment, and it is tucked in a little neighborhood near the cemetery and the tracks, on a mostly sleepy and innocuous block. Nobody on our street decorates egregiously for the major hallmark holidays, and the paint is fresh enough that it’s not peeling off. The marks of dilapidation have not yet revealed themselves. It is an almost suburban patch (I typed “provincial” first) in between two more vibrant neighborhoods.

But our apartment is flanked on either side by two  delicious dives–during the day potbellied, senescent men sit outside smoking and drinking beer, and as the day fades into evening the crowd gets younger, though not much, and indistinctly Eastern European. Crowd is perhaps the wrong word, since the bars are clearly only sparsely populated–although there always seems to be a couple of people outside smoking. For a brief time this summer, one of the bars opened a sushi bar in its adjacent space but the only time I only once saw any clients.

In between these two bars is a shop that prints t-shirts but that remains tightly closed and shuttered during the daytime. It’s enough to make a person wonder whether there isn’t some more nefarious business going on, whether there isn’t something more significant buried under the newly-formed mound in the sidewalk than gas or power lines. The lavanderia across the street seems fraught with meaning, all those washers and dryers spinning their secrets.

Last night, we finally went to the bar–my fella, his friend and I. I broke my toe earlier in the week, so walking is still a little difficult for me, and the guys were tired and hungry after a long rehearsal. When we walked in I was bowled over by the smell of stale smoke, a not unpleasant smell. There was a group of people at the far end of the bar, and a few women sitting at a table in the middle of the bar, so we slipped into a booth near the door. There was low music and round mirrors suspended from the ceiling pointing straight down, so that the floor could touch up its rouge and mascara when it got stepped on, which didn’t seem too often. We asked if they served food and we swear she said “only microwavable” but she was softspoken and might have said “only appetizers.” Chicken fingers were the only edible and available thing on the menu, so the guys ordered that. There was a fish tank jutting out from the wall over the heads of the middle group of women, which we speculated was the source of the sushi. It wasn’t really exciting, and yet it didn’t disappoint.

O blind pig, you thing of tarnished beauty.

Siren song of the disenchanted.

Beacon for the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to drink free.

You could say we came to see the fish.

Or you could say (and this might be true) we came to see the barflies.

Or you could say we came to see ourselves.

At dance class on Thursday, I caught a glimpse of a young woman’s reflection in the mirror behind my instructor–red-faced, bouncing up and down, looking wholly inelegant and undignified. She looked like a flapper in the wrong movie, performing, as she was, some unrecognizable bastardization of the merengue with lip-biting determination.

It took half a second to realize I was looking at myself. Two days before I had walked into a hair salon, handed the stylist a picture of Louise Brooks, and walked out a half an hour later with a heavy fringe of bangs. The next night I bought a box of “dark chocolate” hair dye, and as I was standing in the bathroom with the rubber gloves on and hair saturated in something that smelled vaguely like formeldahyde, felt like I was in an action-thriller film in which the hero is on the lam so his girlfriend has to also assume a disguise by cleverly changing the color and style of her hair so they don’t get caught because she too has an obscured but questionable past that will inevitably come back to haunt her and most likely cause her untimely demise because Hollywood still operates on an unconscious but Draconian double standard where the impure, sexually experienced woman gets sacrificed and the virginal ingenue lives and gets the impure, sexually experienced hero in the end. In this scenario, I am totally fucked.

At the dance studio, I glanced at the other women around me to see if they noticed my air of mystery and escape. They were mostly middle-aged women who seemed to be experiencing difficulty leaving the ground for the jumps and the claps and frankly the cha-cha-chas. If God is dead, I thought, dignity is buried at her feet like a loyal and equally dead puppy. They were all completely oblivious to my recent physical transformation, which was not borne of a questionable past but rather a questionable future. In a need to reimagine who I am, who I can become, to try on other people’s lives like wigs and cocktail dresses, this is where I live these days. In a sorely misguided–one might even say delusional–moment, I thought Latin-inspired dance aerobics might provide the transcendental experience I was seeking. But the class is eight weeks, so I have seven more chances for a transformation:

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless.
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where the past and the future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

I think my saucy new middle-aged salsaing friends would appreciate Eliot’s take on Zumba.

New Year’s Eve is my favorite holiday. It combines two of my favorite things: champagne and fresh starts, with healthy doses of liminality and debauchery. But it’s also a siren song of nostalgia and self-indulgence disguised as reflection, and to be honest I just don’t feel like writing a deeply introspective post about 2011. Right now I don’t have any interest in looking backward; I just want to stare unblinkingly at the year ahead.

On January 10, 49 (you read that right) Julius Caesar led his troops across the Rubicon and apocryphally said, “Alea iacta est.” The die is cast. Nineteen hundred years later Woody Guthrie wrote a list of New Years Rulins that I think the stoic Caesar would’ve approved of. Guthrie jotted down 33 rulins, and of those the first three and the last three particularly resonated with me:

1. WORK MORE AND BETTER
2. WORK BY A SCHEDULE
3. WASH TEETH IF ANY

and

31. LOVE EVERYBODY
32. MAKE UP YOUR MIND
33. WAKE UP AND FIGHT

For the past few weeks I’ve felt suspended in that moment after the dice have been thrown and before they land, between the contraction and relaxation in a heartbeat. I resolve to breathe more and (more deeply), use fewer commas, and try to know when to fight and when to relax and let my heart get filled up.

As a postscript, I found in the archives of my old email address an alphabetical list of possible careers. I have no idea if I wrote these or who did or when, but I’m re-posting them here unaltered for inspiration to all of us who are still making up our minds:

• Autopsy assistant
• Bartender at the Liberace mansion
• Cat nanny
• Donkey trainer
• Elf at Santa’s workshop
• FBI Fingerprint examiner
• Grave digger
• Hurricane hunter
• Ice sculpture carver
• Junk mail machine operator
• Kitty litter box decorator
• Laser tag referee
• Magician’s assistant
• Nuclear electrician on a submarine
• Opera singer
• Parachute tester
• Quality control/taster for chocolate factory
• Romance specialist
• Scratcher (scratched backs for patients)
• Turkey wrangler
• Undercover vice decoy
• Video game tester
• Wallpaper peeler
• X-ray technician for zoo animals
• Yawn counter at a sleep clinic
• Zamboni driver

When I stumbled out of the fog of pneumonia I found myself in a bit of a funk–reading and seeing plays had become effortful, even ones I was excited about. I felt like I was perpetually slogging through a miasma of words. Fortuitously, I had a trip to New York planned–not coinciding with my convalescence, but merely because it was my first free weekend since the start of the theatre season in August.

I arrived in Manhattan after eight hours of sitting, waiting, delaying, reading, scribbling, burning gas on the triborough, and finally reached the West Village for sushi and sake bombs. My cousin–my host for the weekend–and his girlfriend were mildly consternated that I had never “bombed” anything before, and our Japanese waiter (whose command of English was questionable but of sake bombs was impeccable) set my chopsticks up over my glass for me, and the rest of the restaurant watched while we pounded our drinks.

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The next morning I set out to procure theatre tickets, armed with unbelievable coffee from the Roasting Plant (the Golden Ticket blend, for luck), and several hours and one baffling football game and a mad but delicious dash to MOMA later I walked into the Golden Theatre to watch Alan Rickman decimate four aspiring novelists in Theresa Rebeck’s new comedy, Seminar from four rows away. The production is better than the play, with Rickman prowling around its center, but there is a searing moment towards the end of the play where he says something to the effect of, “Truth is like fucking–for some people it’s the only reason to get up in the morning…Others can’t stomach it.” That line came back to me on Tuesday morning, when I woke up in an unfamiliar apartment in the West Village to the news that Zucotti Park had been vacated in the night. It was my last day in the city and I didn’t make it to #ows, to my regret.

The other lines that echoed back towards me that day were the end of King Lear, which I saw on Sunday night (and was graciously invited backstage for the company’s wonderful weekly “Wine and Unwind” Sunday night post-show ritual):

The weight of this sad time we must obey;
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.
The oldest hath borne most: we that are young
Shall never see so much, nor live so long.

Exeunt, with a death march.

Everyone kept asking what I was doing in New York–without hostility, but in those words. I could have just said I was on vacation, but that made me feel guilty or lazy, so I tried out several different answers: just visiting, escaping, needed a change of scene. And it was a change of scene, and a delightful one, but I’m still stuck in the same play, and while it lifted the funk a bit it didn’t remove it. So now I’m back in Chicago, still stymied, trying to un-miasma myself. But the words, they just keep coming.

I’m pretty sure I have the bubonic plague. I looked it up on the internet and I forget what the internet says exactly but I bet short term memory loss is one of the symptoms of the bubonic plague. My doctor says it’s just pneumonia but my doctor has never felt like this: namely like she’s been hit by a truck than dangled over a fast-moving body of water from a bridge like a victim in a superhero movie, then forgotten about and plunged into aforementioned fast-moving and also icy body of water.

I’ve been bedridden for almost a week now, kicked out of three rehearsals and just plain banned from a fourth. I’ve been in theatre for 15 years and have never missed more than one rehearsal. But every time I get out of bed the room starts spinning and my insides try to sneak outside like a clumsy baserunner desperately but futilely attempting to steal home. My attempts at convalescence have heretofore consisted almost exclusively of pretending that I’m Proust. Having never read Proust (and lacking the mental acuity to read Proust at this juncture), this idea came to me by way of Raymond Chandler, or more precisely by way of Lauren Bacall speaking Raymond Chandler’s words when Humphrey Bogart as Philip Marlowe arrives at his office in The Big Sleep. Bacall’s been waiting for him and the ensuing exchange goes like this:

Vivian: “So you do get up, I was beginning to think you worked in bed like Marcel Proust.”
Marlowe: Who’s he?
Vivian: You wouldn’t know him, a French writer.
Marlowe: Come into my boudoir.

I’m writing a noir right now so I’ve started seeing the world through Marlowe’s eyes, which he himself would tell you is a questionable proposition at best. Being a tough-talking, hard-drinking friendless shamus isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, especially when your throat’s too sore to speak and all you can drink is grapefruit juice. But on Monday night in a state of semi-delirium I stumbled to Margie’s for a hot fudge sundae to soothe what’s ailing me and was hard pressed not to see hardboiled denizens scooping insidious ice cream and the hot fudge dripping with sin that if only I could shake the fog out of my head I could solve.

Anyway, I wrote the above on the train out to the suburbs, slunk under my soft grey cloche that has a flower sewn around the side like a moibus strip. I was on my way to see a two-bit hack who could give me the sap for this plague that I’ve been carrying around in my Private Eye Kit next to the invisible ink and the sardonic wit. But she just told me to get back in bed, and as I did I dreamt of

“[...an] old town, lost town, shabby town, crook town…Out of the apartment houses come women who should be young but have faces like stale beer; men with pulled-down hats and quick eyes that look the street over behind a cupped hand that shields the match flame; worn intellectuals with cigarette coughs and no money in the bank; fly cops with granite faces and unwavering eyes; cokies and coke peddlers; people who look like nothing in particular and know it, and once in a while even men that actually go to work. But they come out early, when the wide cracked sidewalks are empty and still have dew on them…”

…and it was hard to tell if I was dreaming or awake. It still is.

I spent yesterday afternoon snuggled up in my friend’s office studying exponents and polynomials for the GRE (which I am taking in five–count ‘em–days). Unsurprisingly I spent more time thinking about this quote that was posted on her wall than on the polynomials.

Life can’t defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer’s lover until death.

But in case anyone’s wondering, anything to the zero power is one. Make a metaphor out of that. Dare you.