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.

We’re only (or already!) a quarter of the way through the residency, and I feel like I’ve been writing like a madwoman at every moment I’m not at rehearsal (or the bar, in true hardboiled detective fiction fashion). I’ve been chronicling our rehearsal adventures on the DCA’s blog including our recent our exploration of gender in the play. Last night we read through the new draft–I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t feeling a little worried about my own ability to pull off all the things I’m envisioning, making the play the most deliciously dystopic story about sex and power and corruption and finding your voice. The beautiful thing is that I have twelve brilliant collaborators on this project–with the lovely and talented Sarah Cameron Sunde at the helm.

Regardless, this is the part of the process I love the most and I fear the most–that moment where you realize your halfway through the woods and the only way out is deeper in. The woods, in these metaphors, are always your own psyche. In this world of femme fatales and grifters if danger isn’t lurking around every corner you’re not in deep enough. So it’s time to put on my red lipstick and fill up my flask and let myself get seduced by the dark side.

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.

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.

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

Our love is like the border between Greece and Albania
Trucks loaded down with weapons
Crossing over every night
Moon yellow and bright
There is a shortage in the blood supply
But there is no shortage of blood

I walked out tentatively onto the ice, and underneath you could see the bubbles frozen as they raced their way to the surface, like the citizens of Pompeii moments before Mount Vesuvius erupted. And interspersed were ridges of ice like tectonic plates waiting to shift. The weather in New London has been quite temperate for late December, and I was waiting for the ice to crumble beneath my feet with every step. But the trail of bubbles and flash frozen plants and cracks compelled me further, despite the occasional crackle pop of the lake expanding under the morning sun. I remembered hearing that miles beneath Chicago there is a fault line, that if the tectonic plates ever shift it will be catastrophic.

Bubbles fleeing like Pompeiians

This has been a year of waiting for the plates to shift, of the fault lines exposing their weaknesses, a year on the brink. There are the tectonic plates of my own body–and they have been shifting inexplicably, exposing the fault lines of my blood vessels and capillaries for the past nine months. There is now the terrifying possibility that my own body is attacking these vessels, which makes me think of ships sailing far away from here. A vessel to take me away from the tectonic plates of my life, only to wreck me on the shores of love and poverty (although poverty is a poor word for someone who is impecunious but rich in every other way). And then there are the most frightening fault lines of all: the words and the worlds that it is my job to create. Because this means it is also my job to seek out these spaces where the world shifts and changes and is destroyed so we can create something beautiful and courageous from the ruins.

Fault lines in the lake

The word vessel reminds me of the word yarn, the way it is defined in The Lover’s Dictionary by David Levithan:

Maybe language is kind, giving us these double meanings. Maybe it’s trying to teach us a lesson, that we can always be two things at once. Knit me a sweater out of your best stories…I want a yarn. It doesn’t have to be true.

“Okay,” you say. “Do you want to know how I met you?”

I nod.

“It was on the carousel. You were on the pink horse, I was on the yellow. You were two horses ahead of me, and from the moment you got in the saddle, I wanted to draw up right next to you and say hello. Around and around we went, and I kept waiting for my horse to pull ahead…You rose and you fell, and I followed, and I followed. I thought my chance would never come. But then, like magic, all the power in the entire city went out at once. It was darkness, utter darkness…But right at that moment, the moon came out from behind the clouds. And there you were…”

“And what did you say?”

“Don’t you remember? I said, ‘What a lovely evening this is.’ And you said, ‘I was just thinking the same thing.’”

As long as we can conjure, who needs anything else? As long as we can agree on the magical lie and be happy, what more is there to ask for?

“I loved you from that moment on,” I say.

I’ve heard other versions of this aphorism since–that the two stories are David & Goliath and Romeo & Juliet, for example (which I’m more inclined to believe, or at least, more able to recognize in the mountains of scripts I read and the few free-reading books I sneak in)–but it’s that original version that’s resonated with me and keeps echoing back to me over the years. Perhaps it’s because I recognize myself in those two basic narratives, because both of those stories promise radical transformation. While I secretly believe in the power of both David and the starcrossed lovers, those stories are too fragile to withstand the banalities of daily life.

Maybe I subconsciously registered the gender–it’s not a woman who goes on a journey, although she might be the stranger who comes to town. And then there was the realization that those two stories are the same story–that the sojourner becomes the stranger. But I’ve begun to wonder about the one who gets left behind. I think about this in the most mundane moments. As a writer, I work most often from home, and there is the daily leaving of my partner, who does not. He goes on a journey into the world, I go on a journey into the worlds of my own words, my own creations. But there is, every day, the tiny panic that he won’t come back.

I wrote a short play called The Dubious Arts of Knitting and Self-Pleasure, which is a response in part to Enda Walsh’s play Penelope, but is more a response to Homer’s Odyssey. It is a play, on one level, about a woman who is very bad at knitting (and by insinuation all domestic arts. This may or may not be drawn from my life)…but rather creative in her use of its instruments. It is also a play about being left, about not getting to be the leaver, about revealing more than you meant to.

I’ve always been interested in the inscription on the Oracle at Delphi: Know Thyself. It’s always felt like a warning. Self-knowledge is a dangerous thing, because once you know what you’re capable of you’re faced with the awful choice of what to do about it. This weekend I was having dinner in the back room of an Irish gastropub called Lady Gregory’s, the room with the fireplace and floor-to-ceiling built-in bookshelves (one day I want to live in a place that has a back room with a fireplace and floor-to-ceiling built-in bookshelves, and also a big writing desk, which this room did not have). At eye level there was a book called “Encyclopedia of Useful Quotations” that must have been published early in the last century, and as I flipped through the book landed on the entry for “Delusions.” The first quotation under the entry was: ”No man is happy without a delusion of some kind. Delusions are as necessary to our happiness as realities.”

But further down the entry I found this, and scribbled it onto my cocktail napkin:

We strive as hard to hide our hearts from ourselves as from others, and always with more success; for in deciding upon our own case we are both judge, jury and executioner, and where sophistry cannot overcome the first, or flattery the second, self-love is always ready to defeat the sentence by bribing the third.

Which anyway, made me think about my inability to knit, which is neither self-knowledge nor delusional at all, but it reminded me of this play, which is possibly about what happens when we are unable to hide our hearts from ourselves. The play will be performed this Thursday at the Steppenwolf Garage as part of an event called EXPLORE the world of Penelope. It’s a free event with some really amazing artists (you can see the full lineup here)–all you have to do is call the box office to RSVP. The Big Star truck is coming AND there’s a photo booth, so everybody wins. Man goes on a journey, taco truck comes to town…and, oh yeah, woman gets a pair of roller skates.

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.

Click to view slideshow.

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’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.

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.