Hi World!

The play is over, I just completed four consecutive mornings of (mostly unproductive) writing, and, on the way home from town today, I picked up Vice from Red Box for a date night movie with my lover man and a bag of poblano chiles (from the store, not Red Box) to stuff with cheese and onions and wrap in warm flour tortillas for tonight’s supper (and for my lunch, because I was too excited to wait that long).

Also, I just ate four chocolates, my younger daughter discovered a dead mouse in the trap upstairs (and screamed bloody murder), and there’s a load of laundry in the machine.

Thrills, my life is.

So this is happening:

There was a Mother’s Day special — mothers train free for three weeks — so I decided, why not? If my girls can do it, I can, too.

It’s killing me though. Seriously killing me. By the end of each class, I’m flat on my back on the floor, gasping for air, every muscle in my body — arms, butt, thighs, stomach, back — sizzling and burning.

One week down, two to go, heaven help me.

In other news, a small breeze inspired our trampoline to slam itself into a tree and die.

We’ve gone through so many trampolines, I’ve lost count. Anyone have an old one they want to off-load?

Friends came for supper and the kids set off a whopper of a fireball.

Because we like to go all out for guests.

After two years of being on a waitlist to be a ride-along with AirCare 5 Medevac, my son finally got called up.

He got two, back-to-back flights, lucky kid.

And then, upon delivering one of the stroke victims to the hospital, he got to see the doctor insert some sort of thingy into the guy’s thigh and then watch on the giant screen as it snaked up through the body on its way to the brain to destroy a blood clot.

Yesterday, my older son and daughter took off to go camping in the boonies for several days.

My son had been planning this trip for a couple months now — the light at the end of the tunnel after all those months of study. (That he considers being far removed from technology and a dry bed and running water “A Light At The End Of The Tunnel” baffles me to no end. Is he really my child?)

I asked them if they had something to read —or playing cards or something — and they were like, Nah.

“But what will you do the whole time?” I asked, distressed.

“Throw rocks in the water,” my daughter said.

“Survive,” my son said.

Three other guys are joining them tonight. Also, it’s supposed to rain, and since they are camping in a valley next to a river, I made my son read the first couple pages of Jeannette Walls’ Half Broke Horses in which there is a flash flood. Just, you know, so he knows to climb a tree if he hears the ground start to rumble.

This same time, years previous: the quotidian (5.14.18), inclusion, surprise!, driving home the point, the quotidian (5.16.16), Captain Morgan’s rhubarb sours, maseca cornbread, a burger, a play, and some bagels, ’twas an honor.

In this show (as in all the shows I’ve done), I gain so much from having an audience. Each night, their reactions — their gasps and sobs, their laughter and deep silences — teach me more about this story we’re sharing. Their presence is a gift, and hearing their reflections and insights afterward is humbling.

After one of our shows, a friend said, “To think, this is how the immigrants who are living right among us feel. So afraid, never knowing when ICE might knock on their door.”  

She and her husband took us out for ice cream that night. Sitting outside in the cool dark, licking my ice cream cone as the adrenaline drained from my body, her husband told us, in his thick German accent, the story of his pacifist parents in Europe in the 1930s…

…How his father had to flee in the dead of night, leaving his wife and newborn baby behind and walking on foot into Switzerland.

…How the Gestapo came to their home a few days later and axed up their house searching for forbidden documents until the young wife became so irate that she ordered them to leave, and, miraculously, they did.

…How she fled the village with the community’s women and children in the back of a covered truck and, when they arrived at the border and the guards opened the truck’s doors, the stench of shit and vomit was so strong that they closed it up again and let them through.

…How the family took refuge in England for a few years (as Germans, they were placed in internment camps) and then immigrated to Paraguay on a ship that had to go out of its way to avoid the military submarines (and on its return voyage to Europe, the ship, now full of meat, was torpedoed and sunk).

I hear that a Holocaust survivor, a gentleman who had been imprisoned in Belsen during the war and is about the same age Anne would’ve been if she’d lived, will be attending our show this weekend.

Yesterday I received an alert from our church regarding the impending construction of a new ICE facility in our town. So, following the urgings of the email’s author, I emailed the relevant community leaders to ask that they not sign off on the new facility. Because immigrants are to be cared for, not treated as enemies.

And then I closed with this: “And, if you need a reminder of what happens when one group of people demonizes, hunts, and casts out another group of people, please go to Court Square Theater this weekend to see The Diary of Anne Frank.”

Shameless advertising, and snarky, too, but really, I don’t give a fig. Stories like this one are relevant. We need them.

Below is an excerpt of a message I received this morning:

Bravo, bravo, bravo!  What a wonderful production last night! … I have seen this stage work on a number of occasions, but this interpretation stands head and shoulders above all of the others. Kudos to you actors and to the directors. I felt the joy, the frustration, and the terror unlike I had ever experienced in previous productions. 

I was quite impressed with the detailed thought. In particular, the tactic of keeping you actors on stage during intermission pushed me into a deeper level of thinking. I whipped out my phone during intermission to send a few text messages. As I was freely sending these messages, there was something ominous about simultaneously seeing you actors “locked” in that space and recognizing that this locked space extended so far beyond a 15-minute intermission. Very effective. 

I did not clap at the end. I couldn’t. I left thoughtfully, thankfully, and prayerfully. 

Thank you for … helping to generate such a thought-provoking show. I am grateful.   

Just three shows left.

It’s been an honor.

This same time, years previous: settling in, the quotidian (5.9.16), the quotidian (5.11.15), immersion, so far today, one more thing, lemony spinach and rice salad with fresh dill and feta.