Giving Thanks in Dark Times...

Apparently, the first official Thanksgiving was declared by President Lincoln during the Civil War.

Well...

Here we are. Thanksgiving in 2016 with the country probably more divided than it has been since then. I know there were other times when it was divided, and maybe those were worse. But it's pretty bad now. And I have never had the dubious privilege of living in stomach knot twisting fear of a President-Elect, as I am now.

Things that have come out these past few days include: a professor watch list where students can accuse their professors of having too much of a liberal bias. When I saw that at first, I laughed. Ever since then, though, I have had a stomach so full of knots it is literally eating itself. I am not joking. I am still writing, was able to do yoga finally, and am meditating, including breathing exercises. Some nights I can sleep and some nights I cannot.

This is Trump's America for me so far, even in one of the - if not the - most liberal borough of the most liberal city in America that voted against him by over 90% (that would be NYC - where he is from...let that sink in).

OK, so there's that, and many others have it far worse than me.

So what am I thankful for? The list is almost endless, but I'll do one anyway (and the order does not signify the importance):

1. The ability to write - even through this.
2. The fact that so far I have not self-destructed in ways I could easily do, but have not.
3. The love in my life, including my beloved Canadian, my mother, my friends - some of whom I will spend tomorrow with in the most diverse neighborhood in the US (Jackson Heights, Queens). One friend, Christian, I have known for over 30 years. We have seen each other through many phases of our lives and I will be delighted to spend Thanksgiving with him and his beloved, Ricardo, and a few of their other friends.
4. NYC
5. NYC
6. NYC and the people herein - overall the people with whom I relate the best and have been acting in heartbreakingly kind and generous ways with one another recently - and I trust will continue doing so. Sometimes there are assholes, but they are not the majority.
7. Kindness - when I see it and feel it.
8. Autumn leaves and the blue blue sky
9. The People's Republic of Inwood (my neighborhood)
10. Artists, writers, theater people, dancers, musicians...everyone who creates things in response to dark times, either as witness or to soothe or to imagine a different future...or simply to dream, or create delightful respite.
11. Paragraph writing studio and all those with whom I share my writing either in silence or at readings
12. Various FB groups in which I do same and the people in real life I have connected with who have given me faith in my writing and humanity in general.
13. National Novel Writing Month (now) that helps motivate me to write every day, and the fact I have done that this month: written every day.
14. New and old friends who have graced my year in so many lovely ways: Suzanne, Adam, Shawn, Christian, Suki, Wendy, Francelle, Julie, David, Marietta, James, Ilana, Aurvi, Carle, Peter, Susan, Sarah, Sharon, Russell, Jane, Pam, Maryan, Allan, Sauna, Kat, Alice, Nina, Andrew, Kate, Nathan, Spencer, Andrea, Veronica, Fran, Gina, Jenny, Ellen, Olivia, Leah, and others I'm sure I've forgotten...and those who have stayed close on FB even from afar, like Fi, Kirsten, Therese, Catherine, Sean, Bennett, Renee, Alison..
15. Scholarships to two very important writing conferences, which made it possible for me to attend what would have otherwise been impossible and the help people at those conferences gave me and friends I met there, too many to mention all...
16. The many people with whom I meet in various rooms to keep ourselves sane.
17. My students who remind me why I'm here...for real. These are some amazing young people, and maybe because I'm not a parent myself, I find in them such joy and love even. Hard to describe that alchemy, but while the pay is far too low, the rewards in this way are rich indeed. While our present may not seem too promising, I guarantee you, the kids are alright. Assuming we don't blow up the planet, they will be there to create something great once we fade away. Of this, I am certain. This is the source of my hope. If I wasn't teaching, I don't know how I would feel. So, I am grateful that I am. I am grateful I can use my skills as a writer and teacher to help them learn how to express themselves in the clearest, most elegant way possible. I do this, so you will listen to them, because their voices and ideas should be taken seriously.

And on that note, I will end. On a note of hope for the future, because God/dess knows we have at least four years of needing to try to withstand a storm that I can only hope we will withstand. My hope here is that many are awake to the need to keep our Constitution intact and I can only hope we won't be duped by a false crisis or goodness knows what. When I do not feel hopeful, I fall into fear and despair, and I cannot live there. Americans have a genius for hope. We are probably stupid with it in many ways, and the rest of the world - rightfully - looks at us most of the time like we are kind of nuts, but for all that, I do hope we can withstand the ultimate stress test that is upcoming of our country and how it was founded. Well, not ultimate, there was the Civil War, which I really hope we aren't going to end up in another one. But I mean stress test as in: can we get through this Without a Civil War. I pray and hope so. I also hope we can make it through without becoming a totalitarian capitalist state like China. These are my hopes.

I also hope that I will have the courage when needed to stand by not only my own beliefs, but also all of my friends - and strangers - who are in groups that are or may be targeted in ways large and small.

But for today, I give thanks to all of you out there who are willing to listen to all sides, who are tolerant and loving of everybody, including those with whom your disagree. I wish for our whole country (and I come from both sides of this political divide so I mean the Whole Country) a way to hear and listen and respect and love one another. I hope that all those who feel unseen, feel seen, those who feel silenced, find a voice (that is not filled with hate or that silences another), that we can reach across the borders and find a way forward.

This is my dream. This is my stupid-ass American hope.

I love you all. I really do. I am that weird.

Finally some good news!

It's been a week since I last wrote, probably the longest break I've taken from this blog.  I needed it.  Had to apply to a bunch of places for teaching work - which seemingly endless task will continue this week.  I had a realization:  I need a job, as in a full-time job, as in not adjuncting, not just freelancing - a real job, teaching preferably so the PhD doesn't have to seem entirely meaningless, on which status it now flutters.  I also would like to not be continually plagued with money anxiety.  I feel a bit like I'm giving in to something, put perhaps at 48, it's just adulthood.  I've given permanent adolescence a long run.  Wouldn't trade it.  But right now, would like a break in the action so I can catch my breath, have some health insurance and maybe afford a decent apartment.  Crazy talk, I know.

So, what's the good news?  I'm teaching my Cutting It Up workshop on Saturday at The Brecht Forum and so far a good sized group has signed up for it, including folks coming in from Washington D.C., Boston and Philadelphia.  This kind of blows my mind.  People are making a trip into NYC to take my workshop.  Perhaps it's because it coincides with Easter, Passover and Spring break, but for whatever reason, I'm delighted...especially since we thought the group would be really small because Passover and Easter coincide this year. Oddly enough the first day of Passover is on Good Friday, which just seems like some sort of existential joke between the Old and New Testament God/s or something...Kierkegaard would get a laugh out of it anyway.  Can't speak for the Jewish scholars simply because it's not my patch. Anyone want to comment on that, please feel free.

Was asked by the extraordinarily supportive Martin Denton to do a guest blog post on Indie Theater .  This is about the workshop and how this work relates to my writing.  If you're interested, you can link to it here.  That probably helped bump up the numbers for the workshop.  Speaking of which, if you're interested in the workshop itself, come on by on Saturday or if you can't make it April 7, come on by May 12.  Would be lovely to meet you!

It is now also - praise Jesus Allah Buddha Mohammed Vishnu Kali and Whomever Else Desires  Praise - spring break this week.  I am beyond exhausted, so am grateful for this.

However, I have enjoyed teaching this week.  My acting class, as always is a joy, but a surprise was my interpersonal communications class - when two different students today handing in their research papers said - and I quote - "Thanks for this assignment, I really enjoyed doing this work."  Please re-read that.  Please understand where I teach and feel the miracle.  I almost cried.

After months of grading short essays, driving the students insane by requiring writing (not to mention driving myself insane by needing to mark all these essays - in homework, on tests, etc.), there was this unsolicited response.  I was floored, in a good way.  Just when you start thinking: what's the point?  Why do I do this much work?  No one cares.  No one even seems to be listening in class.  I wonder if perhaps I may be the most boring teacher on earth, etc., this happens and it seems, at least for one afternoon, all worthwhile.

Beyond that, I feel I am beginning to find my footing in these unfamiliar classes, beginning to allow whatever passes for the 'real me' into the classroom.  Last autumn I was so scared that while I was present, I felt like a cardboard cut out of a teacher - someone following rules others had laid down and hoping no one would find out that I was only 2 pages ahead (which last autumn I was - not that I lied to anyone who hired me - they knew that - so at least I didn't have to worry about the administration - I just felt for the students).

I love teaching my own work so much, however, that this Saturday just seems like a 6 hour play date to me, not like work at all.  That is an amazing feeling.

But I also feel that this dragging students along into maybe actually, for a moment, enjoying writing has value, too, even if that work is much more taxing and definitely feels Like Work.

The other good news if you want to call it that is that I really Felt this past week that the grieving, sitting through all the emotions surrounding, the separating from B and our impending divorce is like detoxing from alcohol and drugs.  In other words, the marriage was a state of being, one that was clearly getting increasingly toxic and so to move away from it is going to feel as disorienting as getting sober.  That process can take years and I believe this process will also take years.  I don't know when I will be ready to get involved with another person, because I really, really, really need to find a way to believe in myself as OK - by myself.  I don't mean by that that I don't want to be with someone else again, because that's not true.  I simply mean that I want to go into any new relationship as a whole person.

I am a whole person, that's not the problem - it's my perception of myself as Not a whole person that is the problem.  The part of myself that feels I need to Perform in all ways to deserve to draw breath on this planet and certainly in order to be with another person.  This is gut wrenching work and means going through what I am increasingly seeing as emotional DTs - wherein strange hallucinations appear and there be dragons.  Of course there not be dragons.  The dragons are dream figures.  I know that once I can see them that way, but in moments they seem quite distressingly real.

A few days ago I called and regaled my mother for about an hour with said dragons, which she did a brilliant job of helping me see as shadows - not by haranguing me or saying "hey, those are dragons, you fool!" but by listening and helping me see this myself.  I have good friends who help me this way, too, and for whom I do the same.  Without these friends and family, I know this journey would be impossible.

These people who love me, one of whom also includes my cousin Darcy who I finally got to speak with last week, keep me sane and let me know there is love and allow me, in moments, to feel loveable, when I'm about to throw in the towel on myself.  I don't mean by that I am suicidal by the way, because I'm not.  It just means a kind of giving up that would mean not physical death but living life in a husk-like way, skating on a surface of wafer-thin ice...therefore always afraid of really skating, hovering at the edge of the pond, clinging to branches of trees, hoping not to fall into the ice-cold water...mixing metaphors and never really resolving them kind of like this sentence...OK, forgive me.  You get the idea.  I'm too tired to mop that one up.

In fact, I'm too tired to keep writing.  But did want to post something.  I will eventually post some lovely spring photos from Central Park but too tired to upload those right now, too...

Oh speaking of which, my sublet is coming to an end on June 1, so I'm looking for a place to live - in case any of you out there are in NYC and know me - just a heads up on that.  Was hoping to stay here this summer and not have to move again but them's the breaks with subletting.

Have cat, will travel...somewhere within NYC...that is affordable.  Wish me luck.

I close out this post listening to a chance-operations version of Handel by Gavin Breyers (sp?) thanks to Jonathan Schaffer's 'New Sounds' on WNYC, which was preceded by a piece by Alvin Lucier that used dolphin sonar locators.  Sometimes life is just so good.

Uplifted today by teaching at Hunter

Today started in a miserable fashion emotionally.  I was contemplating writing a whole post about the loneliness of loneliness.  That kind of awful after a night of difficulty sleeping.

Two things turned around my day, one was going to a meeting of folks like me and remembering what I should feel grateful for in my life and talking with a good friend who re-grounded me back into my life and reminded me why some issues involving my separation in the past few days have been so difficult.

The other was teaching my acting class at Hunter.  To be able to teach basic acting skills as I have discovered them over the Many years I have been directing and, more importantly, working with incredibly talented actors in labs, and see that this works in a college class, is an incredible high.  To listen to their response to the first chapter of Joseph Chaikin's The Presence of the Actor and their understanding that the listening, tone and space exercises we had just done relate to that even better.

I began the class the way I had wanted to but was not sure I would be able to do properly, but it worked: with breathing.  How to breathe.  Basic yoga stuff, 3 part breath conflated with up and down the body register vocal work.  Then I took them through a yoga sequence an actor taught a group of us ages ago when I had a theater company in NYC, which I have been doing myself for years.

Usually, when I teach this stuff it's in the context of a workshop or a class related but not just about this, so I have to teach it quickly.  To be able to take it all apart in a leisurely way and relate it to the class-long discussion on Monday was just great.

This I could get used to doing for like a while.

The students are a great mix from teens to 30s, many races and backgrounds, and - delightfully - only 16 of them.  This means I can give individual attention and we can play as a group without losing each other.

Also, much to my amazement, many of them had bought the book and done the reading.  They are thoughtful and - again to my astonishment - care as much about the ideas as the acting.  Jackpot!

So, a thank you to Hunter for hiring me, a prayer for more of this kind of the work in the future and a posthumous thank you to Joseph Chaikin who rocked my world.  First in 1983 when I read his book after my friend Veronica handed me a copy of The Serpent telling me I had to direct it (so thank you Veronica for that - and so much more...), then in 1988 in person when I took his directing tragedy workshop, quitting a job, selling my bicycle and hitch-hiking from SF to Marin to do so (and never regretted it even though I was quite literally starving for lack of funds) - so I could listen to him speak in post-stroke aphasia (a precursor to 7 years communicating with my father before he died), thinking I had landed at the feet of the Oracle at Delphi.  I directed a scene from Seneca's Oedipus, rehearsed in a corner of my room with the furniture (I mean milk crates and futon) pushed to the side - while we all smoked too many cigarettes.  Not exactly Grotowski to be sure.

My work has of course moved on from then, and I'd like to think I've kicked the can up the road a bit in my own labs, but if it weren't for Joe's work with The Open Theater, his encouragement of me as a director in the workshop and taking the time outside the class to show me old tapes of the Open Theater's shows, I know I would not be the artist I am now.

Which answers the whole sorry tale of woe in my last post - yes of course teaching is worth it.  I just hope and pray I can continue to find opportunities to teach not only what I love but what I have well over 30 years doing and close to 20 years doing in an original way.  It is a revelation.  While I have taught the workshops and loved that (I always love teaching my workshops), there is something special about having a whole college course to introduce young people to a fresh way of approaching one of the oldest and most deliciously impure art forms.

Finally, thank you, my lovely students today, for being open, receptive, ready to play.  Many of them said the class reminded them of being children, that they noticed stuff they'd never noticed before or had forgotten since becoming adults and and the class allowed themselves to get lost, look silly, play.  Music to my ears.

Hallelujah.