Last year I drove by my late aunt’s house, where her adult son still lives. My last memory of visiting the house was 25 years ago when she was dying of lung cancer. I was stunned to see her old car still parked in the driveway – the light blue buick, circa 1970, was so uniquely hers. All of her negative energy toward me came flooding back, like a punch in the gut.

Came across this website today that got me very excited. It’s called Free Rice (www.freerice.com).  It’s brilliant! It basically tests you on your vocabulary, and for every word you get right, it donates ten grains of rice to impoverished nations. If you have a few minutes spare, check it out. I mean you’re procrastinating, but you’re also helping to solve world hunger while you do. So if you’re like me and a complete word junkie, or if you just want to do more for humanity, check it out!

I have many small replicas and photographs of the spire atop the Chrysler Building in New York.  The replicas and photographs are a reminder of my father, who worked in the building in the late 1940’s when I was a young child.  His office was on the 69^th floor, in one of the “fins”.   I know that I was inspired to commute to work in New York City in the 80’s, by my father’s daily commute to his office in New York.  For me the Chrysler Building spire represents his aspirations and my own as well.  It is also very beautiful.

A few years ago I was the last overnight visitor to a house that’d been in my family for a few hundred years… my relatives were born and died in those old beds, rooms. In the attic were trunks filled with old civil war uniforms, flapper dresses, old lace….. and the old house was rotting, sad… but I could still feel all the life that had happened there, when the world was a very different place. My aunt gave me many of the oil studies that my namesake, Katherine, painted in the 1880s; she also played the guitar, and died at my age, of T.B. I have her tambourine, her ornamental hair comb. I was the twelfth bride to wear the family dress, fifth generation. I love the funny old things I have from that house more than anything, they connect me to a past I was never part of, but is in my DNA, somewhere. It is so bitter, the reminder of mortality, of Time moving on… but comforting because I can lean against those who came before me.

“With used furniture you cannot be emotional”—says Gregory Solomon a couple of times in The Price. The research of time lost, made famous by Marcel Proust, is, in fact, a completely emotion-driven affair. The objects and places of our past can encapsulate indelible moments, a mixture of pain and comfort, joy, continuity, endings, a sense of who we are today. The objects and places of our memories have a life of their own. We can be confronted with them materially—having to look at them again, deal with them, think about their future destination, or they simply live in our minds. But they are there. After all, “lives are lived through china dogs or well-thumbed books, families held together by a letter or a pipe, identities formed though pasts not forgotten.” (Material Things and Cultural Meanings: Notes on the Study of Early American Material Culture by Ann Smart Martin)

We’ve asked cast members of The Price, as well as members of the Long Wharf family, to share their memories of an object or place that speaks volumes (or just a nuance) about who they are today. Over the next few weeks, we’ll post their responses to rumen (Click on the Memory in Objects category for the full listing to date)…

The train-ride into New York is my best script-reading time: the trip in one direction–just shy of two hours–is the perfect ammount of time to read a full-length play at performance speed, so I read one script going down, one script going back, and maybe one while I’m there just to feel extra-productive.

Thanks to Literary for tracking this one down…

For all the public drama of Arthur Miller’s career—his celebrated plays (including Death of a Salesman and The Crucible), his marriage to Marilyn Monroe, his social activism—one character was absent: the Down-syndrome child he deleted from his life.

by Suzanna Andrews September 2007

(more…)

It’s a rainy Friday, the end of another busy week. I watched a run-through of The Price on Wednesday. It is always a revelation to see the almost-finished product. It makes me realize that what we all do here is so vitally important on so many levels. It is easy to forget that in the midst of all the backstage drama. The fact that we create something from nothing is a constant source of amazement to me. Even though I have gotten better at imagining how a particular production might look as I am reading the play, I am still inspired and surprised by all of the creative choices.

Anyway, as I was sitting on a prop couch against the wall watching the run-through, I started to fantasize about the notion of getting rid of all the theatre seats, extending the set into the empty space, and filling it with period furniture, so that the audience would feel as if they were really sitting in that old attic. Carrying the idea further, creating seating for each play that essentially becomes an extension of the set. But I know that the reality would be a logistical nightmare on many levels, but still fun to think about. We would certainly distinguish ourselves, though!

On this day one year ago, I quit smoking. It was time. I knew it was time. So I did it.

20 years, that’s how long I smoked. An as-much-as-2-packs-a-day smoker. $60 a week, give or take a sale. Ultra light 100’s, didn’t care about the brand. I was a fixture on the front dock, puffing away as a result of stress, or perhaps boredom. That was me, one year ago.

Now I will admit, I loved smoking. LOVED it. I loved it for all the romantic and rebellious reasons, for the rush into adulthood it provided as a kid, for the coolness of it. I could be the aloof kid in high school who was too cool for the girls to talk to, playing hooky for a smoke. I could be the noir-ish mystery guy lighting up in a crowded bar and contributing to the smoky atmosphere (literally).

Then reality arrives …. Sleep apnea. Extremely severe. I was a stroke candidate, it was so bad. My tonsils are huge, my uvula was redundant, so they had to go. Frankly, the pain was so bad for the first three weeks after surgery, that you might as well have put a “Stupid” sticker on my forehead if I had kept smoking.

The biggest obstacle? Routine. I could tell you how many smokes I could do in a 15 minute break, or the ride home. Heck, I knew how many I could get in just from walking from Mainstage to Stage II. (Five, if I walk slow and puff fast.) I had to break a 20-year routine; I had to change me. That’s rough, folks.

So for anyone looking to quit, here’s my best advice: you’ll know when you’re ready. There’s never the perfect time to quit, there’s never the perfect reason to quit. But you, and only you, will know when you want to stop. No lie, it’s a commitment, and it’s hard. But you can do it. And you’ll know the right time. I was there.

And now, I’m a former smoker. Not a non-smoker, a former one. I live with that realization each day that I decide that I don’t want to start again. There are days I miss them, and there are days I can’t remember the feeling of being a smoker. I concede that there may be the day I return to it. But today, I reflect on my past-smoking self and all that it gave and took away from me, and I move forward.

Not bad. Not bad at all.

~M*

On Sunday I went to Open Studios and bought a beaded necklace from an 11-year-old beader. She clearly knew her stuff; her necklaces were sophisticated compositions of shape and color. Although just about anyone can string beads, it does require a certain amount of talent to make something unique and beautiful. It felt good to support a young artist.

My own interest in beading began a couple of years ago when I lost a treasured earring and decided to make a necklace out of the remaining one. Since then I have made dozens of necklaces, bracelets and earrings; sold many pieces and given many gifts to friends and family. Creating a necklace is much like creating a printed piece. Both situations require taking a bunch of random stuff and making something appealing and inviting out of it. In design you get a bunch of words, and if you’re lucky, some creative direction on imagery. If you’re not so lucky, you have to look at the words and hope that they inspire some kind of visual. Sometimes the words themselves become the visual. And sometimes the visuals suggest the worded message. It’s all just a big puzzle.

Then there’s the challenge of coming up with a visual solution for a play. But that’s for another blog.