Flying Sardines

The other day

We rocked the shores of Squibnocket.

The rocky beach made us jump and jerk as we walked.

Bent at the waist, eyes intently down

Searching.

K, J and Vivian, a triple-decker sandwich

All begging for shells.

Rocks, pebbles, stones

Of all races, creeds, colors and cultures.

Broken, beautiful shells hide

Beneath them

Between them

Washed up onto them.

The rocks house broken hearted crabs, garbage, shells, and

SARDINES

Flipping, Flopping

Gaping, Gasping

Struggling, Striving

For nothing less than life.

Feeble tails fanning the waterless, heartless air.

Begs for a mermaid to attend,

To put his seat back in the upright position.

K gasps

J bends

I watch

One of their hands

I don't remember which

Reaches and gently scoops up the quivering, slick fish and

Chucks it underhand back to the sea.

But more, more amongst our foreign shores wash

UP on sand to strand themselves.

We diligently oblige.

From one moment, swimming,

Then flopping, gasping, striving

Dying

To Flying.

Stuff - 8/15/07

I stepped on a screw.

It got stuck in my shoe.

The first thing a child recognizes is its mother's legs. No matter whether it's just their mother, or a whole sea of people, that child will know it's mother by her legs. She knows the grip around her mother's thigh. He can tell by the smell of her laundry detergent and the texture of the pants she wears. Just the width, stature, musculature and familiarity of the legs give her away.

Breeze - 8/14/07 3:00 PM

It's calm at the Yard right now. As impossible as it sounds, everyone is relaxed and not working. Wendy is napping, J & K are relaxing together, the Bush Women are grocery shopping or resting, KC, Nicole & Lise are chilling on the office porch, the girls are postering Edgartown, and I am sitting on a counch under the tent, writing. It's cool and lightly breezy, like the day has no agenda. The sky is a light white blue, and the sun is dappling the trees, making them glow in the afternoon cocktail hour. The red and white checkered tablecloths wave in the gentle wind, and everything is photogenic, but too relaxd to be photographed. The mood is happy, bery different than the past few days. Everything was compressed yesterday, everyone on a tight mission. No one looked up, or stopped to notice the lanterns or the grass. Today, everyone has noticed. Everything has taken a moment to breathe: us, the buildings, the trees, the tent, this couch, this paper. I can notice the colors of things again. My watch is a bright bluish teal, and the sliver is shiny. The candle on the table really looks "peach," edible and succulent peach. The candle on the other table is a real lime color, pretentious and jazzy green. This couch is made up of three different browns and two different greens and a lovely soft white. Even the white of the chairs is a real white. Life is simple now.

Chocolates

K says "chocolates" in a consistantly beautiful way. It sounds foreign and exciting when she says it. She pronounces the 'a' like in "latte," and both 'o's, instead of just the first one. She sounds mildly Jamaican in that she's anunciating, accentuating all the syllables. It's soothing to the ear. "Chocolates." I thought I'd get used to hearing it said that way, but every time she says "chocolates" it's new.

Evolution and inspiration

Thursday night, the Chilmark Writing Workshop... On Stage. I didn't expect a thing of them, except to read some poems and clap for each other. But the stories they read were incredible and extraordinarily well-written on all types of subjects, but all with the main theme of invitation. One was about a prom, another was about a dying mother, one was about their mother not being there, one was about a restaurant scene, and one was about revenge. They made me remember why I wrote, and how much I enjoyed writing.

Today I had a fit, since I'd lost my pad of plain white paper, and I needed to find it. It's been lost for a few days now, but today I really really wanted it. So I searched high and low, looking everywhere, asking everyone, snooping around the other houses, moving other people's things to find it. There were sheets of its paper in various places, like clues on a children's detective show. Some were in one person's handwriting, and others were posted on the bulletin board. I tried to find the last sheets I'd written, so I'd know when I lat had it, and so I could date the unknown pages from someone else's writing. They were a cold trail, since I didn't know whose they were or when they had been written on. It drove me crazy. I'd find a new page and feel closer, but just that much farther away from finding the pad. I didn't get the damn thing back until Nicole brought it to me, after having made a grocery list on it the other day... And the ultimate irony was, that I wanted to write this whole affair down as a comedy sketch, but the only thing I would write it on was that very same pad of paper that I couldn't for the life of me find.

And with that pad is my favorite pen, that I cringe at when other people use. I had to buy two more, just so they'd be around and I'd always have one. They are now essential to my survival as a creative being.

Tonight, a dog was around the theater, that belongs to one of the writers in the Chilmark Workshop. It's 15 years old, and only has three legs. The fourth had been amputated years and years earlier, but apparently she used to lick it for comfort, to soothe herself. But now that the leg is gone, she licks and naws at her hind leg, limping more and more. She's now turning into a 2 1/2 legged dog. When I said that out loud, the first thing that came to my head was that she was willfully evolving. She is progressing to two legs, a two legged dog. She's becoming human.

Monday night horror

If I hadn't had a vodka and Fresca in my hand and 5 other people in the room, I would not have been able to handle the B rated horror movie I just saw as well as I did. I'm still thinking that every extraneous sound I hear is the ghostly monster, but I'm too tipsy to react. I'm just afraid. So I'm typing this up and listening to music so I won't hear the bats outside and scream. I miss Jay, because if he'd been here, I wouldn't have had to have any other reenforcement. But the other 5 managed to keep my mind from accepting that any of it was frightening by laughing at the B-rated acting and obvious outcomes and betting on who would die next. K's dad was in it, as the cop, so that's why we were watching it in the first place. It hasn't even been released, so we got a sneek preview, of what will undoubtedly bomb and immediately be put on the back shelf. But I'll tell you what, I don't want to see yellow eyes again for a very long time.

Harbor Mist

Yesterday afternoon, when I went up to The Hole (sound booth) for the Log of the Skipper's Wife tech rehearsal, I didn't expect anything from the day. The play was dull and all the songs sounded alike, and this was the first time they'd ever rehearsed the whole thing all together. There was also no reason for me to be there, since there wasn't any external sound, no CD's or sound effects, just their piano, violin player and singer. But I walked up to the booth to turn everything on just in case, and on the sound board lay a bundle of white tissue paper and a pink note. The note read, "Vivian, For all the work you've done. Liz" And in the bundle was a blue, sea shell votive candle holder with a blue "Harbor Mist" votive inside. It smells heavenly. Then Liz came in and said, "Because you've truly lit up my life."

I think I'll go buy her a CD of some sort, since she's lights and I'm sound, she gave me light, and I'll give her sound! Ha, what teamwork. I love it when a plan comes together. ::puff puff::

Talent

I am a creature, beast, animal of numerous but tiny talented triumphs. I can dance a little, sing a bit, play the slightest smigeon of piano, write moderately, photograph and video allright, sculpt reasonably well, paint and draw OK, act acceptably, cook decently, drink socially, run lights and sound abley, make clothes it my life depends on it, see, hear, taste, feel, and express just fine, my teeth are straight and I walk upright. I find myself extremely adequate.

Hair

When I leave my hair down, I'm a fox. My long, thick, full hair balances out the rest of me. I instantly turn heads. I've written before about people smiling at me, and now I realize that my hair was left down. As much as I would love to chop off all of my hair just to feel the breeeze, I would lose the bearing that so many people perceive as maturity and age. So instead of decapitating my most capturing feature, I think I'll keep it intact.

A Theatrical God

I've seen God in so many things: nature, school, people, animals, the vastness of space, sunsets. But I never found anything mystical in theater. I've seen, heard and felt beauty, joy, sadness, but never God. Theater is something that appears entirely man-made. It's a completely human element to our society. Each element of theater in itself seems majestic in a Godly way, but when we piece them together, it seems forced by the hand of man.

I had to search for God today.

I sat on an uncomfortable stool in a tight, hot, sticky sound booth, trying desperately to make the system stop making that horrible thudding, popping sound every time a CD ended or I paused. For hours I'd been sitting there, sweating waterfalls. Nothing worked to make the popping go away. Other than that a CD would read "Error" until I took it out and put it back in again, and then Liz was dealing with the light board next to me, mumbling incoherently about cues and dimmers. It was tense and angry and heated to work in the sound booth, so I stumbled down the three curved steps with glow-in-the-dark tape on them into the theater so I could breathe. I thudded down onto the nearest bright red chair, staring blankly into the deep black space of the stage.

I wanted God to be there, to help. And I couldn't find Him. There was nothing that indicated "God, look here" with a neon arrow next to it. There wasn't an opening in the ceiling with a beam of light, or a big beautiful moth to come land on my knee, or even Josie to come in and smile at me when I needed her most. There was nothing Godly in there; it was all human - hot, sticky, sweaty, and blubberingly human.

And then later, as I went to close the window blacks so we could run our cue-to-cue, I saw light dribbling onto a few measly spiderwebs. There amongst the dust and residue of old socks, on that old window sill, I found God. He was just smiling coyly at me, whispering that I was able. I was able to find inspiration, strength and my own ability in something tiny. I photographed it as my own proof to myself.

This evening, when I jinxed myself and the whole production by merely thinking that everything would run smoothly and perfectly, the disc again read "Error," so I ejected it as fast as I could and shoved it back in, and the wrong music came on. It was the other piece that came out instead. One CD had stuck to the bottom of the correct CD. I hurridly ejected it again whispering "Oh shit oh shit! It won't play it won't play!" By now our dancer had come on and begun her dance, the lights had come on with no music and she'd gone off... twice. Once when it read Error, and the second time when the wrong music alltogether came on. So now, with our third go-around, the music was all ready, then the light board wouldn't read the proper cues. So instead of a blackout we needed for the end of the 7th dance, we got the bright green cue from the 4th dance. And Liz, being the brilliant light designer that she is, manually made light changes for the rest of the show, as I sat sobbing silently in the next seat.

God somehow made it back there, in that tiny 2'x4' sound booth, by telling me to "breathe" with Liz's voice. That was the only thing that held me together. That and Katey our stage manager coming into the booth from all the way behind the building, in the dressing room to rub my back and say that it wasn't my fault, but the heat's. I couldn't do anything about it, so I shouldn't worry about it. And everything worked out OK. Somehow, God only knows, God made it to our opening performance.

We're singing...

It's opening night... It's Opening Niiiiiiight!

It's Wendy Tuacher's latest show. Will it flop or will it go?

The interns are hectic, we're all in a haze.

I'm telling Wendy that I want a raise!

Gotta stay hydrated, or we'll all die

This is the most hectic day of our lives.

Gotta get chocolates, flowers and ice

This is a crapshoot, so just throw the dice

Let's get this show on the road.