Author: Kelley

Praise song for the day

I thought this was beautiful, and true, and right for the day. Well done to Elizabeth Alexander.

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Praise song for the day
The inaugural poem by Elizabeth Alexander

Praise song for the day.

Each day we go about our business, walking past each other, catching each others’™ eyes or not, about to speak or speaking. All about us is noise. All about us is noise and bramble, thorn and din, each one of our ancestors on our tongues. Someone is stitching up a hem, darning a hole in a uniform, patching a tire, repairing the things in need of repair.

Someone is trying to make music somewhere with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.

A woman and her son wait for the bus.

A farmer considers the changing sky; A teacher says, ‘œTake out your pencils. Begin.’

We encounter each other in words, Words spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed; Words to consider, reconsider.

We cross dirt roads and highways that mark the will of someone and then others who said, ‘œI need to see what’™s on the other side; I know there’™s something better down the road.’

We need to find a place where we are safe; We walk into that which we cannot yet see.

Say it plain, that many have died for this day. Sing the names of the dead who brought us here, who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges, picked the cotton and the lettuce, built brick by brick the glittering edifices they would then keep clean and work inside of.

Praise song for struggle; praise song for the day. Praise song for every hand-lettered sign; The figuring it out at kitchen tables.

Some live by ‘œLove thy neighbor as thy self.’

Others by “first do no harm,” or “take no more than you need.”

What if the mightiest word is love, love beyond marital, filial, national. Love that casts a widening pool of light. Love with no need to preempt grievance.

In today’™s sharp sparkle, this winter air, anything can be made, any sentence begun.

On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp — praise song for walking forward in that light.

Things feel possible

In November, Nicola and I drank champagne as we watched Barack Obama win the election. Today we drank tea as we watched him become the 44th President of the United States.

I went to the gym early this morning. It’s foggy here today; I felt that I might be the only person for miles, until I saw people standing like shadows at a dark bus stop. I was alone at the gym. I drove home in a still and quiet world.

Then I turned on the radio and heard millions of voices in the other Washington. And you know, here we go… I imagined that someday I might meet President Obama and shake his hand, and I began to cry in the car for the wonder of it all, and the fierce hope I feel that maybe things will be better. Not just for me and Nicola, but for all of us, everyone in the world.

Our challenges may be new. The instruments with which we meet them may be new. But those values upon which our success depends — honesty and hard work, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism — these things are old. These things are true.
 
— President Barack Obama, from his inauguration speech, January 20, 2009

When one is a new president sending one’s first official greeting to one’s people and the world, the words one chooses are important. Honesty, hard work, courage, fair play, tolerance, curiosity (what a marvelous word to include!), loyalty, patriotism — these are good words. Today is a good day. Things feel possible. Things feel new.

In which the screenwriter shares her vision

I have this character in my head. She keeps appearing places: on trains, in the city, on the highway. I see her out there. She is heroic, but not like any hero we’ve ever seen.
— Debra Winger in this interview with The Guardian

I am proud of the women in the screenplay I have in development. They are as real as I can make them. They pass the Bechdel test. I love them, as I love all the characters of my fiction — and thank goodness, because I would hate to spend this much time with people I don’t like, real or not.

And they are young women. That’s what’s required for this story, and fair enough.

So here’s what I hope — that writing them well helps get the movie made, and helps me establish myself as a professional screenwriter. So that I can write the literally dozens of stories I have in my head for women in their 40’s, 50’s, 60’s… stories of adventure, bravery, sex, love, action, suspense, big feelings, small everyday moments, across the spectrum of human relationships. Not sweet old lady stories; not stories where women play someone’s mommy or grandmommy in the background. We get enough of those. The stories in my head are muscular stories of intriguing, compelling people who come in grownup female packages and do things that apparently will startle the hell out of the men who run Hollywood.

I want to do it for Debra Winger.

And Meryl Streep.

And Emma Thompson.

For every woman who has ever had to choose between playing bullshit roles or playing none at all.

For every woman over 40 who loves the movies but wonders why no one who looks like her is up on screen kicking ass and taking names, living large, being sexy, being frightened of something besides old age or loneliness, and maybe, just maybe, being the hero every once in a while.

That’s what I’m going to write. And I can’t wait.

Friday pint

Every Friday I transfer posts here from the Virtual Pint archives.

Halfway through January already. Hard to believe. Is it like that for you?

Here are three long posts from the archives, all in some way contributing to extended conversation. My favorite kind. Lots of navel-gazing this round — I was in a ruminative mood. That happens (smile). I actually wish I had time to wander around in my own sandbox right now: instead I feel like I’m running on some endless track, around and around and around.

I hope your days are less loopy, in all ways, than mine are right now.

Enjoy these pints.

And I wish she were here to kick his

I wish High Kick Girl were here because someone needs to kick George Bush out to Saturn.

As part of a set of midnight regulations, the Bush administration has issued a rule that allows individual health care providers who receive federal funding to redefine abortion to include the most common forms of birth control — and then refuse to provide these basic birth control services. They don’t have to tell vulnerable women about their options. They can withhold the information entirely and keep women ignorant of the choices that might be available to them from another provider. They don’t have to confess their bias. They can simply say, sorry, you’ll have to have this baby, or sorry, just don’t have sex if you don’t want to get pregnant.

Please sign this petition at Planned Parenthood asking the incoming Obama adminstration to reverse this regulation. My god, how many women are going to be hurt by this before it can be fixed? And when are we going to stop hating the diversity of humanity so much that we will hurt each other just to make the sure the world reflects only our ideas?

And someone please kick Shrub in his lame sick fucking ass on his way out of the White House?

(Edited to add: thank you to Mark for telling me about this, and for posting about it himself.)

5 second favor

If you have 5 seconds (and haven’t already heard this pitch), I would like to ask for your help. If you’ve already got the t-shirt on this one, then I ask for your patience (grin).

I have the chance to have A Leader’s Manifesto published by ChangeThis.com, a great organization providing a very generous service to the online community. If my manifesto receives a large number of votes, ChangeThis will — for free — design and publish a professional PDF file that anyone can read, store and share on the web or through email. ChangeThis will also distribute the manifesto through their online network.

If you’re willing, will you please take 5 seconds and vote for the manifesto?

Voting closes on the 15th (not sure what time), so this is my last get-out-the-vote effort for the manifesto. It seems clear that it will have enough votes to be published, but it’s such a great opportunity for me that I’m trying not to leave anything to chance.

You’re all awesome and I appreciate the help.

You can read A Leader’s Manifesto in full here to know what you’re voting for (or here’s a single-page version if you prefer).

You can vote to publish the manifesto here.

I pick champagne

When I was in high school, I was for one brief shining moment a New England Debate Champion.

I am not generally competitive. There’s nothing wrong with competition: I just don’t like the stress. I suck at sports, and even in the most casual situations I’ve never been a fan of any dynamic that was all about winning.

The thing is, I like to win — I am just not always willing to pay the price, which is for me a weird combination of trying to exercise power over others (I’m going to win win win!) and feeling powerless myself (oh no they’re winning I feel bad bad bad!). I am willing to make myself vulnerable to the world in lots of different ways, but competing is not such an easy one for me. Maybe it comes down to the difference between being good/not good at something myself (does someone buy my novel/short story/screenplay, or not?) and being better/worse at something than someone else. Maybe I just don’t like being shown my place in line. I dunno.

At any rate, signing up for the debate team in high school still remains one of the great mysterious choices of that part of my life. And I only lasted one term (semester, quarter… we called them terms). But in that term, my debate partner Jon Sweet and I kicked some serious smart-kid ass up and down New England.

We found a good division of labor: Jon did as much of the extemporaneous talking as possible, and I wrote as many of the prepared words as possible. I was great at putting the arguments into coherent and occasionally passionate terms: and Jon was great at doing the thing that scared the bejeezus-most out of me, which was fielding oral debate on the fly — answering the challenges calmly, with the facts and figures, and a particular easy-going charm that just made him seem so much more convincing than everyone else.

And so one Sunday we went off to one of the other schools (Exeter, maybe? Not too far away…) and represented St. Paul’s as a Novice Team. Our topic was, I believe: “Resolved: the United States should unilaterally cease production of nuclear weapons.” (Or something like that — Jon, if you ever come visiting here, do you remember if this is right?) I remember nothing of the experience except the statistic that (at the time) the US had the existing nuclear capacity to destroy the entire world dozens of times over (I can no longer remember the exact number, but it was impressive). So when it was my turn to stand up and field the challenges, I just kept finding creative ways to make the response be about We can kill everyone a lot with the stuff we have now, why do we need more?

And at the end of the day, after doing this three or four times, we got named the winning novice team and they gave us little silver bowls, and then we all climbed in the van and went back to school.

I must say that winning was one of the biggest surprises I’d had in a long time. It felt… really weird to win at something that I was pretty sure I actually wasn’t that intrinsically good at. Hey, you know, maybe that experience is part of where my attraction to team-building (and ultimately Humans At Work) came from — I’m certain that neither Jon or I would have won on our own, but we made a great team. Huh. I’ve never thought about it in those terms before, but that’s really what the dynamic was. And it was one of my first direct experiences of the power of teamwork when people are playing to their strengths.

Anyway, Jon and I were friendly but we weren’t active friends outside of debating. I was always a little bowled over by his confidence and charm (waves to Jon through the internet), and I was shy, and…. And so you may imagine my surprise to wake up in the middle of the night sometime the next week to find Jon shaking my shoulder. It was the first time a boy ever snuck into my room.

Hey, Kel, this is for you, he said, and put something in my hand, and phtt, he was gone into the magic invisible wormhole that boys go when they sneak out of your room…

And there I was, holding my first bottle of champagne.

It was just great. Really an amazing moment.

So I did what any kid with no real experience of fizzy alcohol or radiator heating would have done: I hid the bottle behind the radiator.

For several days.

In winter.

The following Saturday night, my friend Margo and I settled down after dinner to savor the experience. I had craftily set up the furniture in my room so that I could block the door from being opened (we didn’t have locks, those were simpler times…). We opened the window and lit cigarettes. I put on music (probably Traffic). I produced the bottle. I peeled the foil. I took off the little wire hat.

I didn’t even have to touch the cork. It exploded out of the bottle all by itself and champagne went everywhere. All over us. All over the bedspread. All over the india-print wall hanging. All over the ceiling (drip drip drip).

And at the door: knock knock.

It was the faculty member on our hallway, Miss Moroney. She opened the door and it banged against the drawer. I beetled over and peered out. My heart was pounding a zillion beats a minute. Behind me, Margo was desperately fanning fumes out the window. I was sure we were going to be in Big Trouble — alcohol was the kind of thing that could get you suspended or expelled.

“Kelley,” Miss Moroney said, “I have to know… are you smoking in there?”

I have never been so happy to be caught doing something wrong in my whole life.

“Yes, I am,” I said, in my best George-Washington-cherry-tree voice. “I’m sorry, it’s just that it’s so cold outside and I just, well, I’m really sorry, I won’t ever do it again, I’m really sorry, I really am.” And I’m sure I looked terrified. At any rate, she took total pity on me and told me that if it ever happened again, she’d have to report it. I groveled earnestly. I thanked her. Then I closed the door, and Margo and I damn near laughed ourselves sick (very quietly!) as we drank the remaining bit of the champagne.

I didn’t sign up for debating again in the spring. I think I hurt the teacher’s feelings who ran the group, but I knew it wasn’t for me. I’d been lucky to be with the right person, but I didn’t really have the fire for winning that one needs to be a top-notch debater. Because debating isn’t about persuading, or having an actual conversation. It’s about positions, points, arguments, and sometimes it’s just about volume and who bangs hardest on the table.

I’m just not very good at it. I would much rather have champagne.

Human cities

My friend is having a hard time right now, partly because of the pressure that humans put on each other by living in communities. We are not made to be solitary forever, but we damn sure aren’t always made to live so close together, either.

If you’ve read or listened to my essay “Surrender,” then you know I had a dream of a city life. Sometimes I still do, but the city in my imagination is very different now. I could never live in New York: too big for me, too much. The psychic weight of all those people would crush me. Chicago was wonderful, but I am not so sure that I would fit there anymore. I don’t know if it is that I have become smaller, or… well, I don’t know.

What I do know is that I’m not yet ready to live off the grid. I think a small community might be too small for me. I don’t do active “community” that well at the best of times, and I need a variety of human ways, of human expression, around me. I need access to a spectrum of human experience. Others tell me this is possible in small communities. Perhaps it is. And perhaps it is elitist and ignorant of me to think I need the nice restaurants and the club guarded by men where only women dance and the high-speed internet and multiple movie theatres and a store that carries the beers of the world — but I do think that, at least for now.

Mostly, I think, I need that hum of human energy. And (and there’s always an “and”…) I need to be able to shut the door on it sometimes, too. Seattle is good for me that way, right now. I don’t think I could shut the door in New York, or even maybe Chicago. And to my friend whose door is not shutting so well right now, I send my love and the only assurance I can give, which is that human cities, like the humans who live there, are sometimes random, sometimes unpredictable, and sometimes they hurt us. But we love our cities, and sometimes they sustain us, nurture us, love us back. Just like the humans who live there.


click here

City living, heavy trouble.
City living rough.
We are given angry hearts
But anger’s not enough.

I don’t always know what is enough. I just know that humans have it.


click here

I am the eagle
I live in high country
In rocky cathedrals that reach to the sky.
I am the hawk and there’s blood on my feathers.
But time is still turning
They soon will be dry.
And all those who see me
And all who believe in me
Share in the freedom I feel when I fly.

Come dance with the west wind
And touch all the mountaintops.
Sail o’er the canyons and up to the stars.
And reach for the heavens
And hope for the future
And all that we can be
Not what we are.

And why is this song in a post about city life? Because woven within all the noise and the chaos and the fizz of the city is this part of being human, too. We are eagles and hawks in our concrete canyons. In our cities, we dance and reach and hope.

You’d better like to play

I’ve been reading Bob Lefsetz for a long time. He writes specifically about the music business, but he’s got something to say to anyone who wants to combine art and business. His passion is always for the art; like me, he believes that traditional business models for publishing, distributing and marketing art are pretty much dying on the vine, while the major book publishers music labels are blinking hard and saying Hey, what happened to our revenues? And he riffs. I like that.

The other day, Bob wrote this post about redefining success. Those who have been reading here for a while know that I’ve gone through some of this myself recently. And it’s still going on for me, as I ponder the balance between fiction and screenplay and management consulting and life, between security and freedom. As I fall in and out of fear. As I reach for a goal and sometimes get a fistful, and sometimes miss it altogether. I think many of us are engaged in our own redefinitions right now.

And I wonder how we will all define success on the other side? I’ll let you know what I come up with. And I’d be interested in hearing your postcards from this particular road.

I do know one thing for sure: Bob Lefsetz is right when he says You’d better enjoy playing.

And what if that is the real success?