Category: life

Playing for Change

The power of music. So often, I turn to music to express things I can’t talk about any other way. Or to celebrate, or get busy, or because all I want to do is paint my room black and so I let the music drip down the walls while I cry.

And sometimes music is more than just about me. Sometimes it’s about all of us, together. That’s another power of music.

The Playing for Change Foundation wants to bring peace to the world through music. That’s not a bad idea: people who would never consider sitting down together will stand up together and dance to the same song. PFC is building community around music and committed to providing resources for musicians, music students and music schools around the world.

And they made this great video. I love the song, and I love what they’ve done with it. And right now it speaks to me particularly keenly, the way music often does: right now it seems good to remember that we all need someone to stand by us sometimes, and that when we stand by someone else we are doing good in the world.

Enjoy.

 

More on marriage

A thoughtful post by HuffPo’s Bob Ostertag on the Whole Big Frakkin’ Rick Warren Brouhaha and the general topic of gay marriage.

I’m seeing this perspective expressed more and more these days. I think Ostertag has some good points to make. And like most perspectives (including mine), it doesn’t reflect the whole picture — I can certainly empathize deeply with the commenters whose personal lives have been trashed by Prop 8 and all the intolerance that nurtured it. Maybe there are just too many differing individual experiences and “goals” to draw them together into one neat package and say Here’s the last word on gay marriage.

We’re fond of single perspectives in this culture. We like it simple. We like rules and solutions. But most things involving identity and feelings just aren’t that simple. I wish that the culture could learn to make room for the variety of human experience.

And yet — is injustice wrong? Absolutely. Is intolerance stupid? Definitely. Is this the world we live in? It sure is. So what do we do about it?

No easy answers here, just more to consider.

Periodic Table of Awesoments

When I was in high school, I memorized the periodic table of elements (here goes, without looking it up: hydrogen, helium, lithium, beryllium, boron, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, fluorine, neon. Don’t ask me why. I also have a place in my brain where practically every lyric from the 80’s lives. So many mysteries…)

Why has it taken me so long to learn that the universe is actually made from awesoments? And it is, you know. Your particular mileage may vary, but there’s no denying that the universe is a magnificent, wacky, ecstatic, terrifying and ultimately heart-stopping place to live. The more it’s made of awesoments, the better for all of us.

Don’t miss the comments, they are easily half the fun.

Enjoy.

Trouping

Since I wrote yesterday about Bret stabbing himself, I’ve had a whole surge of college / theatre department / acting memories. So here’s another story.

From the Cambridge Advanced Learners Dictionary:
 
trouper noun
 
1 a successful entertainer who has had a lot of experience
 
2 APPROVING anyone with a lot of experience who can be depended on and does not complain: Good old Edna – she’s a real trouper to do the washing-up without even being asked.; He took his disappointment like a trouper.

I really did want to be Juliet. Sigh. But it was not to be — a) there were better actors than I to fill the role (digression here: people in Hollywood talk all the time about “actresses” and I try to behave in their company, I really do, because it’s polite to speak the native language if one can. But we’re all actors, people! Yeesh.) and b) I was taller than Romeo, and gods know in the 80’s we just couldn’t have that kind of thing on stage.

Our Juliet was a student in her late 20’s who was small and fresh-faced and could still play a teenager. Our Lady Capulet (Juliet’s mum) was a student in her late 20’s/early 30’s who looked, as we liked to say in the South, like she’d been drug down a mile of hard road. She was, I now understand, deeply depressed and doing her best to just hang on. At the time, because I was young and stupid, I just thought she was gloomy and grumpy and a little weird.

One afternoon during the run of the show, my stage manager Suzanne came and pulled me out of class and took me for a little walk. She put an arm around me. “Kelley,” she said, “you know the tradition that if something happens to an actor, the ASM steps into the role?”

“Um, no,” I said, “I don’t know that one.”

She said, “Well, I need you to be a trouper. Because we may need you to be Lady Capulet tonight.” Then she smiled and squeezed my shoulder, and before I knew it I was in the costume shop being fitted, and then in an empty room with the choreographer learning the dances. Yep, dances. I pretty much knew all the lines, I’d been prompting for six weeks, but the dances… And I knew enough to be terrified: knowing lines from the third row every rehearsal is a hell of a lot different than knowing them in the moment, under the lights and the hot heavy gaze of the audience, especially when one is trying to sort out her left foot from her right.

6:30 pm. Actors’ call. No Lady Cap. Suzanne smiles reassuringly.

7:00 pm. Cast warm-ups. I take my place and start stretching and la-la-la-ing. Suzanne is practically incandescent with calm. The director gives me an enormous hug, looking exactly like Peter O’Toole in The Stuntman, that particular combination of what a cock-up and isn’t it all exciting? The actors look at me with varying blends of sympathy, concern and well, that’s you fucked. And I trouped. I trouped until 7:25 pm when Lady Capulet came into the room.

Everyone looked at her. Everyone looked at me. The director said, “Thank you, Kelley.” And I nodded and left the room before I gave in to my impulse to smack Lady Cap into next week and thereby ensure that I would have to play the role after all.

I still don’t know what happened. But whatever it was, I understand now how brave she must have been to have come back when she did. I imagine at that point it would have been far easier to just bail. I think she was much more a trouper than I.

Song of my Sunday

All the world that I can see from my office is covered in snow, framed by icicles on the overhang outside the window. It’s cold, it’s quiet and still, the sky is half-blue and half-more-snow.

Today I am many things, but mostly I am lucky. I have food in the house and a house to keep the food in. I’m warm in here. I have health insurance that just paid for half the medication I’m taking because I’m still coughing 6 weeks after being sick. I have a new business that I suspect will struggle for a long time before it takes off, but I have (perhaps absurd) faith in the integrity and goodness of it, and I believe that it will reach people and help them. I am worried about finding paid work in the meantime.

There’s a lot going on.

So what am I doing? I am working on my screenplay all day today in a grand gesture of thank you to the beautiful day and fuck you to the people who say that female-driven movies can’t get greenlit, to the search for paid work, and the many frightening things in the wider world. Because writing this movie makes me most happy, and today being most happy is more important than being stressed or realistic or responsible. I am having enormous fun. And I am listening to this.

My advice is to turn it up loud.

Click here if you can’t access the player.

Storm

I have a pile of work to do, and there’s a big storm on the way — the temperature is dropping and the sky is drawing in on us, as if the world were shrinking. And so rather than telling the story of the actor who stabbed himself, or doing my monthly search keyword roundup (both coming soon, I promise), I thought I would just leave you with some music.

When I was younger and even more consciously dramatic than I am now, I once stood on a Florida beach at midnight watching heat lightning twenty miles out to sea, the last shreds of a thunderstorm gang that had come hulking across the area that day. It was a big system: the lightning poured down across half the horizon, and a cool wind blew in and out of the warm night, and the surf was pounding… so you know I had to sing “Riders of the Storm.”

I hope you have had the fun of getting big with the universe sometime.

Buster, life coach

I flounced over from a link on Booksquare. Had to comment on the cat — with four of my own acting as miscellaneous muses, masters and subjects of devious deeds in fiction and fact — I relate to Buster.

Cheers,

Pat Harrington
http://patriciaharrington.com

Isn’t Buster awesome? Let’s not even bother with a link, let’s just present him again in all his glory:

I discovered Buster when I was first putting together the project management team at Wizards of the Coast. I’d been facilitating for years (I’ve led meetings from 2 people to 250 people), and I was very glad I had those skills. I wasn’t expecting all the negotiating I had to do with other executives, my own team, and other teams that we worked with.

The thing is, all the facilitation skills in the world don’t stop other people from being defensive, uncommunicative, frightened or angered by change, or from hijacking the conversation onto another track. They just give me more tools with which to respond. And so sometimes I felt overwhelmed or stressed. And then I would return to my desk, look at Buster, nod in silent acknowledgment of our common impulse, and then go back out and start trying to hammer out more agreements.

Buster reminds me that good managers don’t eat the mice. And even though I’m not a direct manager in a corporate job right now, the fact is that we all “manage” relationships with each other every day, in large and small ways. So please don’t eat the mice.

Thanks, Pat, for bringing Buster back to the conversation today.

And a note: the Booksquare link Pat is referring to was a Twitter tweet… Yep, I’m on Twitter now. So is Nicola. Come join us in the twitterverse anytime.

And another note: I’m now moved to cross-post a version of this to Humans At Work. Come on over and have a look — there’s also a post about diversity that features a rockin’ Evanescence video, and a look at a recent interview about trust and social connection in every aspect of our lives — family, work, and community. If you enjoy the conversations here, please join me for more at Humans At Work.

Day on

The Platonic ideal I have of “dawn” comes from my childhood in Florida, where the sky is an enormous kid who fingerpaints herself, and she is both exuberant and very, very serious in the focused way children sometimes are; so there are moments of pause, moments of held breath when the sky simply sits still and says Look at me for a while, and then we’ll go on to the next thing.

By my standards there is no dawn in Seattle these days; it’s more that the light simply comes on when it’s supposed to. Blue-black sky, streetlights with frosty halos, an edge of moon and then someone flicks the switch and poof, it’s morning and everything is thin: the translucent pale blue film across the sky; the cold thin sunlight that seems not quite there, as if it’s coming in on conference call; the thin shadows of the people at bus stops, the way they clutch their coats closed and squint into the distance looking for the bus.

I saw today come on through the windows of the gym. I’ve been feeling stressed and just a little beaten down around the edges, and I didn’t expect that looking up from my sore self and seeing a slice of blue sky, crows shaking out their feathers against the few orange and yellow leaves still left on the trees, would make me feel better; but it did. I don’t know why, and I don’t need to. I do know that I found myself thinking of the word daybreak, and realizing it’s the wrong word. There is nothing broken about the day.

Cuffy things

Today I want to go to Musha Cay.

Several years ago, I had an emergency appendectomy. Big drama, midnight surgery… it was odd being wheeled on a stretcher through empty, silent corridors past dark rooms, a bit like suddenly finding myself in the movie Coma, which wasn’t maybe the most cheerful thought to pass out on, but by that point I didn’t care. I just wanted the Bad Stuff out of me.

When I woke up, they brought me Nicola, and then we all went up to a room. The nurse shooed N out the door (it was nearly 3 AM, she was exhausted, and our friend Liz who drove us to the hospital was still asleep in a chair in the emergency room lobby). Then the nurse tucked me up in bed with a contraption that I still, with great fondness, refer to as “the cuffy things.” These are pneumatic cuffs they put on my ankles and calves: the cuffs squeezed my lower legs very gently, alternately, to help keep circulation going and prevent blood clots. They made a gentle wsssh wsssh sound, and the squeezing was like an ongoing massage, and I was warm and full of Vicodin and I knew my dangerous infected appendix was in a dish somewhere far away from me. And I went to sleep.

The cuffy things were unbelievably comforting, to the point they have become iconic for me. Now when I’m feeling tired or stressed, so overwhelmed by all that must be done that it’s hard to focus on actually doing it, I long for the cuffy things. For the feeling of security, of all your problems are somewhere else tonight, you’re safe, just go to sleep.

And Musha Cay is just a Great Big Cuffy Thing for me right now (grin). How wonderful it would be to swoop up a group of awesome people and take us all to a place like this. Where our problems would be somewhere else for a week, where we could play and talk and eat and drink and rest and be alone with the sky and the sea and then be together again.

I figure it’s good to have goals, so Musha Cay is on the list. Until then, I’ll pull out my other comfort strategies. Self-soothing is one of the skills we must acquire early if we’re to survive — we start as kids, with our blankies and teddy bears and all the ritualistic superstitious behaviors of childhood. I don’t have a blankie anymore, but I do:

Cook my mom’s tuna casserole.
Listen to music.
Go to a movie.
Read an old favorite book with a cup of tea and some chocolate.
Take a long hot bath. Sometimes I read in the bath, and sometimes I drink a chocolate milkshake.
Go to the pub. Not so much for the beer as for the journey to the “third place,” where they know me and I feel comfortable, but I don’t have my own problems around me.
Sit by the sea.
Watch the sky.

Those are some of my everyday cuffy things. What are yours? Whatever they are, may they work well for you always, and may you very rarely need them.