My Life is Like Beautiful Perfect Apple...

I was verklempt (Yiddish for "choked up with emotion") yesterday at the end of The Language Archive, the play I directed at Heartland Theatre. 

I felt it coming on as tears sprang to my eyes at every poignant moment in Act II, and then I was holding back tears at the end, all too aware (from childhood on) of what could happen next: immobility from sobbing. Sigh... It was a lovely experience, and August (rehearsals) and September (performances) have whizzed by the way time does when you are immersed in goodness.

This a beautiful perfect apple by Jonathan Koch, and it makes me think of Alta in the play saying, "My life is like beautiful perfect apple..." in a marital spat scene in which she continues, "and then you are WORM who come in and eat the rotten heart--," her husband, Resten, interrupting to point out the flaw in her metaphor, "YES, exactly--ROT-TEN HEART you have--" and the hilarity continues. I'm sure lines from the play will continue to come back to me for a good while.

And it's apple time, too. And I've seen pumpkins ripe in the fields. And some poems are ripening. And by the end of the week, I'll be immersed in the next theatre experience, the annual Evergreen Cemetery Walk. I'll be entangled in another marital spat, that of Mary and Asahel Gridley. Better go outside to work on my lines in the sunshine!

Harvest Begins

I took a short business trip to Chicago yesterday by train and got to see the beautiful yellows, greens, browns, rust, and lavender of early fall, striping the fields. On the way home, the corn was a day riper, a day crisper, and a slightly different (wheatier) shade of brown, and harvest has begun!

This fantastic corn, grasshopper, and moth art is by Andrea Kowch.

While I was there I discovered a new neighborhood downtown, just east of the Radisson Blu, that has sprung up since I've been gone (since 2000, that is). Gorgeous park, edged with roses, a fenced children's playground in the middle. Fancy wancy condos, organic grocery stores, a nail salon, restaurants, and boutiques encircle the park. Very pretty. If only I were fancy wancy (and rich).

But at least I am alive! (I dared to eat sushi again.) When I got home, I drove a wood splinter into my palm, so maybe I will die of that instead. In other news...

Internet Quiz Death

If I die this year, my dears, a crazy Internet quiz prediction will have come true. Why did I even take that Facebook quiz? A friend took it, it looked like fun? "It's scientific," the quiz claimed. Oh, it will show me healthy foods & good lifestyle choices and maybe even offer me wine and dark chocolate*, I imagined. It will comfort me with a nice distant age of death, something like 94 or, goofily, 120, which a current anthropologist predicts, according to another link. I will die at a nice old age, I foolishly thought.

No, I will die at the age I am now, predicts the scientific Internet quiz. That's annoying and a bit disconcerting, like waking from a bad dream that lingers all day. Among the stock photos offered as answers to the sometimes hard to answer** questions, I wanted to pick the soup on the stove. It looked like a nice, hot vegetable soup. But maybe it had sausage in it. So I picked the sushi, having had some excellent spicy salmon sushi Saturday night at Anju Above, a Korean restaurant! Now I'm going to die.

To comfort myself, I'm posting morning glories, in honor of finding another on the fence this morning. Unlikely but beautiful morning glories in my friend Lorel's garden.

*Yes, it did. I said yes.

**Do I want mustard on my hot dog? NO, I don't even want the hot dog! "NO, I don't even want the hot dog!" was not an option. I am a lousy Internet test taker.

Bel Canto

I am reading Bel Canto, by Ann Patchett, hot on the heels of State of Wonder. Bel Canto turned up on many people's lists of 10 memorable books, and I think blog pals here have advised me to read it more than once but especially whenever I rave on wildly about the aria from Lucia di Lammermoor in the movie, The Fifth Element. I love that movie. I love that aria!

Recently I had the lovely surprise of a poem of mine set to music by Joe Robinson of Ham Kicker, a music collaboration site where poets can leave poems and various composers can use them as inspiration for songs! Here it is, "I woke in grief and beauty," a dreamily sad poem set to a charmingly joyful melody!

Many thanks to Right Hand Pointing for first publication of the poem and for taking another poem for December publication. It's been a dry season for acceptances lately, if a wet season outside. (Yes, it rained at--but not in!--the theatre last night, drowning out a bit of the dialogue and even a train whistle at one point, but we all got through!) Poets who read this blog should check out the collaboration practices at Ham Kicker and the current calls for submissions at RHP!

Monkey Orchids

Beautiful, breezy morning for the Alzheimer's Walk today! A little cloud cover, so it was never too hot. Lovely opening ceremony, lovely people walking + some dogs, including Daisy, on our team! And I have a new purple t-shirt for promoting the cause and for cheering on the Bloomington Junior High volleyball team when that season arrives!

I guess my gratitude continues to overflow: this morning, a surprise morning glory, after I thought they were spent. The play continues to please and delight people, to move some to tears. People are impressed by the actors, yay! They love the script, yay! (Except for those who don't--but that's a taste thing, subjective, and I don't worry about people who don't like whimsy or don't like not-quite realistic plays; they have plenty of other plays to delight and move them!) Um, but a storm is brewing, so I hope I get the chance to be grateful later...if it doesn't rain in at the theatre, or drown out the actors or the marvelous congruence of the distant train, that so consistently arrives in the perfect scene, resonating with the earlier sound effect train!

Ah, thunder. Ah, monkey orchids.