All of the Things that Aren’t Happening

Today I am in Winston Salem meeting with all kinds of folks—local artists, a choir leader, craftspeople—we’re talking about our work, sharing stories, connecting. It’s part of a year and a half long residency culminating in a Secret City event in the fall of 2021.

At the same time, I have been planning our annual Gershwin Cabaret. A line up of fabulous New York performers pick one Gershwin song each and sing it, I host the event and tell a bit of the history of the Gershwin brothers, and it all takes place in Ira Gershwin’s former penthouse on Riverside Drive, with the best view of the Hudson River and New York Harbor with the Statue of Liberty.

We’re also gearing up for our summer Art Revival here in Woodstock, where the town comes alive with performance and community events, we host an artist residency. There’s a town wide processional which we’ve been designing and making since January.

Bobby and I are going to Provincetown the week of May 19th—it’s a very special pilgrimage for us, with many beloved rituals.

I’m going to Omega at the end of June to teach a storytelling workshop, I’ll be back there in September to teach a writing workshop.

except, none oh these things are happening. All of these events populate the calendar I was keeping up until March 12th. Since then, those events, that vision of my future has eroded. I’m not in North Carolina, I’m not preparing for Gershwin, we won’t be going to Provincetown anytime soon and Omega is up in the air. I’m thinking of that Jimi Hendrix song: And so castles made of sand fall into the sea, eventually. Right now, the biggest question for my own life is: will The Secret City, the organization I’ve spent 13 years of my life buiiding, survive?

There’s a quote by E.L. Doctorow that I like to use when I teach: “Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

I admire immigrants, to leave the familiarity of home takes enormous courage, and the journey, some don’t make it. Then to arrive in a country where you’ve never been before and then, what? Like facing a blank page, you begin, with one word, just start putting paint on the canvas, you start composing with one note, then another, like stringing beads. Oh, I am rich with metaphors today!

I’m often more comfortable with the metaphorical than the literal. Looking back where I came I see how stories protected me, so dealing with the present, now, I lean into the page, tease out the ideas, work to clarify what I mean, how I feel, how a certain object looks, what a place sounds like.

But, what about the future—can stories help with that? I start but instantly run into trouble. Next week I will—hm, not sure. In May, we’re going to…my thoughts dry up. This summer is going to be…what? Quiet? Lonely? More of the same? It’s such a cliché but seriously, who knows? Collective uncertainty.

But haven’t we come through things? Not just humans, but the planet…Ice Ages, Dark Ages. The Mesozoic Era, the age of the dinosaurs, lasted almost 180 million years, from approximately 250 to 65 million years ago. What? Could dinosaurs imagine this time, humans with our little cars and stores--gated communities. Elon Musk, yes, but also Octavia Butler, Doris Lessing. Sci Fi.

A dear old friend asked me to speak to his grad students yesterday via zoom. They’re all performers, just about to graduate from CalArts and embark on careers in—what? What is theater when the house is dark, and the stage is bare, except for the glowing light standing alone, warding off ghosts. We think of ghosts as things of the past, but the future haunts us, too, our dreams, desires, the things we imagined our lives would have in them…expectations, which, I don’t now about you, but I find really hard to give up. On the zoom meeting, my friend asked me to talk about my work; I launched into a bio of my life in the theater, how it saved me, gave me purpose and direction and the dreams I had—but, I took the ride, like we all do, and if you’re lucky enough to make it to 55 or more, you know that life doesn’t ever go the way we think it will.

Toward the end of the session, my friend asked me—how do you awaken that thing that enables us to respond to this moment with passion and excitement? What would you tell folks—maybe your own students, or whomever—who aren’t feeling inspired, artists whose craft is suddenly being radically challenged… I thought a moment.

​Curiousity, I said. Be curious. Immediately I wondered if that was unfair. Like telling someone to be smarter, or to stop behaving in a way that is inherent to them—can curiosity be cultivated? Learned? I hope so, I really do—more than what we pack or what we’ve been given, more than education or money, more even than security—curiosity is what saves us, it is our headlights, casting just enough light to move forward into the today—hell, I can’t even see afternoon from here, but I can see this morning, and it’s fine. It’s rich with possibility.