My Blue Castle

So should it be good or bad that my dad’s surgery is one of TWENTY-SEVEN being done at the hospital today? His is a minor-ish operation, but insofar as any operation is dangerous it’s still worrymaking. Mom says the waiting room is packed. He was supposed to go in at 2:30 but they moved the surgery up and he’s in pre-op now.

Note to whoever is down the hall previewing a 16mm film… projectors come with VOLUME knobs. Stop being a nob and turn it down!!

Creepy co-worker who treats all women as if they were five years old and in need of a lollipop (speak SLOWLY so the poor frail females may understand) is getting on my last nerve here… he stops by every morning to gossip and be generally the most annoying person on the planet.

We’re at four weeks till opening, and it’s like this Emily Dickinson piece is never going to end. Granted I love being there during rehearsals… it’s just not the most stimulating event. I mostly just cinch her into her corset and then sit around for three hours while we shepherd young actress through the ways of acting. How is it that she could have an undergraduate degree in acting and we just had to explain beats to her yesterday??!! Also difficult for a 25 year old to portray the entirety of a life, so more discussions which are fascinating… but when sitting in a corner on a metal folding chair… can get a bit tedious. I wouldn’t have expected the dynamics of a one woman show to feel so different from other plays, but it is somehow.

here’s a thinky thought that landed in my inbox this morning:

Helen Hayes

"Every human being on this earth is born with a tragedy, and it isn't original sin. He's born with the tragedy that he has to grow up. That he has to leave the nest, the security, and go out to do battle. He has to lose everything that is lovely and fight for a new loveliness of his own making, and it's a tragedy. A lot of people don't have the courage to do it."

What springs to mind when I read that is “oh… so that explains all those childish reality tv “stars” that are constantly cluttering up my TV…

Off to put on my Peter Pan CD and refuse to grow up for another day…

From James Wood's review of John Wray's novel "Lowboy," about a schizophrenic young man riding the subway. I am fascinated all the way around...

"Fiction is at once real and imaginary. Not real at one moment and flickeringly illusory the next, like the fading pulse of a dying man, but both at once, as if a ghost had a pulse. Fiction is one giant pseudo-statement, a fact-checker’s nightmare. Like one of our own lies, it can be completely “wrong” about the world and yet completely revelatory—completely “right”—about the psychology of the person issuing the error."

Check out the rest of the review here.