So finally having overcome my own apathy and disappointment with what the theatre (spelled the committed way) here has provided, I made my way to what I will have to conclude is the East Village, and the New York Theatre Workshop presentation of RED-EYE TO HAVRE DE GRACE, a title so complex and elevated it might have lit up a side street in Paris. It is a dark and sort of delicious, in a sour way, presentation, starting with a man who pretends to be a fire inspector before he bursts into song, and whom I engaged in a bit of chatter as I believed the uniform, and, as everybody knows who talked to me lately, I lived in my 11th or maybe it was my twelfth year at 255 West 84th, on which site, it says in brass on the outside wall, Edgar Allen Poe wrote The Raven. And as those who know me also know, I do not believe in coincidence, but imagine that almost everything is Divine Choreography, except the Middle East. So I lived there because it was on that site that Edgar Allen Poe wrote The Raven, and I was given the gift of poetry because there had to be something to balance in my soul the way my parents tore each other apart.
It was there that I first began writing songs as I lay in my foldaway bed in the living room, and my mother, hearing, when I told her what I was doing, said "Oh, my God, she's crazy as a bedbug!" But I did write what became the school song for P.S.9, on 82nd and West End, which is now, according to my friend and (didn't know it at the time) schoolmate Hal Dresner, a school for the intellectually challenged, to put it kindly. But then, ah then, it had Mrs. Schatteles for a principal, and she was a woman who loved education and gave her all to it and the children whose lives she touched, which happily included mine. So, with her guidance, I chose a destiny that included serious education, and didn't go to the Hunter program for exceptional children when I was invited into it, because I knew I'd do better with Mrs. Schatteles staying in P.S.9. Just as I chose to go to Bryn Mawr, even though Radcliffe shone glossier, because I got who and what Bryn Mawr had to offer: women who were smart who really cared.
The play about Poe is shadowy excellent, and the man who plays him is inspired and perhaps already a little crazy.Or maybe a lot. He is intensely dark-eyed and very sunken-cheeked handsome and has obviously fallen face forward into the role, so I hope he survives it. But he is clearly gifted, and I'm glad I went. It justified theah-tah and what we hope to get from it. And in some cases, if we're lucky, give.
And now, just as I get ready to go to London, and from there, Scotland to visit Rosie and then to the Isle of Man, Wight, Skye? one or all? I connect at long last with my wonderful, eloquent, and great-hearted teacher, Jack Kornfield, who calls from the start of a retreat in Yucca Valley, where I learned how to be still, the thing in life that was hardest for me. As always, Jack lifts, and, in this case, affirms that I am doing exactly the right thing. All is in place. Either it will happen or it won't. Not up to me.
GO, UNIVERSE!
