So I awake in a room streaming with light, even though it is not that bright a day. The anguish and cares of the past couple of weeks, though not quite vanished, now seem just more preparation for being all right. I do not imagine for a moment that there will be no more problems-- I have had moments where I lost speech, lost direction, and I am hopeful now that that was all anxiety, because I didn't know where my life was going, or if. It is beyond strange to get to my juncture of the road and have nothing settled in my life, least of all my body. To be adventurous at this turning I understand is unusual to say the least. But then, little in my history has been traditional, except for my wonderful college. And my having opted out of Bryn Mawr Reunion to come to Europe sort of spoke to how I felt about looking back.
Because God was I going to set the world on fire! Broadway was just waiting for me. I knew Frank Loesser, and even more base, Frank Loesser knew me. I had a champion in Yip Harburg, the finest lyricist ever (that stands,) I had Summer Stocked with Marlon Brando, at his most marvelous and thin and terrible at comedy, I had loved up close a movie star, before it was okay and sort of known that he was gay, I had been abused even in college by a young man who would also become a movie star, before he threw it away with drugs, I had traveled the world and lived in the south of Spain before it was overrun with tourists, had a romance with a bullfighter, stopped short of being gored, sung in a night club in Paris, had my palm scratched by Maya Angelou. Why, there was nothing I wouldn't be able to do.
And then I'd met Don, and my fear that I wouldn't have children was obliterated. They were wonderful when they were little. So much for that.
But the good die young. And he was very, very good.
Then I started my life all over again, writing travel for the Wall Street Journal Europe, the only job I ever had after the one when I was twenty, writing comedy for NBC, sharing office space with Woody Allen, already much smarter than I, coming into the office only on the day we got our checks. I had a friend then, Selma Diamond, who wrote for Sid Caesar, and when we walked in the park she asked a pigeon: "Any messages?"
I still think of her when I see a pigeon, and they are everywhere. So in a way, I guess, she is immortal. As long as someone thinks of you, in a way you are immortal. So I hope this will become a real book, and someone will read it, and think of me.
I mean, if people still read books, and it isn't all just the damned internet.
