City Hall

Laura and Ruben, beautiful. Marriage, blue sky, glowing.

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Trains

Chris Ziegler once said something very profound about relationships- in that case, long distance ones- and per usual, he’s good for general wisdom: You have three lives in a relationship. The one you share, the one you live separately, and the one where you merge the other two. I thought of that around 10pm Friday, smoking a joint outside a Fort Greene winebar. After leaving my noisy life for an afternoon living a strange and different one, returning.
I decided earlier that week to go visit my mother. It became a private milestone (though I am really beginning to detest these conceptually,  these manufactured life checkpoints that never seem to really change anything). So, a punchline, then a train ride to Floral Park.
It’s odd to think i take different lines on the LIRR to visit my parents now.
I don’t know why I went now. Part of it was to go before Leigh and Aaron’s wedding. The last time our crew was together was her funeral-  so it felt right to go before their great celebration. Part of it was my usual propensity to see any instinct I get to completion. Mostly,  upon reflection, I think it was to see if she really died.
A train and a cab ride later, we arrived at the office, a cross between a 1980′s bank and a CitiHabitats HQ (in terms of flurried activity and phone calls, real estate and mortality are similarly cyclical business models). Behind bulletproof glass, a man in a yarmulke printed out a map of the massive Beth David Cemetery that had her jewish name (a mess of vowels and syllables) and the intersection at which she…uh…lives (between joshua and benjamin, talk a left at mechlasomething). The mile-long walk to the site, sunlit silence with idle and perfunctory observations about dead strangers “how many steins do you think we’ll see?”  Soundtrack to the situation’s gravity was the fucking Mister Softee truck’s jingle on Elmont Avenue, drifting over the earth in mocking perpetuity.

At first, we couldn’t find her. ‘We’ was not me and Bret/Randi/ or Dad, or me and any of my posse, my life source, my vital signs. I took Jared. My man. I didn’t do things like that before; I didn’t invite anyone into the dark stuff, the tears and the horror behind sleepless eyelids. But I took him. Rather, he carried me.
In any case, we couldn’t find her.  This place is seriously fucking huge. It became sort of an academic exercise- Find the Plot. How many surrounding Shiveks does it take to find the Friedman amongst them? She doesn’t have a headstone yet (my father isn’t ready) so I didn’t have a visual cue. I realized later, I would have been happy to hunt all day, to keep the moment away, to never really do it. I walked around unit H6 (Benjamin) for almost twenty minutes, calling Dad, Bret, then the office. Finally, as I tapped my nails against an adjacent Blumstein as they tried to pinpoint her exact spot by cellphone, Jared called my name from 30 feet away. Slim and squinting amongst the waist high cement edifices, he pointed down. I hung up. My heart got sick and my gut, wormy. I navigated my way over, and saw my grandmother and grandfather’s name on a stone.

I was incredulous. No fucking way. I know them. if they’re here, then.
Yeah. She is here.
jared stood above a foot high mound of dirt.

She is there. She actually is.

I wasn’t sure it really happened but, seems it did. There’s a sign at the head of the dirt with her name.

Three months of rhetoric and philosophy and residency in my head ended when I saw that dirt. I climbed down to her. She moved into my heart, my stomach, my fingers. i grabbed the dirt, I wanted to go so deep down that i might be under there. i loved her so much. i held the dirt, I held her.
Daan once said when his father was dying he wanted to crawl into the hospital bed and hold him. I never understood it until I was there, in the sun, my shoes bathed in warm dirt and my knees childlike, sticky with miniature twigs and leaves. I never  looked at her, loved her, as much as i did then. she moved into my heart, my life, as i curled into her, breathing in the fine late summer heat and the dust.
I got up and sat for awhile. I sat on my grandparents’ headstone (I don’t think they mind my particular sense of ceremony). I didn’t talk. I listened to the ice cream truck. Jared sat and smoked over in H5. I could have stayed there all day, in this other life; but its not really this other life. Its just more of mine. Its not going anywhere, and neither is she. Something is there, its not her really, but something is there, all the time, all day long, all forever long. After the sun goes down, and the truck pulls away, I imagine that its quiet. At least from what we can understand.

The walk back was different. I was dirty but maybe clean. We made it back to Brooklyn, where I move and move. She is there, in the quiet. There is something in that cemetery, for me. It will be part of me when I need it; I will probably need that train ride sometimes.

My boy is an angel. He is an angel. He was there, head-on and beautiful, holding me, thoroughly a man.  My man. Jared took that first blow for me, finding her instead of me tripping on her. I asked him what he felt at that moment- he simply replied “I just said hi to your mom”. He is something. She would have loved him.

He also later admitted he wanted diner curly fries but didn’t think it was appropriate to voice. Those are hard to find in Brooklyn, we found out upon return to this life, on a nearly hourlong curlyfry pilgrimage. Long Island has some things we can’t really get anywhere else. Its a shame he didn’t say anything while we were there. I don’t think you can make a trip to the suburbs without stopping at a diner.

It is so easy to love someone, for them to fall simply into your heart and your multi-part life. You find yourself ready. My mother fell right in. Jared fell right in.  My parents fell in at a bar in 1971. There are hundreds of partners in that stony quiet in Beth David right now, they fell into each other. Chris is right in that we have many lives at once. We have so little time with them, so I guess its efficient.

It is so easy. I am so lucky.

Chris

Lost a friend this week, across the ocean, my sweet cosmic crush and a beautiful soul.

To know someone could feel such loneliness is a paralyzing thought at a Flatbush Avenue intersection.

I am so lucky.

Flickering

will possibly burn down a 40 unit building

i’m burning a candle the rabbi gave us, with the directive to let it burn straight through the day.  ‘The…whole time?’ I clarified, incredulous. Call me spoiled and out of touch with heritage, but I tend to think modern Brooklyn households are more flammable than troubled Maccabee dwellings. But apparently this is supposed to go straight for 24 hours. or 7 days. or something. I’m consulting wikipedia (which is hebrew for ‘atheist who never had a bat mitzvah’… Didya know?). In any case, owning furniture my cat can reach, an anticipatory guilt towards burning down my apartment building and the propensity to want to leave my house requires I blow this out when I go back home for shiva, Day 2, tomorrow.

Shiva, meaning 7 (thanks, relatives/internet!) is the period in which jews mourn a passing. technically it requires we cover mirrors, not shave, sit on hard surfaces, ignore visitors until we feel like talking and blithley eat a shitton of baked goods. since bret and i tend towards a more vain and stimulated existence, Day 1 involved a Tanqueray toast, a gorgeous mob of chelsea homosexuals descending upon a Queens cemetery, and tossing martini glasses in the ocean (as beta testing for the June 9th drop-a-thon. Verdict: I’m not a thrower by nature).

I took the candle back to Brooklyn; drained, gutted, numb and grateful.

We buried her today and so continued the recent phenomenon of shoving huge milestones into 5 seconds- the first call, the family gathering, the choosing of the coffin, the funeral, the mourning. I don’t know what the fuck comes next. Dinosaurs, maybe.

It was a profound service. She was jewish and was buried next to her parents (my dad wants to be cremated and won’t be joining her). Nearly 90 people of every age, orientation, color and culture crowded the dirt and weeds while the sun shone. We were like the Barrymores, except less weird.

Many there didn’t know her- but they know me, and Bret, and that means they know her. How profound, how visceral. She’s in me. The rabbi mentioned that and I can’t get it out of my head.

I didn’t want to trust him, or invest in what he would say. He called us Saturday night and I forced myself speak to him. I don’t believe in God, I find ritual bullshit, and he had never met her. i was worried about a solemn Mad Libs-like recitation ( Elissa was a ___ who was known for her ____. Many ____ed her because of her constant ____ for ____. Please fear God. The exit is to the left). But I gotta say, I drank his words. He expressed a profound respect for concepts- how good and vile life can be. what a mother is,what a husband is, and the notion of legacy. Roots, branches and dust as metaphors (and you know i loves me some metaphors) for how much one still occupy the earth once they are dead. she is still here.

he said she has left but she still remains- holy shit. i’m still reeling from the truth of that. i mean, it has to be true. there were people there today that ether never met her, or never really met her because she was too sick to represent herself. but they were still there because they know me, or bret, or my father and they love us. and i’m here because of her. it’s not theology, its logic, it’s biological.

i am her. she is in me. for better or for worse. my life, so full of glorious moments and ideas and people, continues with her body gone. These things are evidence she existed. I am her, and I am thankful.

I’m also fucked up and numb and frequently feel like someone is neatly folding my chest into origami. I have lived in a vacuum for 4 days and don’t know what happens when I reenter the world and its pace, its priorities. I wrestle with the injustice of long illness, a mother-daughter relationship stopped in its tracks, and the idea of a life more tragic than the death.

But it’s ok- there’s life ahead. She’s no longer here in a way that’s painful. It’s some other thing, something that allows life and growth. I will learn to live with a balance of presence and absence, as there was before, but turned inside out. This version allows life and growth. the pain and the joy flicker and shift, like the candle does.

So, I don’t believe in God but I believe in friends, and hope, and new beginnings and strength. Which means I’m going to fuck with the protocol and blow the candle out when I go to Pilates in the morning, and then to my dad’s in the afternoon. relight when i get home. balance.

“So I was talking to the cop…”

began my father, looking reflectively out onto the ocean yesterday, may 20, 2010, the day his wife died after 38 years of marriage. and i burst out laughing. he started a sentence this way, sitting, surveying the water as he, bret and myself had a waterside sushi dinner. late sun reflected off the canal. a too chilly breeze that didn’t compel us to move inside because it wasn’t extreme enough to compete with the heat and the shock inside us. more close to what we’re going through were the waves’ meandering unpredictability. i guess that how this goes.

its the second day of this sad sad thing and life the way it will be. it took almost 2 decades to finish. though just hours to restore an appreciation for blacker humor (most would think it’d be closer to a whole day).evidenced by that statement, which had me busting up.

the tone and context is important, of course- we had just toasted elissa sandra friedman with mugs of japanese tea, and were sitting quietly watching the water, each other, and at one point, two seagulls fucking on the dock (yes, nature does continue mechanically even in these fucked up times; and yes, bret filmed their squawking inappropriateness. Didn’t they understand the cinematic melancholy of this dinner?).

anyway.

“So i was talking to the cop”… bret and i break up in tearful laughter at this bizarre, out-of-nowhere sentence fragment. i mean, it makes sense- on long island, a cop has to legally accompany any 911 ambulance call. but seriously, it was a little weird to hear. but the concluding profundity is what really got me:

” and he said, i’m sorry but i have to ask… did your wife own an unlicensed weapon?”

there’s no way to sum how perfectly insane the notion is. my mother was nearly incapacitated for years.  the image of her, an always sweet natured (and eventually nearly helpless) individual keeping an unregistered handgun beneath her wheelchair had me crying for a million reasons.

i have to archive all this so i don’t miss anything that i will need to hold me up, to help me hold onto preciousness. that was funny. it was just fucking funny. i’m in a lot of pain. and i might be in shock. and my shoulders feel like throwing up and i’m crying a bunch. even two days in there’s so much crying and laughing and it’s just gonna be like this. i guess. but bret and my dad and myself are in touch with each other and ourselves, and we’ll work it out together. we’re learning absence. her absence was partial before she died; i think its partial now, in a different way.  it’s hard to define the presence she held before and of course, impossible to say what it is now. but i know she’s free. she’s no longer in that body and i don’t know where she is, but she’s not in pain and she’s free.

so is my dad. so is my brother. so am i. she’s free and it was her choice. she died in her sleep thursday morning. she spared my father a million more difficult choices. she was so fucking brave.

as is he. i have a heroic father who has faced horror head on, with compassion and patience and a love i can’t fathom. Who now has to figure out how to move on with his life, reconciling what it is to miss his partner, all of her, the woman he married and the woman who disappeared slowly; who can, already, laugh and smile and appreciate the weight as well as the lightness my family sits with in late sunlight.

i have a brother whose tenderness is matched by his strength and sensitivity, humor and tribal-like loyalty. i could learn so much from him in that way.

they’re my family. this is our new structure. she was my family too; she still is. i gotta figure that one out. i didn’t have the ‘her’ everyone tells me about for very long- i gotta grieve. i gotta work with that.

i gotta reconstruct her through stories and photos and by smoking a joint and literally feeling her- trace my fingers over her scarves and jewelry, over the curves of the diamonds on the necklace that spells her name. i did that last night, held up by girl members of my devoted posse in a living room in crown heights, surrounded by tarts and wine.

jewelry explosion! grief tarts!

but i think i know her better than i give credit for. the choice she made thursday; she was tired and did it herself. what a fierce woman, what a mother, what a wife. that’s love. oh god, it hurts to understand love and really look at it because it is too, too much sometimes. but i gotta. i have to touch how painful this terrible journey was in order to move on and look at myself, and others, with grace and forgiveness and honesty.

i’m also gonna eat my feelings a little bit, there’s shivah for that. ranbow cookies as solace for about a decade of nervous. i’m entitled. i mean, we were fucking upstaged by lena horne and there has to be a little justice for that, yeah? yes.

lines like the cop one are worth storing. even the trip to the funeral home this afternoon was a horror movie but occasionally quite funny. i guess that’s how this goes.

we’re burying her on sunday. no memorial service at the funeral home, thank fucking god. we’re classy. graveside service straight to their (his? fuck. don’t know. his?) house, and a smoked meat platter from pastrami king,  hugs from old jews and new york friends, and tanqueray and tonics. her favorite.

i have so much. i am lucky. it hurts so much.

‘his beauty’ design update

Utterly inspired after an impromptu design meeting.

For ‘his beauty’ Jon Cottle’s design thesis is so reflective of the themes in the piece, that i’ve been furiously googling seemingly incongruent phrases such as ‘hipster porn with trees’  and ‘Darth Vader’  while dashing off moments in the script I’ve never seen; a creative, lively secret Saturday night off.

Besides solving the do-or-die challenges of a festival load-in process (15 minutes before and after a performance, zero storage space, and a rep light plot to share with multiple shows) this incredible production team of bright and engaged New York artists- Christine Dow’s costumes, Ashley Hannan’s choreography, Stephanie Cox-Williams’ fight choreography, Danny Abalos’ video and sound, Saphira Celius’ production management and Jon’s lights and set- is developing a meaningful and hot-as-fuck allegory of sex, possession, and object/subject relationship; a totally sublime fable.

Four characters cavort inside a stark, 15×15 bungalow of kitsch and fluorescent lit desire- a box in which the role of Object and Subject shift constantly, and characters live under harshly literal scrutiny from audience and each other. Much of the play’s language are subtle distinctions of seeing vs. looking, and the myriad vile ways we can tether ourselves to other people. With just a square of snow white carpet, 4 aluminum poles, exposed clip lights and a deep red canopy (velvet, naturally), we aim to create an environment of distance, while the content probes  at intimacy.  Upstage of the box is a backdrop of abstracted, grayscale pornography, acting as canvas for Danny’s pulsing and evocative video collages.

Man. It’s getting me going. And possibly makes no sense to read about. But I am so pleased to create something with a group so engaged with the issues of power, subjectivity, and vulnerability in this fucked up story.  Come check it out; we’re keeping a spot on the carpet- dark, inviting, and kinda dirty…

TICKETS Y’ALL

Um,

never let me forget all the reasons i love you

i just found that on a scrap of paper in my bedroom as i was doing some sundown cleaning. still letting it settle, not sure of the context in which it was written, still rendered a puddle, an exxon valdez caliber spill of gratitude.