The Trip- Part 1

I am lying on a king-sized bed in a Holiday Inn in Gainesville GA after a marathon trip from Winchester VA, down the Shenandoah Valley, past the Monongahela National Forest, the George Washington National Forest, the Cherokee National Forest, across the Tennessee panhandle, the Pisgah National Forest, through the Smoky Mountains and Asheville, NC where I had once spent a rainy afternoon with a bad boyfriend, where my Smartphone failed me and couldn’t get me a reservation on Priceline so we had to call our son in CT to go online and get us a hotel reservation, into South Carolina passing Campobello (is that the place where “The Sunrise”… is at?), down into Georgia about six hours after I had wanted to stop in the first place. My body is still tingling from the vibration of the road.

Day 1 was cool. We stopped in NY and had a nice dinner at a Mexican restaurant, then saw a Broadway show: “House of Blue Leaves”. (Good but John, Swoozie and Christine were better. And whoever told Jennifer Jason Leigh she could act?) We continued to NJ that night and stayed with our kids and granddaughter.

Day 2 of the adventure was fairly sane. The GPS took us clear across Pennsylvania before making a sharp left toward the south. Winchester VA was so nice. We stopped driving at about four p.m. having gotten a reservation on Priceline at a Borders with free Wi-Fi. $50 for a 3-star hotel. Adorable! Such a cute room. Ikea chic. King-size bed, 42 inch flat screen, one of those tall, round, ultra-modern sinks, glass shower with a smoky glass wall that overlooked the bedroom area. Very sexy. Mini-fridge with complimentary bottled water and free Wi-Fi that worked immediately. We found a few restaurants online that looked wonderful and headed down to the historic district for a truly memorable dinner at Violini’s.

But that was yesterday. Today my husband took me on the modern-day equivalent of a forced march. He SAID we could stop whenever I wanted to but somehow, whenever I suggested a stop, it was either too far off-course or too late because we just passed that exit. Suddenly, stopping for another night before reaching our Georgia destination became a “waste of time”.

So Day 2 we ate at a 4-star restaurant and Day 3 we dined at Five Guys.

And that’s another thing! There are no more local anythings! Wherever you go, you’re in the same place. Every exit has the same hotels: La Quinta, Holiday Inn Express, Hampton House, Comfort Inn, Days Inn and, of course, a Super 8. Every town has McDonalds, Starbucks, Dunkin Donuts. (Where did all the Krispy Kremes go?) I saw at least a dozen Outbacks, Red Lobsters, Friendlies. Then there are the regional redundancies: Shoneys, Golden Corral, etc. Every mall is the same: Marshalls, Borders, outlet stores. You drive for hours and if the mountains didn’t change, if the mile-markers didn’t keep their relentless .10 mile pace, you’d swear you hadn’t moved. I do want to send out a special thank you to Borders for the free Wi-Fi. Meanwhile, we’ll rest up for a day and then continue south. More to come.

My incredible Spring

I am sitting in the teachers’ room at a public arts magnet school where all my thoughts of wanting to teach are being dashed like ten-foot waves on a rocky shore. I got a job replacing a theatre arts teacher who has to take the rest of the semester off because of health problems. What’s most amazing to me is that ALL the teachers aren’t in rest homes! It is May. That’s nine months of backtalk, bureaucracy and early rising. I’ve been at it for two weeks and I need a vacation.

When the job was suggested to me I thought “Sure! Eight weeks? Piece of cake!” And, in theory, it IS a piece of cake. (I've been told that the normal pre-requisite for a Sub is a newspaper and a cup of coffee.) But teenagers are not cake. They’re not even cookies. As the regular teachers are not shy about descrying, they are... smaller than that. (Enough said. I know you get it.) At first I was shocked to hear them describe their charges in such colorful terms. Now I applaud them on their restraint.

I don’t want to paint all of the students with the same brush. There are some students that make it a pleasure to come to class each day. They sit, listening attentively, participating to the best of their ability above the din of the other ones; the ones who sit with their backs to you, who can’t stop talking, who answer back with the disdain one generally reserves for worms and rodents; the ones who look at an assignment as a challenge to their autonomy; who couldn’t care less about being here and will say so, unabashedly, to your face.

It may sound clichéd but “when I went to school” you wouldn’t dream of answering back to a teacher. You were afraid of teachers (!) even though the law said they couldn’t hit you anymore. (My husband went to a parochial school where they hadn’t gotten that memo yet and was routinely thrown up against the locker by a belligerent brother.) But these kids… Fresh? Omigod! They talk incessantly and when you ask them to stop they look you square in the face and say they weren’t talking. You start to feel a little crazy, seeing their lips move, hearing the murmurs and being told you imagined it. They lie on the floor, sometimes in pairs. They dress like they’re going to a rock concert. They lie right to your face. In groups!
“Your teacher sent me this lesson plan.”
“Oh, we did that already!”
“You did?”
“Twice.”

They hate us! Maybe hate is too strong a word. They tolerate. They disrespect. They know better. They think teachers were put on this earth to make their lives miserable. It is a cesspool of discontent. And if you demand attention, if you demand respect, if you demand anything, they will tell you outright that their “Mama will come to school and lay a whoop-ass on you” if you write them up. (That is a direct quote.) Oh, yes, ‘The Write-Up”- that is the punishment! I saw the following in one of the classrooms I visited. For a first offense a disobedient punk gets a verbal warning. (Oooooh!) For the second offense they get their name written on the dry erase board. (Oooooohhh! Now I can see this sort of public humiliation working on a businessman who has been caught trying to buy a hooker, but not on a kid who has just defied the authority of a women who comes up to his elbow.) For the third offense, you get “written up”. A formal complaint is lodged with the principal’s office. (Ooooohhhhhhhhhhh! See above comparison of student to teacher and multiply by 0.) For the fourth infraction (Fourth? Really?) your parents have to come to school for a meeting. (Refer to above section where student tells you Mama will lay a whoop-ass on you.) There's "In-house Suspension" where you get to run into the person you disciplined on a daily basis. And, of course, for the most persistent, major offenders, there is 'the boot'. I don't know how bad you have to be to get 'the boot' and I don't really want to find out. I'm just a little scared.

Still, if I had the opportunity, I would do it again. There have been moments - a class where everybody wanted to be there; a thank you from a student who had been praised; a thank you from a student who just had a good time in class. Those good ones... they make it all worthwhile.

And the music plays on and on...

What part of the brain is it that controls music? Is there a particular spot? Because it feels like the whole thing.

It is 7:51 a.m. I didn’t get to bed until after 2 so my body feels exhausted. But my brain… it keeps playing a familiar refrain… “The Brady Bunch. The Brady Bunch. That’s the way we all became the Brady Bunch.” Over and over it plays until I want to beat my own brain out with a stick. The other night it was “Limbo Rock.” Once upon a time it was “We are Flintstone kids, 10 million strong and growing.” What triggers this firing of synapses dedicated to driving a person crazy?

While the song plays, my brain produces another train of thought that runs through the song on a single rail as if through a mountain pass. “Get the white board; tape a camp flyer to it; find the old photos of the camp; tape them to the board; stop at Edmond Town Hall; borrow an easel; should I bring an easel; maybe something to prop it up on the table; will there be room on the table….” Feverish activity!!! But my body doesn’t move.

Wouldn’t it be far more productive if, instead of discovering things like Viagra, which I consider a BIG waste of time (Who really wants to spend more time in the sack with an old man who has erectile dysfunction?) scientists could figure out a pill to make us be able to manifest the actions our brain wants us to accomplish even when the body says “Don’t bother me now; I’m sleeping”? (Wait a minute… that is Viagra!)

Frances

My husband just walked out of the room and slammed the door. I don’t know why. I awakened from what felt like a very deep sleep. I had been lying in bed for over an hour, wrestling with the exhaustion of my body and the ramblings of my mind. My whole body had felt like it was sinking but my brain was doing things like singing “Limbo Rock”. Really! And then, I was talking to my grandmother; my "bubby".

She had come to visit and looked like she did perhaps at 60- tiny, robust, and very sweet. Her hair was a dark grey, not the white it would become in later years, and it was styled to perfection, teased a little, flipping at the ends. She looked so beautiful. And I said, “We can go to see Frances tomorrow if you like.” She had just gotten here but this was a priority. She was aching to go to her handicapped sister who I recently located in a nursing home. Frances has been living in one facility or another since my great-grandfather, my “Little Zaida” died maybe 40 years ago. Frances was “retarded” at a time when no one would dream of calling it anything else. She didn’t speak and made noises that sounded to me like those of a chimp. All “ooh, ooh, ee, ee, ah, ah”. But her brothers and sister could always understand her!

One by one over the years the brothers died, and then my grandmother, until the only people who went to visit her anymore were my great Uncle and his wife. They never told her about the cancer that had claimed one of her siblings, or the old age that had claimed the other two. “They went to Florida; that’s why they couldn’t visit.” I always wondered what she thought “Florida” was. Did she, who had never been farther than the Lower East Side until she moved into her “home” in upstate New York, have any concept of “Florida”? Of distance?

The last few years have been very hard on my great Uncle. He lost his stepson and then his wife in rapid succession. The grief was overwhelming and his stepdaughter one day spirited him to an assisted living facility… in Florida. Suddenly, without explanation, Frances was without visitors. She stopped eating. They have been feeding her through a tube.

I have either been sick or busy since I found out where Frances is and I have promised to take my mother there when she comes to visit next month. I feel a strong calling to go to her now but I’m so afraid. I still feel sick; weak and shaky. The glands in my neck hurt again and the pressure in my chest is palpable. I have to gather old pictures to bring her because she will not have a clue as to who I am. To do that, I have to find an old carton in the moldy basement that is probably the cause of at least some of my ailment. And if I do find it, and do drive the hour to her bedside, and do show her the pictures, how will I explain to this woman in her late 90s that I am the little girl in the picture taken in her father’s living room? And that I will come again next month with my mother, her niece “Fagey”, when she visits… from Florida?

Slings and Arrows

I get a weekly update on the visitors to my various Facebook pages. It reports the number of people who’ve looked at your pages, the number of people who “Like” you or it. The number goes up or down from week to week, signified by either a green arrow pointing up or a red arrow pointing down. If nothing changes, you get the green arrow. Thank you for the small vote of confidence.

I have always had an issue with being “liked”. Perhaps it was the vanishing of my father at the age of 9. I must have been something awful if my own father didn’t like me enough to stick around. To a child, these decisions are always about the child. There could be no other reason for the abandonment. It took some work but I finally accepted that I wasn’t to blame. Still, the question always lingers. Do you like me?

“Well, who the F*** cares if you like me?” I get to that epiphany on occasion. Interestingly, to me anyway, I give up the-need-to-know both when I am extremely confident and when I am feeling totally defeated. One comes out of a momentary sense of being okay; the other comes out of a sense that life has passed me by and I forgot to get on the bus. The enduring part of my psyche knows that one day will follow another and that somehow, someway, I will be all right. I won’t lose my home. I won’t have to eat cat food. My children will always love me and be there for me. I will see something of this world other than what I’ve seen so far. The other part ponders sleep. I’ve had enough. It’s just too hard. The mortgage is due; the credit card bill is too high; gas is over $4 again; everything goes up except the income. Then the phone rings and a friend offers me a job and I think, okay, I’ll make it through another year. She likes me.

Once upon a time I had a wicked stepsister. She probably wasn’t really wicked but she didn’t like me. She was six years younger than my mother and wasn’t thrilled that her Dad had adopted a new family. I can see that now. She was ready for him to be grandpa to her kids, not Daddy to a 9-year-old girl. Anyway, we never had a relationship and I’ve come to regret that now that Dad is gone. I used to get obligatory presents from her on my birthday. Once she gave me a silver scuttle and, when I open it, the card saying Merry Christmas to all her husband’s employees fell out. That was a fast elevator ride down from elated to crushed. But the reason I bring this up is that once she gave me something I really liked- a gold arrow that hung from a chain. I still have it. There’s only one thing wrong with it. The arrow is pointing down.

I hate those arrows.

Round and Round and Round

Round and round and round it goes. Will it stop? Nobody knows!

I don’t remember who came down with it first. I think it was my son who spent this semester doing a rotation in an elementary school towards his Masters Degree. Elementary Schools: a breeding ground for germs and bacteria second only to hospitals but with even less of the hygiene. He’d come home and head straight for the shower, quivering at the thought of runny-nosed kids running up for a hug. I’m glad he’s popular. I wish they wouldn’t touch him.

He went down hard: sinus infection, throat, the works. Missed a week of school. By the time he was better, I was on my way to the doctor.

Or was my husband the next to succumb? He works at Madison Square Garden which is undergoing renovations even as the seasons of basketball, hockey and concerts grind on. It started in the sinuses. Asbestos, we thought. But then came the other symptoms and his first round of antibiotics. When was that? My first round was in February.

Two up, one down, one up, two down. One or another of us has been sick since the ball dropped in Times Square. My son went down for round two a couple of weeks ago. I’m on antibiotics again, along with steroids, antihistamines and a new inhaler. Right now, my husband is standing in front of me struggling to get the cap back on the childproof bottle of Tylenol. He can’t ask for help; he can’t speak. Day four of his antibiotics.

Interesting sidebar: we’re all sick, we all keep re-infecting each other, and yet we’re all given different pills. Why is that?

It is Easter Sunday and the temperature has reached a balmy 71°. I dragged myself out of bed this morning, opened every window in the house and the door and did four loads of laundry including all the bedding. Someone once gave me an Indian Smudge Stick for purification. I wonder where that went. It doesn’t seem like a bad idea right now to circle the house a few times and cast out all the evil spirits. It finally feels like spring and I’d like to enjoy it… if only I could stop coughing.

What Next

My “Nurse Jackie” episode aired last night and with it went my ability to say, “I’ve got a “Nurse Jackie” episode coming up.” In a business where success can be so fleeting, the question, “What have you been doing lately” is a loaded one. Ask a banker what he’s been up to and he’s likely to say, “Oh, I’m still with ‘Such-and Such” or I took a new job with “X, Y and Z”. But an actor, especially a New York actor, is lucky if the week is filled with just auditions. I’m happy if I get one a month! And a job…! Wow! If you are one of the few very lucky enough to be in a long running show or series, well, you have the key to the city! I had a key to the city once. I remember those days… strolling to the theatre at dusk. I owned the streets of New York on those walks. When all the ‘ordinary’ people were finishing their day, I was starting mine. Drinks at the theatre row bars afterwards. “I just saw you!” A working actor “belongs”. I belonged. I hate going to see shows, leaving the theatre with the rest of the audience and feeling like one more tourist. I want to wear a sign that says “I belong here”. I did a lunchtime theatre gig today, reading a short play opposite my husband, wringing out every last bit of my voice that has been largely absent for a few days now. Sick as a dog, I would not have given up the chance to perform. If I can crawl or squawk and you still want me, I’m there. Having an acting job is a misnomer. If a job is something you do everyday, that puts food on your table but has you looking forward to weekends and days off more than going to work, then acting is not a job; it is a pleasure. I had an acting pleasure today. I was on TV last night in a small but poignant acting pleasure on “Nurse Jackie”. But “Nurse Jackie” is over for me, and this lunchtime theatre thing is also over for now. So what am I doing…? “Well, I’ll be on “Jon Benjamin Has a Van” this summer. Do you get Comedy Central? “