I have been happily consumed by an acting workshop with Shakespeare and Company this weekend in San Francisco. This is a group that I spent a month with in January in Lenox, MA exploring myself and Shakespeare and my relationship to both. It was a life changing month Continue reading
Monthly Archives: April 2012
Finger-painting drummer
Today was a day to meander back to my home town of St. Helena, CA. The photo to the left is where I was raised, a home in the vineyards, among the dirt clods, and grapevines. The soil here seems different from in Seattle, drier, lighter-colored, clumpier. Funny to be nostalgic about dirt, but there you have it, a small town girl raised on a ranch and dirt was a big part of the experience. You walk differently on freshly disked earth, carefully, tramping with higher steps, testing your balance, and it has a fresh, weedy, damp smell like nothing I’ve experienced in Washington. Continue reading
Responsive Renovations
I’m getting practice at the start of this journey in going with the flow. I read this morning in Women Who Run with the Wolves that “if we were to name only one thing that makes the Wild Woman what she is, it would be her responsiveness.” Explained further this is the ability to adapt to change, being innovative, flexible, quick-sighted. Continue reading
Just call me Bat Girl
I am still in Napa, CA camped out with my mom for another week, delayed a bit as I have the wonderful opportunity to attend an acting workshop next weekend in San Francisco. But my heart is pulling, longing and grasping to be in the wilderness. Yosemite is one of my next stops and I cannot wait… Continue reading
Meet Tom
Tonight I celebrated the 70th birthday of my first boss. Tom was a great pal of my father and a bright spot in my adolescence. The summer after my high school graduation he put me to work filing in his insurance office. It was a cushy job in a great atmosphere and I always felt like the special favorite. He swears like a sailor and being Irish, has a wicked, but huge-hearted sense of humor. When I shocked my family with the news Continue reading
Lounge Lizard
After the frantic days of moving and getting ready to leave Seattle indefinitely I have spent the last few days in recovery. Today I am lying by Mom’s pool, in a repose that my father used to dub “Lounge Lizard.” The weather is warm and sunny in Napa, and I’ve been visiting with family and friends, eating amazing food and Continue reading
Barbara, Maya and Me
OK, this is amazing. I just read a blurb in the NY Times about a concert given by Barbara Cook, a lovely musical theater star that I have admired for years, (she created the roles for Marian the Librarian in Music Man and Cunegonde in Candide in the 50’s). It is wonderful to find this admiration is not in vain and has every reason to continue. At 84, yes folks, 84 years old, she memorized and learned 11 new songs for the concert and as a Continue reading
Thoreau and Rivers
My “relationship” to Henry David Thoreau started back in high school when my favorite teacher of all time, Lowell Young, quoted him with passages like… “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” I have always wanted to make a difference, live deliberately and not come to the end of my days with regrets. My blog name reflects this in borrowing again from Thoreau.
I was born upon thy bank, river
My blood flows in thy stream,
And thou meanderest forever,
At the bottom of my dream.
It is a time for searching, dreaming and meandering. Today was Continue reading
meander
…to take a winding or indirect course. That’s me, doing everything backwards and in heels. Instead of heading on a career path in my teens, I got married and raised a family and then decided it was time for my career. And not just any career, but one in the arts! There are days, like we all have, that I cry in despair “what was I thinking?” But here I am free for the first time to follow my dreams of being an actor and after auditioning like crazy finding the parts filled by others. Here’s where the “rest” in meandeREST comes into play. My voice teacher wisely reminded me that rests in music are blank moments that are completely necessary for the beautiful notes to be set apart. If we didn’t have these times of blankness, absence of sound, or in my case work, the beauty of the whole would be compromised. So I am going to embrace the rest, the empty measures and embark on a journey of discovery. An image of the quarter rest is on an orange sticky note in my car to keep me centered on the positive aspects of a blank slate rather than despair over the lack of casting directors’ phone calls. The rests are also a great time to breathe deep.
meanderest 
