You're Always Kenickie To Me

I grew up watching Grease constantly.

I knew every song by heart, loved all the dance moves, and at eleven years old, was totally and properly scandalized by the racy Greased Lightning scene. And even though John Travolta's Danny was the real heart-throb, I always had a soft spot for the weird-talking Kenickie with the goofy laugh who gets hit in the head with the car door right before his big drag race.

I saw Grease on Broadway when I was a senior in high school, wrote an essay about Grease's influence on my adolescence, and have spent countless Nonesuch road trips singing along to the soundtrack with newer, younger Grease fans who adore "Freddy My Love" as much as me. And I might as well admit it: I even liked Grease 2, the inferior sequel.

So the news that Jeff Conaway passed away today at the still-young age of 60 makes me sad indeed. Until today, I had no idea he'd become an incoherent, flailing drug addict on Celebrity Rehab thanks (in small part) to a back injury suffered during the filming of that gyrating Greased Lightning scene. No idea he'd lived a life beyond the grinning Rizzo-loving bad-boy who cheers with delight when he finds out she isn't pregnant after all.

I guess life goes on no matter how hard we cling to our childhood iconography and mythology. And yet I'll always be grateful to Jeff Conaway for teaching me that the side-kick can be just as cool as the leading role, that it's okay to back down sometimes and let someone else be the hero.

Turn Turn Turn

A short history of my weekend:

On Thursday a student called me a f*$&*ing bitch! and slammed out of my classroom, leaving me with enough adrenaline to break my bike trail record on the way home. I haven't been yelled at by a student since my very first year at Nonesuch, when take-no-shit Ariel screamed "suck my cock" after I made her leave class for antagonizing another student. But at least her insult was peppered with verve, creative license, and, dare I say it, an admirable use of metaphor.

Friday was our annual photo scavenger hunt in San Francisco, and thanks in large part to my giggly group of students, I had a blast. Highlights included dressing Maddy and Alana up in biker gear, creating a found object masterpiece on a sidewalk in Fisherman's Wharf, blowing up balloons with a spry old man, getting the paw print of an adorable black and white hound, and all of us rolling down a grassy hill together.

By Saturday I felt so wiped out that I slept through my Pilates class. In a rare show of self-forgiveness, I let myself spend a good part of the day lounging on the couch, finishing Hamlet, reading about Osama bin Laden in the New Yorker, and watching my two new favorite shows: Parks and Recreation and The Twilight Zone.

I woke up this morning to a hail storm. I love the quiet calm of Sunday. Everything feels just right: iced coffee and journal writing, a great yoga class, M still sleeping off his accumulated debt. I've been trying to keep my mornings Internet-free, but boy am I glad I checked my email this morning. Perched in my in-box, like a bright piece of candy, was an acceptance letter from Frostwriting, the online literary journal that has chosen to publish my story "The Girls." Suddenly that f*^&*ing b*&tch outburst seems so far away, and so small.

happy may!

there were so many things going on today, a may pole gathering I once cherished, an immigration march I usually attend, but instead of doing the obligatory I did just what I wanted, which meant coffee and croissants in the cemetery this morning, an hour of glorious lane-all-to-myself lap swimming, digging up (with permission) and replanting poppies, lilies, and lambs ear in our exploding garden, reading Hamlet on the front porch, eating lots of purple cabbage salad and tangerines, and last but verily not least, preparing for my interview tomorrow with acclaimed author Pam Houston, whose writing makes me glad to be alive...

bunnies and swallows

Just back from an impromptu camping trip that bequeathed four wholesome days and three nights without showering, being indoors, touching a keyboard, or looking at a screen. I feel refreshed, grateful, clean, and flummoxed. What do I do with myself? Take another walk? Photograph the exquisite wild roses growing by the back porch? Prepare to start teaching Hamlet tomorrow? Respond to e-mails? Blog?

Too many choices and commitments and distractions flood my life.
I love being away from all of it.
I love traveling more than anything (except writing)
(And M) 7 mos ago I wed him :)

There is a magic for me in experiencing life blow by blow, not knowing who or what or where or when. I'll never forget the terrible excitement of landing in Bangkok the first time, at midnight, without a plan of any kind.

I love the surprises of travel.
Even this long unexpected Easter weekend yielded a few...

... a super cheap and quiet campground for ten bucks a night,
that just happens to be on a military fort in the valley of the oaks,
a surreal place of army jeeps, camouflage, target practice, rivers, wildflowers, lone roads, and lots of merry cottontails, including one little rascal that raced our car.

... a remote mission where we went to Easter mass with a bunch of soldiers and cute squirmy babies, and where the first ever Christian marriage in California took place.

... our own Eden, just a short mile hike from the campsite: we bathed in a cool flowing river while swallows performed in the afternoon sunlight.

... a big ole hike at pinnacles, through caves and up steep deserted trails, watching our food supply dwindle right down to a humble evening meal of tortillas, veggies, cheese, instant soup, red vines, whiskey cokes, and of course, roasted marshmallows.

What I loved most was the fire.
Each night I'd just stand (stretch, dance, gyrate)
close by the fire,
watching it go from twiggy to fierce to smoky
to nothing but a bunch of sparkly orange nuggets
whose captured heat I took with me
into the cozy tent.

Fiction

I'm obsessed with fiction these days--writing it (or trying to), reading it, studying it, wishing I could use it to re-write my own reality. If I could, I'd edit out my allergy attack on Saturday, which left my eyes swollen and goopy, and the really gross enchilada I ate on Friday out of desperate hunger and thriftiness.

I'd alter a couple of things, too: less people at the packed roller derby match on Saturday so me and the Nonesuch kids could all sit together, and more money back on our tax return. Oh, and how about 9 comments on my last blog entry. (Okay, I'd settle for just 1...)

Still, the weekend also yielded a few story-perfect moments that need no revising: moon-light bright enough to burn, a tender new dahlia shoot, a new bike trail that led to a new journal-writing rock, a sweet bug-exploding hike with Zoe.

And today, on a misty gray Monday afternoon, there's the supreme satisfaction of clicking on www.shareable.net and seeing not one, but two pieces written by yours truly: one about how to throw a DIY wedding, another an interview with T.C. Boyle. Check them out!

Ruined

On Tuesday evening I saw the play "Ruined" at the Berkeley Rep. It's about the civil war that continues to rage in the Congo, thanks to the tragic irony that one of the poorest countries in the world also happens to be one rich in natural resources: gold, diamonds, tin, copper, petroleum, and coltan (short for columbite-tantalite, which is used as a high-charge conductor for cell phones, laptops, and other electronic equipment). So as the world continues to crave Play Stations and digital cameras, miners dig through muddy pits at gunpoint (militias with AK-47s) and receive hardly any compensation even though the Congo exports a million dollars worth of coltan a day. But if you think this is the saddest part of the story, you're mistaken.

As "Ruined" beautifully reveals, the true casualties of the war are the women. In fact, the Democratic Republic of the Congo has been named the Rape Capital of the World because of the rampant abuse suffered by women who, as usual, are armed with babies instead of guns. Though the Pulitzer Prize-winning play, written by Lynn Nottage, is brutally honest in its devastation, it also manages to be funny, irreverent, and dare I say it, uplifting. Much like Dave Eggers' "What is the What," the story is so emotionally gripping that I couldn't stand for it to end.

Which brings me to my question, readers: what stories (plays, novels, shorts, etc) have broken your heart lately? How about when you were in high school? I'm looking for the right book (preferably female-authored!) for my eleventh graders to read this spring, after a year of Tony Kushner, Tennessee Williams, Aristophanes, and Jonathan Swift. Help!

Spring (finally) Breaks

A perfectly-timed spring break is upon us, and as I face down a bleak forecast of gloomy rain, and our Santa Barbara camping trip threatens to become a Half Moon Bay hostel over-nighter, I reflect on some of my more memorable spring breaks:

1. Nothing like March in New England to make California rain seem like a holy benediction. Freshman year of college I desperately needed to earn some dough for my upcoming summer backpacking trip to Europe. Why else would I have agreed to alphabetize and label my dad's cavernous wine cellar? A perpetual fifty degrees inside, dirty rotten snow outside, bright fluorescent boredom, and a never-ending cavalcade of Merlot at eight bucks an hour. Of course, I realize now (despite the dingy memories) how very privileged I was.

2. By senior year of college I'd seen the light of Alternative Spring Break, the civic-minded undergrad's antidote to tequila-soaked foam parties in Cancun. So together with a dozen other rosy-cheeked college kids, I headed south in a giant conversion van thick with the smell of Doritos and expectation. We spent the week hammering houses into being with Habitat for Humanity in beautiful Almost Heaven, West Virginia. I remember the monotony of the work sometimes broken by jokes and stories and local kids. It's those moments of young-adult bonding--Audrey and I performing a dance routine for the talent show, the video we all made using kitchen utensils and food scraps late one night--that still burn brightest in the sanctuary of my memory.

3. There was that time I went to Vero Beach, Florida, with my first serious boyfriend who played golf every day while I swam and jogged the flat beaches and got the worst haircut I've ever had (and which still elicits horrified laughter from my sisters who were later charged with the task of chopping down the mushroom that had grown atop my head). What can I say? I was 23, making Kraft mac and cheese for dinner, and reading 'Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood.' Some things, thankfully, really do change.

4. I've spent a couple of spring breaks down in Louisiana, where Easter looms large, warm, and eternally sunny. Eggs are boiled, dyed, and pock-pocked (which means they are knocked together to see which one breaks first), and sometimes eaten. And then there's the annual crawfish boil (solid proof of my Cajun roots). The whole family sitting outside around newspaper-covered tables heaped high with steaming red boiled crawfish and corn-on-the-cob will always and forever mean spring to me. Ditto Mom's sumptuous calla-lilies unfurling dramatically all over the yard.

5. The last two years M and I have taken to the road with a car full of camping gear, books, maps, and vague plans. Each time we found adventure: old saloon towns, windy cliffs, salt flats, LA hot tubs, occasional fast food, and glorious desert. This year, armed with home-baked calzone and 'Madame Bovary', who knows what we'll do?

Last night the storm clouds obscured the biggest-in-18-years 'super' moon as Nonesuch rocked a sold-out benefit featuring David Grisman and the haunts of my boyfriends past. I had so much fun joking around the silent auction tables with the co-workers, students, and parents I've done this with for years, who have seen me grow into a married woman, who have become my community. I had so much fun taking tickets at the door, swaying to a legendary mandolin player, eating cake, and amusing the kids with my (wine-loosened:) southern accent.