My Day.

Ina Garten has fig trees in her garden. The figs are not ripe yet, but she loves to use the leaves from the tree to decorate her cheese board. She’s making dinner for her photographer friend Miguel, just the two of them, but she has about 3 pounds of cheese on that board, a quart or two of dried fruit, maybe half a pint of fig compote, half a box of crackers, and about 5 big disks of savory rosemary shortbread (“how delicious does that look?!). And that’s after dinner. How much do I love Ina Garten?

It’s Wednesday, so I’m not working. This morning I picked up my new glasses in Hell’s Kitchen, got a haircut (I didn’t absolutely need one, but my favorite barber is right across the street from the optometrist), bought 6 pairs of underwear at American Apparel (I took 5 pairs up to the register but the cashier told me they were buy-2-get-1-free so I grabbed one more) (its nagging me that I have a vague recollection that we’re supposed to be boycotting American Apparel, is that true?? I was totally self-conscious carrying the bag home, thinking everyone was judging me for supporting human trafficking or death-to-the-gays or campaign contributions to the Tea Party or some such. I’d been wearing Hanes for years but they changed the design and they look like old man underwear now. All of C’s underwear is white and I don’t like white underwear -- it looks good on him but not me-- but he has one pair of turquoise American Apparel briefs that I think are flattering now that I’ve lost weight so I decided to get a few more pairs. I may be almost 53, but I still want to look cute in my underwear), walked up to Trader Joe’s (stopping for a chicken sandwich and coffee at the cafe at Lincoln Center, which, do you know about this place? very inexpensive, delicious, not too crowded, and great people-watching if you need to have a quick meal on the Upper West Side, Jesus New York has some real characters especially at a place like Lincoln Center at lunchtime) to pick up some nuts and trail mix, dried fruit, rice cakes, and peanut butter for my snack-addicted husband. I’ve been such a shrew about snacks because I have no self-control when there are snacks around I eat them till they’re gone, but I hate depriving C of something that makes him so happy. Now that I’ve lost some weight and C is going to the gym at work, we don’t have to be quite so abstemious.

Daytime is when you see lots of moms out with babies, shopping, on the train. I notice babies now, more than before. Not that I didn’t used to see them but now I really look. How does she work that sling thing? My friend T told me to get the sling. He said it’s a little hard to figure out at first but once you do it makes getting around with the baby a lot easier. And he said when the kid is a little older, get the backpack thing. I’m not a big fan of strollers in the city. I’m sure there will be times when I’ll be very thankful not to have to lug around a human being on my back (or set her loose and try to wrangle her on a crowded sidewalk), but I suspect a stroller would be its own special kind of pain in the ass in the city. So I’m watching mothers (and dads, but they’re still rare to see out alone with babies) to see how they negotiate the city with their infants.

We’ve had our first home visit from the agency’s social workers, and there will be more. At some point we’ll be certified and then we’ll be waiting for a baby. I say waiting but it'll be more like searching. It's apparently very competitive. We’ve hired a designer (who specializes in this), to present our life in pictures and text to pregnant women who are looking for parents for their babies. Choose us! We spent the last two weekends choosing the photos and writing the text she’ll use, and we only fought a little. Talk about pressure. We will create a web site and a google ad, take out classifieds in college papers, mention it to everyone we know, and do whatever else we can think of to reach mothers of babies who can’t, or who have decided not to, keep their babies.

When I got home I worked on my play for a little while. (My current project is a play based on the screenplay that I based on a short story I wrote several years ago called Room for Jerry. It’s called just Jerry now. I’d called it Room for Jerry because when I started writing the screenplay, the Gus Van Zant film called Gerry had just come out, but now it’s been years and who remembers that film anyway? it’s one of my favorite films, but I think it was too slow and austere to be very popular.) After that I caught up on LIZZIE email, legal stuff. In the same way that playing music for a living is about 10% music and 90% moving equipment around and leaving voicemail for journalists, making theatre professionally is mostly negotiating contracts. Lately, anyway.

So now it’s 4:30 and I’m having a glass of wine and watching the Barefoot Contessa. I wonder if, once we have a baby, I’ll ever again have a glass of wine at 4:30. Or maybe I’ll have a glass of wine every day at 4:30 so I don't lose my fucking mind.

The only thing I don’t like about Ina Garten is that she’s always asking me questions. How beautiful does that salmon look? How gorgeous is that cocktail? How easy is that? Ina, stop asking me questions, seriously, it’s too much work! The baby is taking a nap and I want to relax.