Back.

The retreat was like a dream of what life could be. Rise at 9 or 10, walk up to the big house for coffee. (Tim and I worked and slept in the caretaker's house about a 1/8 mile away from the big main house, where the rest of the group stayed.) Maybe somebody would be in the kitchen making a pie, and we'd chat a bit, wake up, then back to the caretaker's house to work for a couple hours. Lunch around 1, informal, but usually a group would end up eating together at a big table outside. After lunch, a long work session until dinner at 8 or 9.

We all ate dinner together in a big, low-ceilinged dining room with heavy beams and a wrought iron chandelier with candles. (The house was built in the mid-1800s and expanded in the 1920s. It was huge but unassuming, a little rundown, and very comfy.) We ate like kings. Each artist was responsible for preparing one meal, so of course everyone was showing off, making our most impressive, delicious dishes. After dinner, a couple hours of wine-fueled, free-wheeling conversation about art and politics around the table. Then Tim and I made our way back through the pitch black night to the caretakers house for a little marijuana and 2 or 3 more hours of work until we were so tired we couldn't keep our eyes open and we wandered off to bed.

We re-wrote the show pretty much top to bottom. We kept all the original songs and most of the text, but re-arranged everything and wrote three completely new songs, along with new verses and other changes to the existing songs. We did an unbelievable amount of work in such a short time -- really only five full working days. It's always a surprise and a miracle to me -- though it shouldn't be -- how quickly the work gets done when there are no other pressures, no distractions, none of the daily discomforts that derail the process.

The weather was perfect: 70s and low 80s during the day, sunny and breezy, 50s at night. We must have been at a fairly high elevation for it to be so cool and lovely, but the views of the mountains made it seem like we were low. There was no internet access, or I would have looked that up. I also had no cell phone access. It was a little eerie to be so cut off for a week, but I was glad for it.

I got back late Saturday night, and yesterday I attended an orientation event for students "older than 25." It started at noon, and I left my house in plenty of time, but I couldn't find it. I walked around for an hour, getting more and more lost -- for some reason I always get completely turned around on campus -- and finally called J at home and asked him to look up the location. It turned out to be in the basement of the building I had gone to in the first place. Since it was Sunday, none of the usual offices were open, places where I could have gone for information. I was almost in tears, it was so hot and I'd been walking around for an hour in the blazing sun, in bad walking shoes. I was so overheated I felt sick and almost panicky.

The orientation session was great. It was a diverse group, mostly much younger than I. Even people in their thirties look like teenagers to me, so I felt like an old man even among the older students. There was a talk on how to study effectively, which was enlightening, and a session on staying sane. (U.T. offers free individual and group therapy!)

Dropping Off the Face of the Earth for a Week.

This afternoon, I will fly to New York. I'll spend the weekend with Tim, and then we'll drive (he'll drive) up to Western Massachusetts on Monday morning. They tell me there's only dialup internet where we're staying. I didn't even know they still made that.

So I doubt I'll be blogging till I get back, which is good because I shouldn't be blogging anyway -- Tim and I have 5 days to do about 5 months worth of work -- but I would be tempted to write a little something if I had wireless there.

Eleven artists will be there. We'll work on our own all day, come together for dinner, and then commune in the evenings. We'll share the household chores, and each of us is responsible for preparing one meal for the group. I told Tim I would do both our meals (with his help), since he's not really a cook and it comes naturally to me.

They asked us to send a shopping list in advance. I planned two meals and wrote up my list. I had a little paroxysm of self-consciousness when I saw it written out. It seemed like simple fare when I thought up the menus (roasted Portobello sandwiches with red pepper and arugula, baba ganoush, cucumber salad with lemon and mint, etc.), but the grocery list looks like super-homo food snob in the kitchen. I wonder what everyone else will make.

Lost My Book, Almost My Bike.

I just got back from the library, my neighborhood branch. I've been reading all these Lizzie Borden books, and there were two I wanted to take with me to the writing retreat. One is the conspiracy theory: Lizzie's secret illegitimate brother did it. It's not due till after I get back. The other is called Forty Whacks, and it's my favorite. It's a sober telling of the events, more or less proving that Lizzie couldn't have done it because she didn't have time ... but neither did anyone else. It was due today and I've already renewed it once, so it was really due today.

Anyway -- and I've done this before -- I planned to return it and check it out again. They've done this for me several times, provided there isn't a "hold" on the book (meaning, someone else is waiting for it). Not today. Since the book came from another branch, I would have to take it to that branch, turn it in, wait till it's back on the shelf, and then check it out again. But I'm leaving tomorrow. I pleaded with the man, but no dice. Then I called the branch that the book came from and pleaded with the woman there. By this time, the book was already checked back in, so it was too late to just keep it and pay the two bucks for returning it a week late. That's what I should have done. Damn.

I've gotten in the bad habit of leaving my bike unlocked at the library if I'm only running in for a minute or two. It seemed like a waste of time and energy to spend on this activity which supports an attitude that my neighborhood is full of thieves waiting to pounce on an unlocked bike. I guess I want to feel safe in my neighborhood, even if I'm kidding myself. On my way out of the library, a man was walking quickly and purposefully toward my bike. When he saw me, he flinched, and then he said, "Hey man, do you have fifty cents?" I said I didn't, and he said, "Oh man, I was just getting ready to sit here and wait for whoever owned that bike to come out so I could ask him if he had any change..." and he told me a story about somebody giving him a burrito that was too spicy so he needed a Dr. Pepper.

I think this is the same guy who wanders the neighborhood scanning people's yards for whatever's not nailed down. J caught him "borrowing" some tools from our next door neighbor a few weeks ago. If it's not the same guy, they could be twins. They're both wiry and tattooed and good at making up implausible stories quickly.

Lizard in the Closet.

On the inside of my closet door, there is a row of hooks where I hang shirts and pants that I've worn that are clean enough to wear again. When I opened the door a few minutes ago, a shirt fell off its hook onto the floor and behind it was a baby gecko about two inches long. It froze in the light for a few seconds, and then it scurried behind the other clothes hanging there. Now I can't find it. Maybe it dropped to the floor and ran away. I hope I don't put my hand in the pocket of my jeans next week and find it there dead. I found a dead baby snake behind the garbage can in the kitchen last week.

Speaking of not knowing how things will play out, my new friendship with the Gardener is something like a science experiment. If you like science. I am mightily attracted to him, and I get the idea he's into me too. I think neither of us is accustomed to concealing such information -- and I get the idea we have similar opinions about "how men are." But possibly we also have similar feelings about the ethics of sex, and our better judgment tells us to practice some self-control. Not that a friendship can't begin with sex, but does it need to? (Most of the people I've had sex with I've never seen again.) So we say to each other, "What would it be like if we kept our paws off each other?" This experiment fits nicely with my Buddhist meditation practice, which is all about just sitting with the urge to do something, not scratching the itch, practicing not reacting.

The experiment doesn't sit at all with my philosophy that pleasure is good and that one should enjoy it where one finds it.

It's tricky -- at least mentally, for me -- because recently, well, in the last decade or so, I've tried to let myself be more physically affectionate with my friends. I was not raised by touchy-feely people. When I became an adult, sex was the only setting where touching was easy, and, inversely, touching of any kind felt sexual.

As usual, life is complex.

So, what do I make of my desire to touch the Gardener? I want to allow myself to give in to my feelings of affection, to touch him because we're friends and it's good to touch your friends, but I know that the urge has an erotic component, which I am trying to control. (Who ever said that the human capacity for self-reflection was an evolutionary advancement? I don't buy it. I say it's been nothing but trouble since day one. If we were dogs, we could just fuck, and everybody would be happy.)

The Times, They Are, etc.

I'm suffering with a bit of whiplash this week. After a few years of having my life to myself, I've been wrenched back into the real world. Willingly.

On Friday I fly to New York where I'll spend two days with my friend and collaborator Tim preparing for a week-long retreat in the Berkshires where we will re-write and expand our Lizzie Borden musical. It's been 13 years since we visited this piece, and just as long since Tim and I have worked together, so there's some inertia to overcome. And I suppose it's been that long, too, since I have done work that hasn't been self-generated.

I've been reading books about Lizzie for the last couple weeks and making notes. There are a lot of books. This is the stuff I live for. Every time I do theater work, I remember that it is what I always wanted to do, from as far back as I can remember.

When I get back from the retreat, I'll have about a week before school starts.

I canceled my subscription to the Austin American-Statesman today, reluctantly. I will miss the minutia of local politics. Not only do I enjoy that stuff, I believe that it's my duty as a responsible citizen to know it. I mean that. But I will have to find other ways to stay informed. The daily paper takes me at least an hour to read, and I can't see that I will have an hour every morning to read the paper once I start school. Especially since I plan to take an 8 a.m. Spanish class 4 days a week.

And I applied for a part-time cooking job at a neighborhood cafe. I hope they'll hire me to cook on Saturday and Sunday, so I can pay my credit card bills. My financial aid should cover everything but.

Musical Education.

I had this idea the other day -- no doubt while I was stoned -- that I should work up a set of my theater songs to play live, so I dragged everything out of the storage closet to get out the box of old cassette tapes (of course it was at the very bottom of the stack of boxes at the very back of the closet) and listen to my old work. Now of course I'm all nostalgic and self-congratulatory.

I have a substantial body of work, which is not surprising since I'm 46 and I've been doing this since I was in my early twenties, but when you're 46 and you've been doing this since your early twenties and you're not famous or at least "making a living at it," there's a lot of pressure to conclude that you haven't accomplished a damn thing. Trying to explain that you have been successful despite the fact that your dream of stardom didn't come true is like trying to tell people that you don't consider your divorce to be the failure of your marriage. (And, in my case, the two are exactly the same.)

The story I tell is that theater school ruined theater for me and art school ruined art, so when I started playing in bands and writing songs I willfully avoiding studying music so as not to ruin that. And, as we do of all those stories we tell, I've often wondered whether this was a true story or just a good story. Turns out it is true.

Listening to this old work -- a lot of it is very rough work tapes and demos, just me in my bedroom with a 4-track cassette porta-studio, my thrift store electric guitar and a toy Casio; it's refreshing to see how naive I was, how willing to let my collaborators see how unschooled I was, and how much I loved that distortion pedal -- I can trace my career from those first songs, when I just jumped in and started doing it, all the way to Y'all and beyond, when I had become a fine songwriter, I would even say a first-rate songwriter. And I think the real success is that every bit of the work, good and bad, was genuine. My scheme took decades, but it worked.

In this box is a rehearsal tape of a Tiny Mythic Theatre Company production of Lorca's Blood Wedding from 1989. It was right after I broke up with my first long-term boyfriend -- six years, an apartment in Brooklyn, three cats and a dog, and he was the one who pulled me into music, playing with a band he was forming with a lesbian couple who were moving to New York from Baltimore. The sequence leading up to my work on Blood Wedding led to my decision to leave that relationship. (The director asked us to write the music, since we had worked together on two of the company's productions the previous season. My partner didn't want to do it -- the time commitment of a theater production was grueling -- so I decided to do it alone. Finding a separate life for myself after being part of a couple for so many years was exhilarating. I wanted to be single again. I left him.)

The task was more challenging by far than anything I had done. Lorca's play contained all these "songs," or sections written in verse with no music. It was like being handed the lyrics for a full-length musical and being asked to set them to music. I like to think of Tiny Mythic Theatre Company as my informal MFA program in music for theater. I worked with them on several productions in the late 80s and early 90s, writing and performing music. How often does a songwriter with barely any experience get to see all his first efforts put on a stage straightaway? It was a rare gift.

After Blood Wedding, Tim Maner (one of the founding directors of the company and subsequently of HERE Arts Center) came to me with the idea of turning the Lizzie Borden story into a rock musical. The first incarnation of Lizzie Borden was a one-act, 5 songs, it was wild and loud and the audience loved it as much as we loved creating it. I think it was while we were working on Lizzie Borden that I was at Tim's apartment and saw a copy of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein sitting on a table. I said, "That's my favorite book!" Tim said, "Really? I think it would make a great musical."

Frankenstein kicked our asses, and after Lizzie Borden I hope we get a chance to revisit it. It was too big for us, and it didn't come together, but listening to the songs on tape this week -- we made a soundtrack recording, faithfully documenting every brilliant and dreadful moment -- I still think it's some of our best work. It's easier to see the flaws now, and it would be easier to fix them. At the time, we never questioned our ability to stage a musical with some 18 songs, a cast of 20 or so (mostly non-musical theater performers), with pop rock songs whose lyrics were all taken verbatim from a Romantic novel. We just plowed ahead. It was an inspired process, but it didn't show in the finished production. Half the audience walked out at intermission every night. It broke our hearts.

I think the next thing I did with Tim after that was Las Sirenas, a performance based on the Odyssey, film noir dialogue, and 70s pop music. Most of the songs in it were appropriated pop songs, but I did write an ABBAesque disco song for the girl-groupish Sirens to sing. And then -- or do I have the order reversed? -- Tim did A, a sprawling environmental theater work based on The Scarlet Letter. For that, I wrote a sort of Brechtian ballad about bulimia and a song about transcendence through S/M sung by a full gospel choir.

Red Curry.

In our CSA box we got a bunch of lemon grass, another big bag of okra, 6 or 8 red potatoes, one small eggplant, a lot of basil, two onions, and the usual squash, cucumbers, and assortment of chilies. Since A left some ginger here, and we have all these Thai chilies from the garden, I decided to make a red curry.

I got very good at curries when I worked at Greens. It takes a while and makes our unair-conditioned kitchen very hot, but it's rewarding. I roast most of the vegetables first, which boosts the flavor. (Like the potatoes and carrots and eggplant, cut them in bite-sized pieces, toss with olive oil, garlic, salt, and pepper, and roast on a baking sheet in a 400 degree oven until they're tender. Do them in separate pans to get each vegetable perfectly done.)

Our blender died. We have a hand blender, but it's not quite strong enough to really pulverize the lemon grass and ginger, so the curry sauce is a little fibrous, but it tastes delicious.

The sauce is easy. Sautee some sliced onions and chili peppers with a pinch of salt -- I used three small Thai chilies for the whole batch and it turned out about medium hot. (If I had red bells peppers I would have sauteed some with the onions, for more flavor and a nice red color.) Add some broth or water and blend until smooth. Cut up some ginger, garlic, and lemon grass into chunks and blend with water or stock until very smooth. Add it to the pan with some coconut milk (I'd say 2 or 3 parts broth to one part coconut milk) and simmer until the flavors come together. Taste it frequently. Add some paprika to make it redder.

I sliced and added the okra about two minutes before I turned off the sauce, just long enough to make it tender. Then I added the roasted veggies to the hot sauce to heat them through. It's ready now, but J is gone for the afternoon, so it'll sit all day, and tonight we'll eat it over rice topped with some chopped basil.