Church, Rogers & Hammerstein, etc.

C and I are going to church now. We’ve settled on the Community Church of New York, a Unitarian Universalist congregation in the east 30s. There are 4 UU churches in New York and we visited all but one (it’s in Brooklyn, and, though none of them are what I’d call conveniently located, I ain’t going to Brooklyn on Sunday morning).

The congregation on the Upper West Side (4th Unitarian Universalist) was more neighborhoody and intimate, and the big church on the Upper East Side, All Souls, is the famous one, with the well-known minister and the amazing choir, but it felt a little fancy to us, a little dress-up churchy. We like the minister at Community Church, I love the building, modernist but all warm brick, and the people we’ve met there, and I like its roots in and commitment to social justice movements (their slogan is, “Our Mission at The Community Church of New York Unitarian Universalist is to grow as a caring, justice-making, anti-racist, diverse, spiritual community.”). And there’s an express bus that goes right from our neighborhood down the east side to get us there in half an hour.

If you haven’t known me long, you probably don’t know that I’m a long-time U.U. Jay and I were members of the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Nashville and when we left to live in a camper for 2 years it was only possible to make a living on the road because we performed in U.U. churches all over the U.S., not only in concert but we also performed Sunday morning worship services. That’s right, we were bona fide preachers. Our service was called, “Was It a Miracle, or Was It the Lucky Green Dress?” I’m proud of that and proud to be a Unitarian Universalist, a denomination with a long history of activism and free thinking embedded deeply in American culture.

When we started talking about adopting, we started talking about church. I guess it’s a cliché, but think about it. I’ve had my whole life to ponder the big questions, to come to some understanding of how I feel about religion, and “God,” and why so many people around me seem to believe such ridiculous shit, but that understanding was hard won. I want our kid to grow up knowing that it’s possible to live a life according to religious or spiritual beliefs without being an asshole. Not that I wish my parents had been anything but skeptical, Evangelical-bashing humanists, but I do believe it’s good for kids to get a sane introduction to the various things that people believe, and nobody does that better than the Unitarian Universalists. If we’re going to raise a child, I want to be members of a U.U. congregation.

I’m always a little surprised by how unfamiliar people are with Unitarian Universalism. Our good friend who lives across the hall told us that his boyfriend was appalled to find out that C and I are going to church. I sort of understand – he’s Puerto Rican and his understanding of church is “Catholic.” I’d be dismayed too if I found out I was suddenly going to mass on Sunday and praying to Jesus.

What else?

Speaking of anti-racist, C and I watched The King and I Sunday night. Sunday is our old movie date night. For the most part, I’m curating (our first 3 films were Easter Parade, For Me and My Gal, and A Star is Born), but I recently decided it would be okay if C picked the movie one night a month. He chose The King and I. Not sure why, but great choice. It contains my favorite Rogers and Hammerstein song, “Something Wonderful,” which I guess is sort of a tribute to battered wife syndrome but, well, it’s a gorgeous song.

I wish I could link to a clip of the song in the film, but apparently copywrong law is preventing me from it. Sorry. At any rate, here's the song, without the moving image:

 
C didn’t love it. One, he didn’t like Deborah Kerr/Marnie Nixon’s operetta soprano voice. I’m a total sucker for that voice, so he got no sympathy from me. But he also really zeroed in on how racist the film is. It’s funny because of course it's racist, I know that, but the bigger picture is that Rogers and Hammerstein’s intention, not just in The King and I but in most of their shows, was to be anti-racist. In fact, they chose the stories they chose (South Pacific, Sound of Music, Oklahoma) in order to explicitly challenge assumptions about race, and class, and gender.

Maybe we’ll watch South Pacific next Sunday. I think their anti-racist message was, if maybe heavy-handed, more successful in that show. And it’s a gorgeous film. It was the first big musical I was in, in a community theater production in Indiana, when I was about 14, I was one of the sailors.

Sadly, though the stories and songs are transcendent (okay, maybe not Happy Talk), these films remain products of their time..

There are, however, notable moments, one of which is the Uncle Tom’s Cabin sequence in The King and I, which I think is a fascinating riff on the idea of a 19th century Asian interpretation of a contemporary American woman’s view of African-American slavery. (which, by the way, have you read Uncle Tom’s Cabin? Great, great novel. Nothing like its reputation. Do yourself a favor.)

What else?

We’re trying out a new schedule, trying something different in the ongoing effort to make time to write. For months I was getting up at 5 a.m. to write for 2 hours before waking C up and getting ready for work. I was getting some writing done but not enough. And it was really, really hard on our relationship to not go to bed together. C was staying up a couple hours later than me and then I’d wake him at 7. I knew I was giving up something I loved -- going to sleep and waking up with C -- but I thought it was a sacrifice I could make in order to have time to write. No ma’am. I won’t speak for every marriage, but for us going to bed together and waking up together are both important. Those conversations we have, curled into each other as we’re drifting off, are vital to the health of our marriage.

So now, my day off is set aside for writing. My “day off” is sacrosanct. No errands, no laundry. I am waking up at 7 with C and staying up till 11 so we can go to bed together.

I used to have Wednesdays off, but I’ve switched to Thursdays for a few weeks. Tomorrow is Thursday so I’ll be writing all day. I’m writing a play, did I say that before? I finished a draft of the first act, but now that I’ve gotten some feedback on it (I showed it to a couple people whose opinions I trust) I’m going to completely change it: the setting, the ending, a lot of other stuff. I can’t wait to get started.

Spring.

Ater C left for work this morning, I spent a little while calling restaurants in New Orleans to get a reservation for next Saturday. (We're going for the weekend to a family wedding -- C's family, duh -- which is on Friday, so we have Saturday to do whatever we want. I haven't been to New Orleans since before the flood, and when we went we always stayed with our friends in the Lower Ninth Ward and spent most of our time in that neighborhood. Their house was washed away and they moved to Wichita. It'll be a very different experience this time.) I couldn't get through to any of the restaurants I was trying to call, maybe it was too early. I fell asleep and dreamed I was on a boat somewhere drifting along an ocean beach and then I was walking on the beach. I fished a small piece of driftwood out of the water. I noticed that it was the top part of a broken wooden spoon, and I put it in my mouth and started chewing but then thought to myself “I’m eating garbage,” and I spit it out and kept spitting but couldn’t get all the wood pieces and the taste out of my mouth. I woke up.

C and I are on a 3-day juice fast. Today is the last day. Everyone said I would miss chewing, which I haven’t (consciously) noticed. What I miss are things that taste good. We get six bottles of juice a day and three of them taste foul. One is a combination of spinach, kale, parsley, celery, lettuce, lemon, and apple, the other beet and a bunch of other stuff, also including apple (the spinach one is twice a day). The other three are pineapple and mint (not bad, would be better with rum), lemonade with cayenne (also not bad, maybe vodka?) and the last juice of the day is cashew with vanilla and cinnamon (delicious, like an horchata).

The point, you ask? Well, it’s called a cleanse, so I guess it’s like spring cleaning for the digestive system. Kind of a reset button. C and I both have trouble telling ourselves no to the pleasures of food and wine and we have to be careful about overindulging. Three days of nasty-tasting juice is making an arugula salad with grilled chicken -- that’s what I’m planning to make for dinner tomorrow -- seem the height of indulgence.

I’m not so much hungry as I just miss food and eating and cooking. I can’t stop thinking about how that spinach juice, if you took out the apple, heated it up and added a little salt and pepper, maybe some leeks and a splash of cream, would make a delicious soup.

What else?

This morning I typed, “CURTAIN. END OF ACT ONE.” I came to the end of the first act of the first draft of my first play. I hope the second act is not as long as the first because the first is 75 pages. It’s a first draft, so I’m almost certain it’ll get shorter, but still. It’s slow-going at an hour and a half of writing time a day. I wonder if the second act might go a little quicker -- I spent a lot of time on the first act just figuring out the mechanics of the stage, the set, and how to move the action from place to place.

We had our second home study visit from the social workers at the adoption agency last night. They were only here for about half an hour, asked a few questions, and left. Now they will write a report based on their visits and an extensive questionnaire we filled out months ago and they file it with the state (I think? it’s all very Byzantine to me) and we get approved as prospective adoptive parents. That’s when we start the nationwide dragnet to find a baby. Also, last Saturday we had our first of seven classes at the agency, which is way out on Long Island. They say it’s Queens, but I know Long Island when I see it. As I understand it (and you should take that clause as a serious qualifier), we could get approved before we finish the classes, which is to say it could be soon.

It’s a little (a lot) nerve-wracking that once we’re approved we could get a call any time saying, “We’ve got a baby for you!.” Like, it could be in 2 days, or we could be waiting for a year. (We’ve sort of decided that if it doesn’t happen in a year, we’ll give up.) We have a lot to do to get ready. Besides acquiring all the stuff (oh my lord, the stuff), the big project is to convert our little office into a bedroom. Do we really want to do that now, if we’re not going to need it for another year or possibly -- let’s be honest -- not at all? On the other hand, do we want to do it while we’re also taking care of a brand new baby?

I had my teeth cleaned today. (I love how technology has made our lives simpler. In the last 3 days I've gotten two emails, two voicemail messages, and a text all confirming my appointment today and asking me to please reply. Jesus, people, relax. I made the appointment, I wrote it down, I'll be there. Good lord.) On my way home I stopped at Staples for paper. We’ve been out of paper for, well, I don’t know if we ever had any paper, and every time I’ve wanted to print something I’ve had to use some old bond that C had around for resumes or something. Being out of a thing that I need regularly, and never remembering to buy it except at times when I can’t, really brings me down. I was also going to stop at the Container Store and get some kind of drawer organizer for our bathroom. Even more so than being out of essential office supplies, having to excavate for dental floss every night because the drawer is full of undifferentiated chaos all crammed into the back of the drawer farther and farther every time you open and shut it makes me feel like I have literally failed at life. (I’m not worried about how I use the word “literally” anymore. The dictionary doesn’t give a shit anymore so why should I?)

But I didn’t get the drawer organizer because I had forgotten to write down the drawer dimensions.

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.

Hamantaschen.

It's Purim and my Jewish friends are all talking about hamantaschen on Facebook, which is making me want some bad.

For about a year in the middle of the 80s, I worked at Bandito, a Tex-Mex restaurant on 2nd Ave., most of that time as a waiter on the lunch shift. I lived on Pitt St. near Delancey, so on my way to work I passed Moishe's Bakery on 2nd Ave. just below 7th St., next door to Kiev, the Ukranian restaurant where you could get a bowl of split pea soup (if it was Thursday, otherwise mushroom barley) with 2 very thick slices of challah bread with butter for $2.50 and call that dinner.

I started work at 10 or 11, I think, and I'd stop at Moishe's on the way and buy 2 hamantaschen, usually prune but sometimes apricot or raspberry. They were huge, about 4 inches across, buttery, and sweet. I ate those things every day for breakfast for months. One of them would be gone by the time I got to work where I'd put on a pot of coffee and try to leave the second one alone till the coffee was ready.

I had no idea then that hamantaschen were associated with Purim. Moishe's made them every day. I'm embarrassed to say that I didn't even know at the time that Moishe's was a Jewish bakery -- even with a name like Moishe's! I think I just thought it was Ukranian since so much of that part of the East Village was, back then.

I think Moishe's, incredibly, is still there. I'm pretty sure Kiev is not.

My friend Amy, who used to blog about Jewish parenting, published her grandmother's recipe. It doesn't look to hard. I told C that maybe I'd try to make some this weekend. Or maybe I'll make a pilgrimage to Moishe's.

Iris DeMent.

After the sublime Iris DeMent concert at City Winery a couple weeks ago, she was selling copies of her new CD at a table by the door. I wanted one, but as I was waiting in line I remembered that I didn’t have any cash. I watched and didn’t see anyone paying with a card, so when I got to her I said, “I don’t have any cash, can I pay with a card?” She handed me a CD and said, “That’s okay, it’s yours.”

I was taken off guard, and I said, “Are you sure?”

She said, “Yes! Do you want me to sign it?”

I thought maybe she’d misunderstood my question and thought I was saying I couldn’t afford to buy a CD, but I was insecure and star-struck and not at all sure what was happening, so I just said, “Yes.”

I went and told C about the odd encounter. He had cash, but I was too embarrassed to go back, so I told him to go give it to her. He went to the table, but she was deep in conversation with someone, so he handed the money to the girl standing next to her who was helping sell CDs, but she hadn’t seen the earlier exchange and she had no idea why C was handing her money, and now she was more confused than I was.

Anyway, here’s a picture of the CD. I don’t know why she wrote “Fa Steven.” Maybe she was as thrown by the whole thing as I was.

City Winery is a great venue. I’ve known about it for years but never went, likely because in years past it would have been a little steep for me. They serve great food and of course wine is their thing, so you can go early and have a beautiful (though a little cramped) dinner, and then have dessert with a glass of port when the show starts. Which is exactly what we did.

I didn’t catch the Iris DeMent train till her second album, which all in all is darker and sadder than her first. But J and I literally didn’t take it out of the CD player for weeks.

She brings the same depth of tenderness to songs about grief or Jesus or erotic love or anger. Or this song, which, as far as I can tell, is about songwriting. It is a song about work. What she seems to say in this, and in all her songs, is that music is necessary, that music is salvation. What she does -- and this thought is hard for me to pin down, it flits away as I approach it – what she does is she makes a case for the redemptive power being not so much in any idea expressed in the song (god, etc.) but that it is immanent in the song itself, in music itself. It is how I feel, but have never been able to really articulate, about, as a non-believer, singing gospel music. The songs have power. Belief is beside the point.

Maybe I’m getting overwrought or overblown about such sweet, simple music. It’s just that her songs move me in a way that feels out of proportion and I’m always trying to figure out why that is.

It could be her voice. I was going to call it ethereal, which it is, but the word on the page doesn’t look quite right because her voice is, also, the opposite of ethereal. It’s subterranean, not just rooted but it is the root, of that thing, that world, that was not my upbringing in a literal sense but that I recognize as a deeper, older kind of “home” when I hear the Carter Family or Loretta Lynn, or taste the salt of country ham and red eye gravy. These things in my blood, in my cells. I could not hope, or desire for that matter, to explain what that’s about.

Oh, Baby.

This morning at 9 – on my “day off” C calls it though I consider it my only day on, since it’s the one day all week when I can write or shop or run errands, see a doctor, read, or sit and think – C and I went to a dreary little windowless office to be fingerprinted. It was – I believe, after I send this form to Austin so they can make sure I did not abuse or neglect any children in Texas while I lived there – the last component of a lengthy, tedious application to the adoption agency. (My favorite section was the one where we had to list the addresses and dates of every place we lived in the last 35 years. Attach additional sheets of paper if necessary, and it was.)

I downloaded Your Baby’s First Year for Dummies onto my Kindle last week. We don’t know how old our baby will be when we get it, but it’s possible he or she could be fresh out of the womb, in which case we’ll need to know about umbilical cords, formula, and jaundice, etc. It could just as likely be a year old and I’ll need to read another book.

Months ago or more, we were talking about kids and realized we had similar feelings: we both had wanted to raise a child but had put that desire aside as we got older. Seemed like it was getting late and it probably wouldn’t happen. But of course in the last two years both our lives have changed dramatically and maybe it’s not too late. It surely will be soon, but maybe if we step on it there’s still a chance. I’ll be 53 next month, but I figure I’ve got at least another good 20 years in me. That’s long enough to raise a kid. And C is 9 years younger. (It is strange to think, though, that when my mom was my age, I was in my thirties.)

I had this unexamined thought in my head that there are lots of babies out there who need parents. Don’t you always hear that? It’s not true. There are very few infants, and everybody competes for them. Adoptable babies are even more scarce for same-sex couples because international adoptions are out. People create web sites, put classifieds in college newspapers, Google Ads, looking for pregnant women who for whatever reason are not keeping their babies.

Now that the application is complete, someone from the agency will visit us on Monday to do a “home study.” We still have a lot of work to do to convert our office into a nursery, cover up all the electrical cords, get a crib and diapers, formula, and the rest, but that doesn’t have to be done yet for the home study, which I understand is more or less to verify that our apartment is reasonably clean and that we have room for a child. It’s hard to know how to plan our preparation since we don’t know when the baby will arrive or how old he or she will be.

Okay, now I’m feeling the pressure to write everything I’ve ever thought about babies and childrearing in this blog post – discipline, circumcision, gendered toys and clothing, school, homemade baby food, Santa Claus – but I’ll save it for future days. Maybe I'll blog while the baby is napping.

The deal C and I made is that since he makes a lot more money than I do (like exponentially), he’ll be the breadwinner and I will be a stay-at-home dad. I have to say I’m a little terrified.

What a crazy life so full of I-certainly-didn’t-think-I’d-be-doing-this-now.

Paradigm Shift.

When C and I first met, when I lived next door but was over here all the time, we spent hours lying in bed listening to music. He played me his favorite songs, and I made mix CDs for him of songs I thought he’d like, and he did. Most of the songs we played for each other were slow, emotional, romantic, Dolorean, Iron & Wine, Fleet Foxes. That’s just how things were.

My Xmas present to C was a Jambox by Jawbone. It’s a speaker that connects wirelessly by Bluetooth to your computer or phone or whatever device. He has about a million CDs, and he hasn’t really made the leap to iTunes yet. But the only CD player we have now is an old clock radio that was so big it took up the whole top of his nightstand. In the office, we have my old Mac G5 tower, a great computer and very fast considering it’s about 8 years old (I edited Life in a Box on it), but it becomes more and more obsolete daily because the processors are not the kind required for most applications. I couldn’t tell you why. It’s like most computer things, it just is, and if you want to find any measure of contentment in your life you have to accept it. All that to say that the beloved G5 can’t play music anymore. The speakers died and since the computer is in its last days it doesn’t make any sense to get new ones. I am so unbelievably bored with this paragraph.

Whew. Much better. The contingent present was that I secretly uploaded all C’s CDs onto his iTunes on his computer so that when he got the Jambox he could play all his CDs! This was no small task. Like I said, a million CDs. And I’m not in the apartment alone much. But I got it done by Xmas, or so I thought. It turns out I had missed a big stash, a fat CD wallet which I didn’t know about and which held all his favorites. Hundreds more, and these are the important ones, the heart of his collection. So I’ve been uploading on and off all month, and C has learned how to do it, too. I did a bunch today. There are only about 50 left. It’s endless.

Also for Xmas, from his sister and brother-in-law, C got Apple TV, which, among the many things it does, plays your iTunes through the TV. I felt a little scooped, since now it’s not so impressive for C to be able to play his music on the Jambox. But the TV is in the living room, so it’ll still be useful to play music in the bedroom. Or in the car when we take trips.