Provincetown.

C and his friend E went whale-watching today and I stayed here alone. I might have enjoyed whale-watching, who knows?, but what I really wanted was a day by myself, no plans, just my book of Alice Munro stories and the quiet breeze. I don’t know what the rest of the guys did today. Tonight we’ll meet for “tea,” which is gay for drinking in the afternoon, and then dinner at the Lobster Pot. At 10, we have tickets for Joey Arias’s show.

We are in Provincetown. We rented a house for a week with a group of seven men (three couples and E, who is looking for love), all but me old friends who used to when they were younger spend lazy, horny weekends together in a big beach house on Fire Island but whose lives’ exigencies have pulled their summers apart, and I think this week in P-town was to some extent meant to recreate those Fire Island days.

C and I argued a bit last night. We’ve both fallen in love with this town. All afternoon we mused about the possibility of buying a place here and opening a bed and breakfast. Then late in the evening, he suggested an alternative prospect: buy a house here, rent it out until it’s paid for, then move here when we’re old. C worries about retirement more than I ever did. He was upset that I was less smitten with the rental property idea than with the bed and breakfast idea. One felt like an adventure, the other like a wise investment.

There’s something perfect about this place. Not only is it a venerable old gay vacation spot, it's where the Mayflower landed and the Puritans are my favorite bit of American history. T and I made a show called A, based on The Scarlet Letter, in 1992, and we’re both still fascinated by the story and the period in which it’s set.

On the way up, C noticed at the last minute that we were passing through Fall River, so we got off the highway and found the Lizzie Borden house, which is now a bed and breakfast. We had just missed the beginning of the tour, so we vowed to stop again on the way home. I felt all tingly the whole time we were there, the pear trees and looking in the side door where Lizzie stood and said to Bridget, “Father is dead. Somebody came in and killed him.”

That house, that yard, have lived for so long in my imagination and then to actually be there right next to it. It awoke something in me that had nearly died in the endless tension-filled days upon days of haggling over contracts that our little Lizzie Borden musical has become lately.

This week hasn't been quite what I imagined. I expected that everyone else would be on the beach all day baking in the sun and I'd be at the house alone reading, writing, and then we'd all meet up for drinks and guacamole, dinner at home or in town. But it's not that kind of town. The beach is a trek. Days are for shopping or bike rides. I have had a few hours here and there alone during the day, but there's been no routine. Still it's been a sweet break from the noise and heat and stink of New York in July. Though it has been nice to see a couple shows – Sandra Bernhardt on Tuesday and Varla Jean Merman last night – and do some shopping and dining out in this very charming and very gay seaside town, just a week of intermittent silence in a big house with the windows open day and night and no TV is the best vacation I can imagine.

Maybe it’s Alice Munro, maybe it’s the white wine with lunch, but I’m going to say it’s the long, quiet days that open everything: my imagination, the future, hope, love. And it’s Friday and we’re leaving first thing Sunday morning, so I’m already getting a whiff of dread that soon, back in the city, so much less will seem possible. I guess that’s one reason I’ve fallen in love with this place, the way I fell in love with the desert. It doesn’t have to be just a vacation, it’s possible to actually live in a place where it’s quiet enough to listen to your heart. Everyone says, "you'll hate the winters here -- for two months, it's bitter cold and bleak and so lonely you'll lose your mind." But that sounds like heaven to me. Maybe finally I'd get some writing done.

One Year In.

Minnesota legalizing same-sex marriage is particularly poignant because it’s where my father grew up, and my father’s father was homosexual and, as far as I or my dad or really anyone at this point know because I don’t think anyone in the family ever talked to him about it, he was troubled as you might be troubled if you were homosexual and coming of age in the 1920s in Minnesota.

When I was a teenager, we took a family trip to the area north of Chicago where my mother’s family lived: Waukegan, Libertyville, Gurnee, and then up to Winona, Minnesota, on the Mississippi River, where my dad was born and lived as a child. I have a stack of Instamatic photos I took of houses on that trip. As we drove around town, my dad would point and say, “There,” “There,” “We lived there.” I think I took pictures of about a dozen houses where he lived for a few months, a year, two. There would be an indiscretion, a rumor, a scandal, and the family would move.

Several times my grandfather disappeared, and my grandmother (Grandma Lenore, who I write about so often) would pull my dad and his sister out of school and go find him where he’d usually be living with a man. One time they followed him all the way to Waukegan, Illinois and stayed for a while. That’s where my dad met my mom, who grew up on a farm in Gurnee, which used to be a couple of long roads intersecting a few fields of corn and soybeans, a red barn or two, but now it’s mostly Six Flags Great America.

My only regret about my wedding is that I forgot to raise a toast to my grandfather at the reception. I had planned to say that I wonder how different his life could have been if he’d known that he could -- not if he actually had but just if he had known that it was a possibility for him to -- stand up in front of his family and commit his life to a man he loved, rather than marrying a woman (whom I have no doubt he loved, but that’s not the point) and being compelled to a secret life of pleasure and shame and fear. When I was three years old, he died drunk somewhere in New Mexico, his corpse lying in a public morgue for days or weeks before the news reached anyone who cared. And now same-sex marriage is legal in Minnesota.

The argument for gay marriage – in response to those like me who have argued that, as the focus of the gay rights movement, marriage is too conservative, too limited, that rather than moving us toward sexual liberation it takes us backward, it binds us to a regressive institution, limits the possibilities of relationships, family structures – the argument is that it changes the culture. It lets society see us as normal, ordinary, with the same wish to belong to stable families and communities. It lets us into the fold. And isn’t that what we wanted all along anyway, just to belong? Maybe.

No doubt that framing of the issue (the conservative argument for gay “equality,” which is basically that homosexuals exist and no amount of Christian nonsense is going to change that so why not figure out a way to turn them into productive members of society instead of outcasts and criminals?) is what has turbocharged the movement these last 15-20 years. But if homosexuality is on its way to becoming ordinary, I’m feeling sort of grateful that I was born on the cusp of that change, that I got to be around for a while when it was still extraordinary to be gay.

C and I celebrated our first wedding anniversary two weeks ago on May 5th. We’re saving our money for the adoption (do you have any idea how expensive that is?), so instead of the pricey restaurant we’d usually choose on a special occasion, we had dinner at Joe Allen (I’m not not thinking right now about how different my life is now with C than it was before, that I would think of Joe Allen as a moderately-priced restaurant) because it was where we were when C first told me he loved me. It was an accident, I think. We’d only known each other for a few weeks, though we’d been more or less inseparable. We had just sat down for dinner before a show, and he said, “I love this place. And I love you.” As soon as the words left his mouth, we both froze. Then laughed. I said, “Okay, I love you, too.”

People ask, “How’s married life?” and in many ways it’s true that it’s ordinary. We sleep, watch TV, eat dinner, have a couple Manhattan cocktails when we get home from work (well, maybe that’s not ordinary for everyone, but what use is gay marriage if we can’t pretend we’re Darrin and Samantha Stephens every once in a while?)

But here’s what’s extraordinary. I think maybe I’ve tried to express this before, but I am surprised and amazed to discover that within this structure, this institution, this ironclad commitment, I find an extraordinary freedom to be who I am completely. With C, I don’t have that fear anymore, that fear which was a huge component of every relationship, every encounter I had with men, the fear that there is a point at which I would expose too much, the danger that he would eventually discover something about me, something I did or believe, some angle from which he’ll see my body, that will extinguish his love for me. It's a huge burden lifted.

That’s not to say that no one ever offered me unconditional love, but that I never accepted it before now. I was not ready, not capable, hated myself too much, whatever. C asked me recently if I missed my wild days. It doesn’t feel like the right question. I don’t miss my wild days -- they still exist in my imagination. They’re part of who I am now. So maybe I had to have my wild days, and not just the wild days but the 50 years of love and sex and contemplation and meditation and therapy and the advice and example of friends and my parents and siblings, and books and plays and movies and pop songs, TV shows, and standup comedy, and walking the streets of so many cities and towns watching people live their lives, and learning from those who have loved me how to be loved, maybe I had to live all that life before I was ready for this.

Anyway, whatever, I think too much. However this happened, I'm glad. It’s really good.

Life in a Box, Again.

Today is my writing day, which means that at 10 o’clock I stop whatever I’m doing, walk into the office, sit down, and write. All day. Which means no blogging. Blogging is writing, but it is also a way to avoid the real writing. I hold my blogging to a certain standard but otherwise it has no demands except that I write what comes to mind, unlike the big projects, which have a scale and depth that bring their own demands.

I would blog every day if I had time. There’s always something I want to talk about. I’m still trying to write about my first wedding anniversary (I will, it’s coming), but today I have to keep it short.

Maybe you know that I (along with many talented collaborators) made a documentary film several years ago called Life in a Box.. It’s very good. But for reasons I still can’t grasp we were never able to sell it. It cost our investor/patron/fan over $200,000, screened in several festivals, but not a single distributor was interested. It may be the single work of my career that I am most proud of, yet no one other than friends and family and a few fans have seen it.

So we tried for a couple years with no luck, and we moved on. But the attorney who represented the film recently made another push and found some (very mild, I think) interest from a couple distributors. But in order to make the film ready to sell, we have to spend another several thousand dollars. We have to have something called E & O insurance, in case anybody sues us. I’m not sure why they would, but you have to have it. And we have to pay to use a Johnny Cash song that appears in the film. (No, it can’t be removed. I wish we’d been rehearsing one of our own songs that day when the camera caught that argument with great light and sound, but we weren’t.) I think it all adds up to between $10,000 and $20,000.

Since we’re saving up now for adoption expenses, we can’t even think about spending this much, even if I thought it was wise, and I’m not sure it is. How do you know when to cut and run? When you’re an artist, there’s a feeling of undeniability when you reach a certain point with a piece, I think, because the work feels so absolutely compelling that it’s easy to overlook the fact, the fact, that there will always be so much more art than audience. There is vastly, exponentially, more great art lost and forgotten than experienced and preserved.

I don’t know. I’m thinking about a kickstarter campaign? I have no idea if there are enough Y'all fans out there -- if I can even figure out how to reach them -- to make it possible to raise that much money. I have lots of cool Y'all memorabilia I could offer as premiums. I hate to think of this film never even having a home video release.

Okay, it’s after 10 now, time to write. I'm writing a play. Hopefully more than 25 people will someday see it. Here are a few clips from Life in a Box.

Our Mother's Day Weekend.

A little after noon on Friday I got an email from the director of the adoption agency we’re working with: “Call me right away.” I emailed C to ask if he’d seen the email. He said to call him. He said, “They have a baby for us. We have to pick her up at 6.” I know my husband’s sense of humor well enough to know not to take a statement like that at face value. I said, “Really?” He said, “Really.” I said, “No, really?” And he said, “Yes, really truly.” I said, “I’m going to be really angry if this is a joke.” He said, “I’m serious,” and then I knew he was.

He told me that a woman at the hospital near the agency in Queens had given birth to a girl on Tuesday, had decided to give her up, and had chosen us based on our “Dear Birth Mother” letter, a standard part of the adoption application in which prospective adoptive parents try to communicate to a birth mother who they are, what kind of life they hope to give an adopted child, and how much they sympathize with her painful situation and respect her decision. The agency had given the mother two of these letters, both from gay couples, and she’d chosen ours, saying “It was shorter, but it was perfect.”

C gave me the name and number of a social worker who was at the hospital and said to text her so she would have my number. (C’s phone was dead and he’d left his charger at home. Of all days.) We were instructed to meet the social worker at the agency at 6 where she would give us the baby. We would keep her for the weekend, then on Monday meet the mother. At that time, she would surrender the baby to us and we’d begin the 30-day wait. (By state law – though there are similar laws in every state – a birth mother who has given up her child has 30 days in which to change her mind, no questions asked.)

Officially, we were just babysitting for the weekend, but the social worker told us she felt optimistic. The mother was smart and knew what she was doing. She has a 2-year-old son at home where she lives with her father. She wants to go to college, and she wants a better life for her daughter.

My boss and co-workers (except one manager who handles HR, because I needed a letter for the adoption agency application stating that I worked there) did not know before Friday that I was preparing to adopt. C and I had only last week been approved by the agency, and we expected a long wait. The usual scenario, from what we could gather, is that adoptive parents are selected by a pregnant woman, establish a relationship, provide some support through the pregnancy, and then adopt the baby when it’s born.

I was very conflicted about not telling them yet, because it’s a small company and they treat me very well and it just felt cagey, but I thought I’d have plenty of time to talk to my boss, let him know that this was a possibility some time in the next year, and, though C and I had decided that I would be a stay-at-home parent, I didn’t want them at work to be gearing up to replace me when for all we knew it could be a year away.

Instead, I had to hang up the phone with C, tell the owner of the company where I’ve worked for 2 ½ years that I had to leave immediately to pick up a child I was going to adopt. I didn’t add, “and if this works out, I won’t be back.” I didn’t consciously leave that out, I was just too freaked out to convey much more than, “I have to go. Right now.” On my way out the door, I said to my boss that I would let him know how everything went, and he said, “You’ll probably need some time off next week, right?”

The manager I work directly with, who is an old friend and who got me this job when I returned to New York 3 years ago with pretty much nothing, had stepped out to run an errand and missed the whole thing. I did have my wits together enough to get a kick out of thinking about her returning to the office to hear that story.

I called my mom and dad on the way to the subway, texted my brother and sister and best friends, and met C at the Babies R Us on Union Square where we bought a bassinet, diapers, formula, a few blankets, and a couple onesies. We just got what we would need for the weekend. We had to carry everything we bought to the agency and then home, so we got essentials and planned to make a more considered shopping trip next week. I called my sister K from the store and she talked me through the supplies we would need which might not occur to us, like a baby thermometer, and helped us pick out a “Pack and Play,” which is a combination portable crib, bassinet, and changing table. By this time, we’d called our parents, siblings, and best friends with our amazing sudden news, and text messages were flying back and forth all afternoon. C’s sister is expecting a baby in June, a girl too, so the timing was perfect for her to have a little girl cousin the same age.

We caught the LIRR to Little Neck where the agency is, got there an hour early so had a bite to eat at a Panera in a shopping center around the corner. The social worker called to let us know traffic was bad and she’d be late. When she arrived, she hadn’t been to the hospital yet. She picked up a car seat at the agency and left, telling us she’d be back in an hour, at the most. It was more like two.

We were watching out the window and saw her car pull up. She got out and opened the back door of her car, detached the car seat, and started across the parking lot. We ran out to meet her and hold the door open. It was chilly so she had a blanket up over the baby’s face. Inside, she set the car seat on a table. “Here she is!” she said and pulled down the blanket.

Of course all parents think their babies are beautiful, but, you know, I think babies are usually kind of weird and unformed-looking. For sure, there’s something absolutely compelling about them, tiny nascent humans with one inscrutable expression after another. Hilarious definitely, but beautiful? If I’m honest, I want to say grotesque, really, and I would if I didn’t find it hard to call a human being grotesque, but on the other hand they don’t have any idea what the word means so it’s not like you’re going to hurt their feelings.

Anyway. This child was undeniably gorgeous with her tiny head of fine black shiny hair, skin the color of pancakes, and long fingers. I picked her up and she began to fuss a little. She’d been asleep. But she snuggled into my shoulder and I bounced very gently and she dozed off again, breathing into my neck. In that moment something cracked open and in came rushing the gravity, the intensity, the wonder and magnificence of what we have decided to do. To raise a child. Here she was. This was not an idea, but a human being curled up like a pillbug in my arms and completely dependent on me not to let go of her. We brought her home.

Maybe I don’t have to say that we were not ready. Emotionally, maybe no one ever is. But I’m talking about our apartment. We have a tiny second bedroom in our apartment that we use as an office. When I’m annoyed I call it the garage, because, yes, there’s a desk and computer in there and it’s where I write, but there are also shelves full of old papers and books and things people have given us that we don’t need but can’t bear to throw away and our elliptical machine. (Shut up. We use it, not as regularly as we’d like, but we do use it.)

The office will be the baby’s room. Our plan is to to move all the stuff out, put it god knows where, paint the room yellow (pink and blue are lovely colors, but best avoided – that’s another conversation), and put in a crib. But we were waiting. It seemed unnecessary to have a nursery all set up when we might have to wait for months, especially since we didn’t know the age of the baby – we told the agency we preferred a newborn but were open to an older infant.

But we set up the bassinet in our bedroom and felt completely prepared for the short term, until we could begin making bigger changes. C figured out the slightly puzzling baby bottle, filled it, and we fed her, burped her. We changed her tiny, tiny diaper. She’s not crazy about sleeping on her own, so we took turns holding her, the other of us answering texts and emails from our mothers, sisters, friends dying to know how it was all going.

She’s on a 2-hour feeding schedule, so we didn’t expect to sleep much, and didn’t. As near as we can remember, we took turns getting up when we heard her fuss or cry. It became a bit of a fog, but I do remember one period of a couple hours when I just stood over her with my forehead on her belly so she’d stop crying but afraid to pick her up and sit in bed with her because I was so sleepy I worried I’d fall asleep and drop her or roll onto her. Eventually I brought her into the living room and sat on the couch holding her, feeling a safer sitting upright to doze with her on my chest.

In the morning, we made coffee and continued our woozy surreal life of taking turns holding her, feeding her, changing her, and staring at her as if she were a tiny alien come to simultaneously make us wonder what life was all about and tell us. In brief moments of clarity we’d wonder aloud what to do about the theater tickets we’d bought weeks or months ago: Far From Heaven, a new musical at Playwrights Horizons that I’d been looking forward to for months, and The Nance, a play by Douglas Carter Beane that takes place in the gay world of 1930s New York. And what about our vacation in Provincetown in July? We’ve rented a house for a week with a group of friends. Should we take the baby to the beach? Probably not. We’d have to call our friend who is a doula to see if she can recommend a pediatrician.

We felt, if not ready, then ready to become ready. We would learn by doing, become parents by parenting.

A little after noon, the director of the agency called on C’s phone. Seconds after picking up and saying hello, he said, “Oh, no.” And then, “We understand.” They talked for a couple minutes, but I knew exactly what was happening. The mother had been up all night crying, called the agency in the morning, and said she had changed her mind. She wanted her little girl back. The social worker would be at our house in a couple hours to retrieve the baby.

The outfit she was wearing when we got her was in the dryer, so when it was done we put it back on her, fed her, changed her, packed up a few of the things we’d bought and couldn’t use next time: a half full bottle of formula, an opened package of baby wipes. When the social worker arrived, we put the baby back in her car seat and handed her over.

C’s sister’s baby shower was Saturday afternoon, and he didn’t want to spoil the party with our sad news, so he waited. But I emailed my mom and we texted the rest of our family and friends. It wasn’t a specific kind of sadness or mourning for her. We’d really had so little time to get to know her and there was no buildup, no anticipation, it was so sudden and out of the blue and then over in 24 hours. But we did both cry some and I feel haunted by the image of that perfect beautiful tiny girl who came so close to being our daughter. I like to think of her curled up on her mother’s shoulder asleep, because I remember what that felt like, her breath on my neck.

When C finally did get to talk to his mom Saturday evening, she told him that his sister had put together a bag of baby things she could spare from her shower. She’ll put them aside for next time.

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.