(five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes) x 14

5 homes
7 cats
1 child
1 love

14 years, measured in love

(and currently 1040 miles between us)

More Postcards from Disney

Dear Teacher,

This ride went upside down THREE TIMES! And I rode it twice.

2x3=6

I'm learning to multiply!

Love,
The May Queen


Dear Minnie,

Don't you know to turn the light off when you're not home? I just saved you lots on your electricity bill. But we should talk about that spectro magic parade...

Love,
The May Queen

Dear Mary Poppins,

Carousels are for sissies.

Wheee......
The May Queen

Dear Doctor,

Those drugs you gave me for my back are really helping with the pain, even if they do make me a bit loopy.

By the way, could you please call in a refill?

Thanks,
The Big Guy


Dear Mary Poppins,

OK, I take it back. Carousels are pretty cool, too.

And my mom says I have to apologize for using the word "sissies." Sorry.

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,
The May Queen

Dear Prince John,

Enclosed please find a letter from my divorce attorney. It's over. I'm moving on.

Love,
Snow White

Dear Marriage Counselor,

All our problems with competition started on this seemingly harmless ride at Disney.

Please help.
Painted Maypole

p.s. Did I mention that I kicked his @ss?

Dear Rod Serling,

Scary, schmary. The May Queen LOVED the Tower of Terror.

(but HATED the Haunted Mansion. Twilight Zone THAT)

Dear Ariel and Cinderella,

Princesses may come and go, but cousins are forever.

Love,
MQ and K


Dear Mom and Dad,

Thanks for a great vacation
(too bad you're not in this picture, too!)

Love,
your family

Throw me something, Daddy!

The Big Guy rode in his first Mardi Gras parade tonight. It's a New Orleans rite of passage, I think.

Do you have any idea how many beads he had to have to throw? Me neither, but I'm going to guestimate 5 million, and most of those we reused from other parades/friends. I enlisted the help of visiting British relatives to sort and detangle appx. 3 million of them (the rest I did by myself on my living room floor last week watching DVRed movies)

Here is a mere piddling of the beads we sorted. And some stuffed animals.


After helping to load all the stuff onto the float this morning (in the SNOW, I kid you not. Brr.... Snow and Mardi Gras are not supposed to be uttered in the same sentence. Ever) we got a family picture on the float.

It was about this time that I realized that the reason that The May Queen was so sullen even though she was dying to get on the float earlier is because she has a newly developed fear of heights. This will make Disney interesting next week.


By parade time, the fear was gone and The May Queen was pretty excited. Good thing we knew where to find Daddy, because with the mask, we had friends who knew where he was and still couldn't find him!
It was cold, but awfully fun.

Finding the Good: Daily Gratitude 28

I'm grateful for the perfect NOLA moment I had earlier today: sitting in Jackson Square amidst the street performers and painters, three kids stood above me on a balcony yelling "We love your city!" Me too, kids, me too.

I'm grateful that tonight I get to sleep in my own bed, next to my husband.

I'm grateful that that same husband got new tires for my car while I was gone.

I'm grateful that the May Queen wants to help me decorate for Christmas, even if that means I have to do things differently to allow her to participate.

I'm grateful I had a frozen lasagna in the freezer.

I'm grateful to be writing this post on my computer, and not my iphone, like I've been doing for the past week.

I'm grateful for the neighbors who helped us move the couch out onto the screened in porch after we discovered the cat had been peeing on it. And I'm grateful that that 5 year warranty we bought 4 1/2 years ago covers cat urine.

I'm not finding much to be grateful about with my cat, though. I guess I am grateful for this exercise in daily gratitude. At the end of a long day when I'm tired and crabby, it's good to sit down and think of things in the day that I AM grateful for. May they outweigh the bad moments in my mind and in my heart.

Small price to pay: Daily Gratitude 27

I'm grateful for two auditions this weekend, and a husband who is picking me up at the airport, headshot, resume and script in hand, and taking me to the theatre (and taking MQ to the aquarium to pass the time). I'm not particularly grateful that this means I have to get up at 6am to make myself look pretty before heading to the airport for a 2 1/2 hour flight, but a girl can't complain too much.

---------------

Monday's mission, should you choose to accept it, is to write a post in the style of a letter of regret.

Thanksgiving: Daily Gratitude 26

I'm grateful for a loud and full Thanksgiving celebration: for stampeding children and piles of tasty food and flowing wine and the convergence of family. I'm grateful for an adorable nephew who shares my love of sharks and insists that he hates when I give him a zerbert (aka "raspberry") but keeps coming back for more, amidst peals of laughter.

And thousands of miles away, I'm reminded how thankful I am for my husband, who is generous enough to share his wife and daughter with other family, while he is home alone. Who for 13 years has been steady and sure, providing for me and for our daughter. Who has allowed me much freedom to do the things I love.

And, of course, I am grateful for The May Queen. Her presence in my life has taught me things about love I didn't know I had to learn.

I am blessed beyond measure.

Rock n Roll: Daily Gratitude 15

I'm grateful the festival is over, fun though it was. I'm looking forward to a few quiet evenings at home. I'm looking forward to catching up on some things I've let go. I'm looking forward to some good nights of sleep. I'm looking forward to tucking my daughter into bed.

I'm grateful I had the opportunity to work in 2 wildly different shows, with two very different companies, playing several varied characters.

I'm grateful for a cadre of good babysitters, and a few good friends, who make it possible for me to be away from home when my husband is also away.

And I'm extraordinarily grateful for a husband who allows the craziness that accompanies so many of my theatrical endeavors. He is a rock amidst my creative chaos. I know I couldn't do it without his support: emotionally, financially, spiritually, creatively....

___________________
Monday's Mission is to write a post in the style of a Villanelle. I've tried to start several, but am personally not getting very far with it. Perhaps after some sleep? I'll try again tomorrow. Please, give it a shot and join me. I'll try to get my post and the linky-do up sometime Monday afternoon.

(A Villanelle is a type of poetry. One famous example of a villanelle is Dylan Thomas' poem Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night)

Husbands and football and traffic, oh my! Daily Gratitude 2

I'm grateful for my husband, who picked up MQ from the drama class I was teaching so that I could take off early for rehearsal and battle the football traffic. He offered to do it and made it happen. It took a lot of stress off of me.

And I'm grateful that rehearsal got out before the game ended, so I made it home in record time and didn't get caught in the post game traffic.

(Our rehearsal space is near the Superdome, and I was dread, dread, dreading the traffic from Monday night football. But it wasn't too bad. Hooray)

Scattered and Inspired: Theatre Thursday

This has been a quite busy week, with things hitting me from many angles. Not a bad week, just busy, and germs of post have been filtering in and out of my consciousness as I try to muddle through everything else.

It's THURSDAY, at least for the next 30 minutes, and so it's Theatre Thursday. Last week I thought I had learned my lesson that you all really prefer these to have photos, but alas, I don't think that's going to happen today. We all shall just have to deal with the disappointment.

One of the things that is keeping me hopping this week is this ENORMOUS undertaking happening down in New Orleans, a gathering of youth the size of which continues to astound me. Luther@n youth who have come from all over the country for this convention, a huge part of which is volunteering their time and energies to help get our beloved and still recovering city a bit more firmly up on her feet. My fabulous husband has been working on this for quite some time, and just this week was pulled, at the last minute due to someone else having illness in the family, into the role of the local media go-to man. I have been watching him on TV and on the web with enormous pride.

But that is neither here nor there in regards to this Theatre Thursday post.

On Saturday I am leading a workshop with appx 40 youth and their adult leaders on using theatre to promote justice and social change. One of my many (did I stress many?) activities this week has been pouring over my books by the late Augusto Boal (he died May 2 of this year, which I just learned today doing research online).

Augusto Boal was a Brazilian theatre artist (later exiled from Brazil for his work) who developed Theatre of the Oppressed, a way of doing theatre that raises awareness of oppression and asks the question of how we respond to being oppressed.

I met Augusto Boal several years ago, at a workshop in Los Angeles. I worked with a company that did much Theatre for Social Justice work (oh... now there's a post I can do with some pictures... maybe next week??) and they paid for me to attend this workshop.

As I was starting to plan my own workshop for this Saturday, I knew that I would be using much of Boal's work. I tried to remember things from the workshop, and could only vaguely remember the room that we were in, and Boal as being a quiet but highly energetic man. However, as I was reading through my (signed, thankyouverymuch) copy of Games for Actors and Non-Actors (a way better and more comprehensive book than the title suggests) things were rushing back to me in images and sounds and emotions. It was a bit wild.

Anyhow... in lieu of a real post I thought I would share with you a quote that jumped out at me today:

Theatre should be happiness, it should help us learn about ourselves and our times. We should know the world we live in, the better to change it. Theatre is a form of knowledge; it should and can also be a means of transforming society. Theatre can help us build our future, rather than just waiting for it.

It's so hopeful and inspiring. It is making me long for the artists I worked with in Los Angeles. I miss this work. I didn't realize how much.

And it has made me want to get the leading of this workshop on Saturday RIGHT. So off I go to work some more on it...

Mish Mash Dash plus Monday Missions for March

We're barely home from Florida and The Big Guy and I are turning around and leaving again tomorrow. We had two free nights away in Biloxi that we needed to use before they expired, and with a show opening next week this was the time. So we took advantage of the fact that my parents are down south for the winter (helping with Gustav recovery a little over an hour away from us). They happily agreed to play doting grandparents while we sneak away. I haven't had a chance to even check back in with all of you, let alone get through the list I made of things I was "supposed" to do today.

When we return I dive directly into tech week for a show I haven't written about at all in this space. It's been difficult for several reasons, none of which need public broadcasting. It has been a drain on my time and energy, and will be at least until we open, and likely beyond. I don't have anything scheduled after this, and have been looking forward to some down time, some time to focus on other things. I have let several auditions go unattended, but now there's one this weekend I plan to attend, for a theatre I would love to work for, on a show I think I would greatly enjoy. There are mixed feelings there, about the time and commitment, exacerbated by my current feelings of hurriedness and discontent. And yet feelings of hope and possibility. There's a tricky magic to the putting on of a show, and sometimes the spell doesn't get cast just right. But when it does... well, it's why I keep going back for more.

Still, I think a couple days away with my honey is just what the doctor ordered.

_____________________
March Monday Missions:
Write a post in the style of:
3/9 - description of an amusement park ride/attraction
3/16 - Food label
3/23 - March Madness - playoff description
3/30 - an (early) April Fool's story

Let's see...

The May Queen is up past her bedtime eating Moon pies and drowning in stuffed animals....We're encouraging her to beg....
My husband has a pair of panties on his head...

I'm sending people into hysterics with my (really awful) imitation of Beyonce's Single Ladies dance (sorry, no photo)...


MUST BE MARDI GRAS!


(note: It is not technically MARDI GRAS, that would fat Tuesday, which happens 2/24. But down here Mardi Gras is a season, and starting last night the parades and parties are in full swing)

____________________________

Throw me something ladies! Like an entry in the upcoming Monday Mission. This week's mission, should you choose to accept it, is to write a post in the style of a brief biography (like a bio in a theatrical program or the back of a novel...) Does not have to be a biography of YOU.

Christmas Errata

The May Queen and I have safely arrived in Michigan, and are currently ensconced at the in-laws. Visions of building a snow fort are surely dancing through MQ's dreams, so you know what we'll be doing in the morning. The May Queen is continuing to earn her inherited title of "The Director" (which she took over when my grandmother died over 4 years ago... yes, we knew even then...) by declaring things like "We will each open two presents, and then Mommy will make scrambled eggs while I play with my newly opened toys, and then we will open the rest of the presents." Which is pretty much how it went down. The Big Guy and I got a kick out of opening all the presents she got for us... things of "hers" that she wrapped for us... many of which were ours to begin with (like the Detriot Lions stuffed animal she stole from her daddy years ago). She did take into account our tastes, though. She gave me several shark story books. Even though I didn't win over at Magpies, The Big Guy got me a Wii fit! Or will get me one... as soon as the stores restock. He also is having an apron made for me... I expressed that I wanted one that went over the shoulders and not my neck (that always bothers me) and couldn't find one... and it turns out that a woman at our church makes aprons. How cool is that? So I am pleased as punch with my soon to be arriving gifts. After opening presents I packed us up, and we nearly didn't make it to the airport due to INSANE traffic caused by a wee bit of fog and overacting bridge officials, but we made it, and The May Queen has already scaled the snowy mountains a few times, at 10:30 at night, and who can blame, her really? What an adventure for a little southern girl.

The Big News

Kat is pregnant, and her post about "The Reveal" (and the picture of her husband should not be missed...)had me thinking about when I found out I was pregnant with The May Queen.

It was my first month off the pill, and I wasn't holding my breath. The day before my period was supposed to start was a Saturday, and I flew to New York City to do some publicity performances for the book of plays with me on the cover. I remember that night at a restaurant on Staten Island wondering whether or not I should order a glass of wine. I didn't.

The period didn't come. It didn't come. Then, several days later, I had some minor cramps. Ah, here it comes I thought. I had a glass of wine at a reception. It still didn't come.

Our little publicity tour ended and I went to stay with a dear friend just outside the city for a few days. I came down with a serious stomach bug that I had caught from another cast member and stayed home all day while my friend went to work. I walked to the drug store and bought some pepto bismal and a pregnancy test. It was Friday. I was 6 days late.

When my friend came home from work I told her I was pregnant. She cried. She immediately bent over and began whispering through my belly to the unborn child. To this day she will not tell me what she said.

I wanted to tell The Big Guy in person, and when I talked to him on the phone the next day I kept the conversation short. I was near to bursting with wanting to tell him.

On Sunday I flew home. At this point I had known I was pregnant for 48 hours, and only my friend knew. The Big Guy picked me up from the airport. But I didn't want to tell him in the car. So I waited until we were home (that may have been the longest 20 minutes of my life). And standing in the tiny kitchen of the house we were moving out of in a week... I looked in his eyes and told him we were going to be parents.

***
This Monday's Mission (and tell me, why wouldn't you accept it?) is to write a post in the style of a song (rewrite the lyrics to a familiar tune) - one of my favorites from my early days of posting (click on the link to see last year's entries).

Totally Tubular Mystery Party

Songlist:

1. Everybody Dress Up Tonight
2. Totally Trivia

3. You dropped a clue on me, baby

4. not so Safe to Dance

5. Eat It

6. Everybody was Verbal Sparring

7. Rubik's Cube to the Head

8. Who killed Alligator Dundee?

9. Careless Accusations

10. Pretty in Pink cake

11. Confessions

12. Celebration

13. You can leave your ears on

Lead vocalists: Alligator Dundee and Jessica Bunny

Backup vocals: Ladonna, Lindy Lauper, Toni Oregeno, Debbie Gribson, Nozzy Nozzborn and Wee Pee Vermon

The band: Danny Son on drums, Nork from Pork on "the special button", Louie Skullnick on keyboard, and El Vampira on Guitar

Produced by Polly Abdool and Spunky Brewster at Scabface studios in Miami, FL.

Special thanks to the makers of Ibuprofen for the suppression of fever and Howard Scott for special effect howls.

***

Alligator Dundee, Jessica Bunny and this post appear courtesy of Monday Missions. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to write a post in the form of CD liner notes. If you write a post, please link to your post in the widget below. (and yes, we did a murder mystery dinner party this weekend, with an 80s theme, and it was like, totally awesome, dude).

Join us next week when your mission will be to write a post in the style of a bill.

Also, I am declaring December a nostalgic month. Let me know what your favorite past mission was (one you want to try again, or one you missed and wish you had done) and I'll resurrect a month's worth of past missions. You can browse through all my past missions here. December Missions will be listed next Monday!

Letters

In my closet there's a large flowered tin that formerly held popcorn. It now holds all the letters and cards that my husband and I sent to each other in the two years that we dated and were engaged before we were married. We never lived in the same city, and usually not even the same state. I only checked my e-mail at the university library once a week, and I don't think he even had an account. We talked frequently on the phone (except when I was working at camp), yet we still wrote letters. They are crammed informally into the tin; the ones I wrote on one side, the letters he wrote on the other - although they do get mixed up occasionally. They aren't remotely in chronological order. My husband suggested that we should burn them before The May Queen is old enough to read them. I insist that we just need to hide them really well. Although they are usually tucked in the back behind my shoes they do get hauled out when we're picking the things we want to save from impending hurricanes. And occasionally I find myself sitting on the floor, usually right there in the closet, randomly picking them out and getting a glimpse at the people we were those many years ago: thoughtful and mooning and learning about each other more and more each day. Two people in discovery.

****

Twelve years ago I threw a box of letters away. It was chock full of letters written to me from my high school boyfriend. We had met at camp and began our friendship writing long letters - "epistles," as he called them. We kept it up after we began dating. The letters were long and often took us days to write. When I put the letters in the trash I was moving out of my apartment upon my college graduation. My wedding was a mere three weeks away. I hadn't read the letters in a long time, and when I came across them as I was packing up I hesitated. I knew that getting rid of them was the right thing to do, and to this day I don't regret it. I do, however, regret that I didn't try to return them to the sender. It would have been awkward, surely, but we were still friends. Heck, he was probably busy packing up his frat room across campus at the same time. He may not have wanted them, but as I think back on it I wish that I had the letters that I had written - not as a record of our relationship but as a record of who I was for that year in time.

My Husband, a Hurricane Hero

On Wednesday night I attended a concert at Grace Lutheran Church in New Orleans. Grace is located on Canal street, right off the 610 freeway, and was flooded with probably 10 feet or more of water.The last time I was there there was mold growing on the ceiling, and stacks of ruined organ pieces piled high. It was wonderful to see this church being restored.

The event was a concert of Hope and Healing given by Ken Medema, who sang several songs that he had written, and then spent the last half of his concert hearing people's stories and making up a song about them on the spot. The best song was one about Winnebagos from Minnesota bearing snow shovels. Snow shovels? Well, what better thing to use to shovel out the muck and mud from your home after it's been sitting underwater for several weeks? And you can't buy them around here!

One of the songs he sang was about the call of ordinary people to be heroes. Surely you've read stories in the news about ordinary people who behaved heroically in the days, weeks and months following Katrina's arrival. You probably didn't hear about my neighbors, who took in their family whose homes had flooded: 4 adults and 4 children (added to their own 4 children) and NEVER ONCE complained. Who refused our offers of our guest room.

You also probably haven't heard about my husband, but I think he behaved rather heroically, and I'm going to brag about him for the rest of this post.

When Katrina started making a beeline for New Orleans he was out of town, in Mobile, at a conference. He called and said "leave now." So MQ and I headed up to Kentucky with our friends who had just arrived, hoping to spend a long weekend with us before our friend shipped to Iraq. Instead, we spent a long weekend on the Army Post watching CNN and awaiting news.

My husband returned home, and did all the things I did not think to do. He grabbed the scrapbooks. He videotaped all our belongings. He took our love letters out of the back of the closet, the old yearbooks out of the attic. He helped neighbors move things in out their backyards. And then he "evacuated." He went to stay with some friends in Folsom, Louisiana. I looked at a map, and yelled at him on the phone "that's not evacuating! That's crossing the street!!!" Sure, he got out of the mandatory evacuation area, but he was by no means out of the blast of the hurricane. He hunkered down there, staying with Boy Scouts and Red Cross professionals, wanting to be of help in the days after the storm.

When the storm passed they went out with chainsaws and started clearing streets. They cleared a path so the sheriff's officers could get out of the station where they had hunkered down. He cleared out a path to our home, and to other homes. He started trying to locate the friends and people from our church that we knew had stayed behind. Then, he took the church directory, and checked the home of every single person on it. He took notes of what needed to be done, and dispatched the motley crew of workers from our congregation to cut trees off of roofs, put tarps over holes, check on missing people. He would leave notes at homes, telling people were to find them. When we were finally (and sporadically) able to speak on the phone, he would give me updates, and I would call and e-mail people to let them know the damage on their house. He would check on homes of other friends and acquaintances that I and other people passed on to him. A friend of ours contacted us when her boss could not find his mother who had been evacuated from a hospital in New Orleans. He went to local hospitals and looked for her (she was finally found in Atlanta). He took his turn as a guard of our neighborhood, keeping out looters (this is when we discovered that we are the only people in the neighborhood who don't own guns!). He helped gather food from every one's dying freezers, and at the end of the day they would gather together, this crew of 40 or so people, and feast on whatever they could find... from steak to MREs. My husband, terrified of heights, stood on roofs with a chainsaw.

In those weeks after Katrina, when MQ and I had moved on to stay with my parents until it was deemed safe for us to return, my husband was a hero. He helped many, many people. He brought a community together, and those people were heroes, too.