Opening Night

Perseid meteor shower

Opening night!

It’s opening niiiiight!

Well, almost

It’s also closing night 

Four weeks of rehearsal

Dancers drilled

Notes pounded 

Lights programmed

Sets built

Programs designed

Characters hones 

For one night of show

It’s also the end of the summer

Almost time to leave this happy place

My fifth summer in six years

Second working on the musicals

My “Buck’s Rock babies” 

As I call “my” kids

Over the years

I’ve watched them grow

Turn from awkward unsure ducklings

Into confident swans who know that

At least, if only here, 

In the middle of the Connecticut woods

They have a home

Where they are accepted for who they are 

Where they can express their creative selves

Freely and safely

Without ridicule 

My first summer

I looked at the long-time returners 

And shook my head

How could they keep coming back

Year after year?

Set up their lives around 8 weeks of summer camp?

But I too have kept returning

The one year I didn’t, a 

Miserable cold wet Sydney winter

I pined for my American Brigadoon 

And I returned

And fell in love all over again

With the place

With the people 

With my role in this community of artists 

Walking home from a late night tech

Beneath open night skies

Falling stars

And a maze of meteors

Whose lines are only sometimes visible 

I am home. 

Space Women

Girls Can't What?

This is a true story

It happened to me 

In real life 

My friend

A university educated person

Whose parents are both doctors

Told me 

Women cannot be astronauts 

Because they get their period

This. Is. Simply. Not. True.

In June 1963

Valentina Tereshkova

Became the first female 

To launch into space 

A little earlier 

In 1961 

Thirteen women

Known as the Mercury 13

Underwent 

The same training and tests 

As the men who would later become

The first American astronauts

And they passed

And then

Not because they were physically unable

Or intellectually inferior 

But because of 

Institutional bias against women

For being women 

The Mercury 13 

Were dismissed 

In all 

Fifty-six

Women have fought

And trained 

And gone into space

Two of them have 

Commanded the spaceships
And what about their periods?
One astronaut is quoted as saying
"Period in space, just like period on the ground
Don't worry about it."

Women do go into space 

And while they make up just 10% of the people

To hurtle past the atmosphere

The point is 

Women can be, and are, astronauts

The only thing keeping on the ground

Is prejudice and ignorance

The end. 

This Is

This is me breathing

This is me standing in space

This is me embracing all twenty-seven years of me 

This is me rejecting everything I know and starting again

But embracing everything I know and incorporating it into the starting again

Everything is important

Nothing is important 

Everything matters

Nothing matters

In the words of Alanis

I’m high but I’m grounded

I’m sane but I’m overwhelmed 

I’m delirious

I’m stable

I’m happy 

I’m emotional 

I’m floating on the energy of you

This is me kissing your face

Your hands your lips your ribs your thigh

This is me holding you

This is me crawling into bed to be tangled in you 

This is us lying in bed together

This is the sound of rain on leaves on trees on the world

This is us snuggled under the doona

This is us sharing who we have become today in this moment

There is no time no space

Only what we have constructed determined to be so

There is only this moment

How can we make promises beyond the moment when this moment this breathing this now this second this “this” is all we have all we can be

The power of memory

The power of now

Eckhart speaks to us and we smile and quote movies

Heath and Julia and Joseph and Alison Janney 

And it makes us smile 

It makes us laugh

Makes our energy sparkle radiate pulsate on the same frequency

You said that

We were on the same frequency

And it made me tingle with delight 

This is me falling in love with you

This is me feeling light and wonderful

This is me wanting to rush to rooftops 

And tell everyone about you

This is me smiling

This is me writing 

This is me not being able to find the words to express what I’m feeling

This is me laughing at myself for being like this 

This is me being incredulous that it is at all possible

This is me giving thanks to the universe

To the powers that be

To spirit

To the unnamable thing 

To you

To all the stuff of the last year and a half that has had to be lived 

To experience

To life, to life, lachaim! To Tevye saying why is it so? I don’t know. Because. It is. 

Because it must be so. Because the world is completely unknowable. And yet I know it. I can fathom it. Even if just a little bit. But that’s ok. It’s my little bit that I fathom. 

And here I am fathoming and living and breathing and being frustrated and being delighted and being here on this earth. And my god, it has taken me so long to be okay with the fact that I’m even here! But HERE I AM AND I’M OKAY WITH THAT. 

And then let go of that because that’s not important either. 

Soothsaying for the ego.

All of it is great. All of it is nothing. 

Love. Life. Joy. Bliss. Sadness. The world. 

Here we are.

Here you are.

This is me.

This is us. This is the world. This is everything and nothing. 

These are signifiers for the unnamable unquantifiable unimaginable energy of life of shifting of currents of time of space of the world of everything ever happening to be existence.

Once upon a time there was a big bang

And the world began

And the light was started

And a little while later you and I were lying on the grass (that had grown in the meantime)

And the lights from that beginning were shining down

The very glow of them

And in the moment I offered my thanks to the universe the spark the divine unnamable thing that is the energy of the world

I saw my first shooting star of the summer

And in a ring around the field where we were lying

Were dark clouds, even darker than the dark of the night

And they were flashing bright with lightning

Somehow that night

We were simultaneously star gazing and storm watching

And the air smelt sweet

And you tasted like peppermint 

And there was a fizzle a spark of chemistry an exchange of energy a thrill of joy rush delight 

And then we agreed to say goodbye

This is me breathing

This is me standing in space

This. Is. 

The end.