My Life as a Spreadsheet

A producer often has a fetish for a nice spreadsheet. What's not to love? It's organization, clean and pure... so I reduced my entire biography to a spreadsheet format. Addresses, schools, births and deaths, world events, favorite movie at the time. If you e mail me at mauramooney@att.net, I'll send you the genericized excel document so you can do the same- it's good for hours of fun! Maybe a nice Artist's date to sit and fill in the blanks.

Special gifts

The starry-eyed girl in pink is my grand niece, Lauren Miller, as she appearaed this past weekend in the role of Gabriella in Disney’s High School Musical Jr. - a production of the Special Gifts Theatre for children in Chicago.

(Not to brag or nothin’ but) Lauren has played two leading roles since joining this remarkable children’s theater group four years ago. At age 10 she brought us to our feet - in the title role of Annie. A curtain call I will never forget: when Lauren took her bow, then threw off her wig (itchy!), beaming and waving triumphantly at the audience.

What happens on stage in the productions of the Special Gifts Theatre is nothing short of magic. Building confidence, sharing successes, each child is paired and “shadowed” on stage by a peer mentor teen - to ensure that a full length play goes on without a hitch. “On the ground,” working back stage and in the orchestra pit, are 20 to 30 adults - professionals and volunteers - choreographers, speech therapists, occupational therapists, drama and music coaches. All in it together. Founded in Chicago, the Special Gifts Theatre has recently won national attention and a grant from Disnesy -- with the likelihood that it will roll out as a national program -- a dream-come-true of its founder and exec. director, Susie Field.

In Lauren’s Thank You speech someday, she will have a long list of people to thank -- starting with her twin brother Zach, who has been pushing her and challenging her since birth. Beyond the theater, Lauren has followed in her brother’s footsteps. On ice! While Zach plays hockey, Lauren has found her niche figure skating in the Illinois regional Special Olympics where she’s won gold medals three years in the running. With her connections to Special Olympics, Lauren has had the opportunity to make a number of presentations, including an interview on Radio Disney. In the role of “ambassador” speaking out for children with special needs she had developed a speech about the R word (retard) based on an experience at school. She finishes her speech with the words: Remember R stands for Resourceful and Respect.

Lauren. Never fails to amaze and inspire me. No telling what the future will hold for her. She once told me, “Someday, I want to change the world.” I believe she will.

Trust

As a third-timer to The Artist's Way I'm participating on a want-to-do-whenever basis. Today I read Chapter 7. I have no idea what week I'm supposed to be reading, but it's Chapter 7 for me and it's Friday. Such a rebel.

However many years ago, probably six by now, when I read Chapter 7 for the first time, I actually did the exercises. It was fun reviewing what I said back then and I was particularly struck by my answer to this one: My artist has started to pay more attention to____. My answer was "my instincts."

That was then. It's true today, too, and made more significant by a note given to me by the director of my most recent play. He is a master motivator and confidence-builder. He told me that one of my greatest strengths as an actor is my natural instincts and to keep trusting them. Needless to say I LOVE this director. And I love Chapter 7 for its message about perfection and letting go of the fear of looking foolish. I know embrace looking foolish.

That's me far left in the white hat in this too small picture. Having a ball. Looking foolish. But not nearly as foolish as the dude center stage in the dress. Maybe some day.

A terrible beauty is born

All changed, changed utterly / A terrible beauty is born. (Yeats, Easter 1916)

It was the new World Trade Center then, still under construction in 1974, the talk of New York, when on that muggy morning in August, Philip Petit took to the sky. Suspended on a wire between the Towers, 110 stories above the ground, suspending all disbelief, he walked, he ran, he skipped a beat, dancing between life and death.

“Those who saw him hushed.” From its opening line, Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann holds us in rapt attention to life in the big city and its people living on the edge.

In ten interrelated stories, McCann draws characters firmly planted on solid ground, feet on the street, moving through the “thrum of the subway,” peering out from office windows, sipping tea in a Park Avenue penthouse, stopping for a powder in a fleabag tenemant, careening off the road to oblivion. McCann’s characters -- prostitutes, priests, judges, artists, computer hackers, mothers in mourning, sons killed in Vietnam -- collide and crash and touch one another in unexpected ways.

Count on an Irish writer to capture the spirit of America on the brink of change. Evoking the innocence and hope of a time not so distant, when the internet was ARPANET still taking baby steps, when AIDS was a mysterious disorder of the blood, McCann leaves the reader to flash-forward. We know all too well how the story ends: it’s not the skywalker, but the Towers that fall.

Eventually, inevitably we all fall. And therein spins the tale. McCann’s contemporary Joycean narrative spins, but never settles on the tightrope walker in the air. Rather it asks what sort of tightrope do we walk on the ground and how hard do we fall.

Wayfarers, Let the World Spin is a heart-stopping, drop-dead gorgeous must-read of a book. Synchronicity at its best. If you haven’t yet picked it up and fallen in love, please do!

God bless this mess.

Key West is a mess. Mixed up. Turned loose. Out of control. Not tidy. Not regularly dusted. Not polite. Nobody seems to be coloring inside the lines in Key West.

I already miss that mess. I miss roosters in the street and on the roof. Six-toed cats snoozing on Ernest Hemingway's bed. A bathroom wall collage of faces and labels off old records, so rich with images I took four photos. (That's a record for bathroom photography for me, in case you wondered....) Key West is drunk and disorderly, it flies in the face of convention, upsets the apple cart. There's way too much to see and think about intelligently, so a day gets to be a crazy collage in its own right.

Key West swept me so off my feet and out of my brain, that I got all the way to Thursday without realizing we'd left Week Six of the Artist's Way and entered Week Seven. I was still happily diligently counting, though Counting Week had passed. But I did my morning pages every day. By the pool. Wearing my coat. Brrrr.

Julia is reminding us to listen this week. To open a crack in our usual judgmental selves and let inspiration flow in. To recognize perfectionism as the Evil Ego and ditch it in favor of nurturing and accepting our creativity -- flaws and all.

In Key West, I heard a woman with a voice like Norah Jones and a hat big as a lampshade, sing a song I'd never heard before. Turns out it was written by Jerry Garcia and a man named Hunter. Those of you who've read my novel know its theme was synchronicity for me, but it could work for just about anybody, I bet. When I write the second one in the series, I'm putting this on the first page. I don't think I'd ever want to live in Key West, but I sure do love all the disorder I hoarded up in my soul against the coming of a tidier day. Enjoy.

Comes a time when the blind man takes your hand
Says "don't you see?"
Gotta make it somehow
On the dreams you still believe
Don't give it up
You got an empty cup
Only love can fill
Only love can fill

A big fan of Key West

Yup. That's the giant fan at Pepe's where we escaped a passing thunder storm by eating. What a plan. And, yes, so far, I, too, am a big fan of Key West. It's an artist date as big and overblown as those gigantic blades. The lady at Pepe's assured me the fan worked fine, but it would "blow us out of here" if they turned it on this moderately chilly day.

So, I love the chickens, especially those truly voluble roosters. I love the gaudy bougainvillea in shades of fuchsia, rose and orange. I even like the rumbling, grumbling motorcycles and the fat, tattooed, long-haired, leather-skinned old hippies who ride them. I admired a t-shirt the back of which said, "If you can read this, the bitch fell off." Such gentlemen, those bikers.

The Key West Artist Date is seeing your tame houseplant grown up taller than your head. It's an absolute homage to drunkenness. Turquoise water spread thin over pale sand. Trees, gnarly and tenacious enough to build islands in the midst of the sea. A culture of celebration, perched at the edge of a catastrophe of monster winds and tsunami storm surges. Key West is 100% found art, and it overloads your head with fresh beauty and strangeness.

I'm inspired by these things because they're new to me. They jolt my senses and wake up my imagination. And that's cool. But those of you adrift in winter limbo, open your vacation eyes and find art where you are. Viv has her jar of Fluff. (And her trip to somewhere really warm!) What have you? Weigh in! And you'll have to excuse me. There's a rooster hollering on the roof and I want to get his picture....

March. Onward.

After a cold and blustery February, what better reason to chill?

I take notice of an exuberance of words in my posts. Writing too much.

Spare writing spares the reader. Edit too much and the work turns to sand. Too fine, too dry. Writing is an act of faith, a discipline requiring a pact with the reader: to connect, to share, to inform, to transport, to amuse, to keep interest. To stay true. Words are the tools we use to navigate that vast stream of consciousness through which we drift and flow. Our insistent “inner voice” propels us forward. It also needs the balance of our inner ear: to listen and say: enough.

“In writing, you must kill your darlings” is the advice from William Faulkner, who borrowed the phrase from Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch. (More on that is just a google-search away.) Morning pages open the floodgates -- putting the detritus of fleeting thoughts into words. Those scribbles are useful, but only as a prelude to more pressing work: editing the noise. So onward. To brevity . . .

* * *

Killing my darlings. Please excuse the torrent of words. The stuff of dreams. Poof, they’re gone. Like so much fluff.