Fear.

"As a girl, she dreamed about having a silent home, just to herself, the way other women dreamed of their weddings. Instead of collecting lace and linen for her trousseau, the young woman buys old things from the thrift stores on grimy Milwaukee Avenue for her future house-of-her-own---faded quilts, cracked vases, chipped saucers, lamps in need of love.

"...The daughter claimed that she had been taught that a writer needs quiet, privacy, and long stretches of solitude to think. The father decided too much college and too much gringo friends had ruined her. In a way he was right. In a way she was right. When she thinks to herself in her father's language, she knows sons and daughters don't leave their parents' house until they marry. When she thinks in English, she knows she should've been on her own since eighteen.

"...At the end of the evening she finds herself searching for a ride home. She came on the bus and [he] offers to give her a lift home. But she's not going home, she's got her heart set on a movie that's showing only tonight. She's afraid of going to the movies alone, and that's why she's decided to go. Because she's afraid.

"...What is the woman in the photograph afraid of? She's afraid of walking from her parked car to her apartment in the dark. She's afraid of the scuffling sounds in the walls. She's afraid she'll fall in love and get stuck living in Chicago. She's afraid of ghosts, deep water, rodents, night, things that move too fast---cars, airplanes, her life. She's afraid she'll have to move back home again if she isn't brave enough to live alone.

"...I meet Norma Alarcon. She is to become one of my earliest publishers and my lifetime friend. The first time she walks through the rooms of [my] apartment on North Paulina, she notices the quiet rooms, the collection of typewriters, the books and Japanese figurines, the windows with the view of freeway and sky. She walks as if on tiptoe, peering into every room, even the pantry and closet as if looking for something. 'You live here...' she asks, 'alone?'

'Yes.'

'So...' she pauses, 'How did yo do it?'

Norma, I did it by doing the things I was afraid of doing so that I would no longer be afraid. Moving away to go to graduate school. Traveling abroad alone. Earning my own money and living by myself. Posing as an author when I was afraid, just as I posed in that photo you used on the first cover of Third Woman. "

---Sandra Cisneros, from the introduction to the 25th Anniversary edition of her book, The House on Mango Street.

700 W. Bittersweet Place

Buxom sunflowers
and
nervous black-eyes susans:
the nursing mother
and
the sweet clumsy virgin.
Perhaps I am both on days like today
---all teacher,
and,
all protege.
But what woman is not possessive
of both
swelled breasts of dependence
and
tightly wound flesh untouched?

So,
we proceed.
I
am both
the abject,
the never-enough.
Yet here perfection is achieved
In submission to learned August rain.

23rd Street Runs into Heaven

By Kenneth Patchen

You stand near the window as lights wink
On along the street. Somewhere a trolley, taking
Shop-girls and clerks home, clatters through
This before-supper Sabbath. An alley cat cries
To find the garbage cans sealed; newsboys
Begin their murder-into-pennies round.

We are shut in, secure for a little, safe until
Tomorrow. You slip your dress off, roll down
Your stockings, careful against runs. Naked now,
With soft light on soft flesh, you pause
For a moment; turn and face me -
Smile in a way that only women know
Who have lain long with their lover
And are made more virginal.

Our supper is plain but we are very wonderful.

Today was the most amazing day. It started out with me sick in bed, coughing so hard that my sides hurt, my brain hurt, and the dogs weren't even willing to share a sleeping space with me. All in all, disgusting.

But then I started cleaning, and feeling a little better. I still made it to the show tonight, Spring Awakening. It's been a long time since I've seen live theatre, especially a musical. And, for a musical, it was good. It was just nice to be out and about, a night on the town. All by myself.

When I got home, I had a mountain of packages waiting for me. Most of them were books for the semester and, finally, my dream came true! One of the used books I bought was an old library book! The musty, ragged cover, the card pocket still inside.

I am a whore for old, creaky bindings and pages scented with the kiss of other books and fingers.

One package was from a catalogue. I ordered a hilarious tshirt, and two pairs of pants... THAT FIT REALLY WELL! This never happens.

Okay. The pants were vain. But seriously, 5'2" biatches around the world will allow me this. It is damn hard to find pants that fit when you're the height of a middle schooler with the hips and ass of a normal woman.

"Wild Things in Captivity" (D.H. Lawrence)

Wild things in captivity
while they keep their own wild purity
won't breed, they mope, they die.

All men are in captivity,
Active with captive activity,
and the best won't breed, though they don't know why.

The great cage of our domesticity
kills sex in a man, the simplicity
of desire is distorted and twisted awry.

And so, with bitter perversity,
gritting against the great adversity,
the young ones copulate, hate it, anf want to cry.

Sex is a state of grace.
In a cage it can't take place.
Break the cage then, start in and try.

"Hey little freak with the lunch pail purse/Underneath the paint you're just a little girl" --Tom Petty and the Hearbreakers, "Zombie Zoo"

I cleaned my bookshelf today. It was a general reorganization, dusting, and reevaluation of the books I wanted to keep and those I could muster the strength to part with.

Name a point in my life. A momentous occasion of considerable import, or a random Tuesday in 1998. I can probably tell you what book I was reading. I associate times in my life with what I was reading during that time. I held A Tree Grows in Brooklyn a little longer than the rest of the books as I dusted, remembering the ten consecutive years I have read and re-read it. I passed off Fear of Falling as quickly as possible, because it was the book I was reading when attacked on a bus in 2008. When I had finally worked my way down to the most neglected and chaotic mess, the bottom shelf of old theatre books and scripts, I found a book so special that I felt compelled to share it.


This is a notebook I bought in Broad Ripple (an area on the north side of Indianapolis, that used to be cool and funky). It was from a store that smelled strongly of Patchouli, and they sold long, flowy skirts, candles, and things made out of recycled items. I bought this notebook there to hold my acting notes; things I learned in Saturday morning classes, things directors said that struck me, and quotes from acting teachers and actors I read.


Relatively few pages are filled. But, looking back, I think that was because most of what I learned doing theatre was not in the form of a bulleted point or quick note to jot down. It was more than that. However, coming across this notebook today, turning its crispy, delicate pages, I began remembering the passion, love, and joy that theatre gave me. The alacrity with which I approached it.
A list of "dream roles." I played one, Anne Frank, in 2002.


My loopy handwriting and address, in case I ever left it in some coffeeshop after finishing my Mocha, my drink of choice in my early teens before real coffee sounded appealing.


When I first moved to Chicago at 18, I remember mourning the loss of the theatre community, the creative outlet, and so many other things about it. It had been my life. I wondered if I'd ever feel that way about anything again.

Today was the first time that I've encountered one of these nostalgic moments and was able to think, Yes, I do love something as much as I loved this. And that made me feel content and excited.

Stirring my oatmeal, the smells hit my nostrils and suddenly I am not here, but there, living on the south side, downtown, the South Loop. It is 2005. I am new. I am not at home, yet I feel more comfortable than I have in... years? Months? Ever?

I always get sentimental this time of year. Kids are graduating, others are closing another year, gearing up for the next. Some people are moving. Lots of people are getting married. Summer promises a lot, it seems. And I can't help but think about the promise of summer 2005, for me. Eighteen years old, headstrong, stubborn. I left Indianapolis, the only home I could remember, and the friends and streets and mochas and rebellions that made up my teenage years. In my head I had created a life for myself in Chicago. it was going to be fabulous.

Four years later... and it seems so much longer. And, finally, I feel fabulous. My life is completely different than I thought it would be. For the better, I will add. I would be miserable leading the life that eighteen year old had planned. But tonight, I am sentimental. For a late night snack, I chose a packet of instant oatmeal, Cinnamon Bun flavor. As I stirred the hot oats and water, I remembered eating the stuff every morning before walking uptown to my retail job off Michigan Avenue. In an instant I saw that first apartment, too expensive but too cute, a great first Chicago apartment, with its sideways view of the Sears Tower, its walking distance to both the Art Institute and the largest homeless shelter in the city. A far cry from the suburb I had been raised in. I heard the creaking utility closet door, the cat running past it to use the litter box. I heard the calm quiet of downtown weekend morning, all of the business suits slung over backs of chairs until Monday.

All that from some hot cereal.