I Got To Be in Pictures!

I’m in a movie! A real movie with a director and cameraman and “action” and “rolling.” And a line person and locations and extras and multiple takes. This is my newest New Thing in a while!

It’s called Next to North, and it’s the brainchild of Rebecca Casselman. It’s the story of an Alaska woman returning to Alaska to heal from a Lower 48 divorce. I play GAT (Great Aunt Tonka):

Late 60s Woman

She is called Tonka because she gave Tori a Tonka truck when she was little. Gat is fun-spirited, always bringing wonder and laughter to the family. She lives out in the bush with her man Joe, only coming into town for supplies every few weeks. She is visiting to lend support to Tori and love on her great-great nieces. She likes to crack jokes and forgets to have a filter when in ‘society.’

Boy, that’s a real character stretch!

It all started because I ran into my friend Jane while hiking, and she mentioned being in some indie films. Jane and I both worked at the library, but we also did theater acting. Next thing I knew, Jane told me to call Rebecca, with whom I Zoom-auditioned, and I got the part!

Jane, Linda, and I know each other from the theater world – acting on stage. Acting where you learn your lines in the script and your character develops from one scene to another. Where your lines go in order.

“In order” is just not what movie making is about.

So sometimes, I’d be in a T-shirt for a summer scene, but afterwards I’d be in long sleeves for a prior fall scene. But that’s not the big adjustment.

Let’s say I’m saying two sentences to the two adorable great-great nieces: “I don’t live here, remember? I live out in the Bush with Joe.” So, theater actor that I am, I think I’m going to say them and hug the girls and work my emotions for leave-taking and the rest of my lines.

But someone yells cut and Darius the cameraman moves over my shoulder or over the girls’ shoulders or from the kitchen. And we do it again. And someone coughs and we do it again. And the director and cameraman confer and we do it again. Forget that I have three more sentences that are supposed to come right after with emotional content.

In theater, you have to remember that every audience is seeing the play for their first time, so you have to be fresh with every repeat performance. Here, you have to be fresh with every repeat line. And recover where you are for the next line.

So what you think they’re getting is a chopped-up, fragmented mess of lines and script. Except Darius tells me that the average shot is only seven seconds long, that I should check on my next TV show.

Oh, wow, he’s right! A man running: two seconds on his shoes, one second on a passing window, two seconds on his sweating face, one second on his looking over his shoulder, two seconds on what’s behind him, two seconds on him long-distance, etc. etc. But somehow our brain puts it all together seamlessly.

I have new respect for the editor of movies.

And for what they call the Continuity Person.

One day, Linda and I are in an autumn card-playing scene. Then, for a few days, we’re in the summer. Then we’re back to the night of the card-playing, but I think Linda is in the wrong shirt. After grappling with our Third Third memory capacities, Linda goes home to her laundry pile and returns to the set with the right shirt. We’re pretty sure.

Never mind where the tea cups were placed!

It had been quite a while since I’d acted. And suddenly, there I was with a group of actors again. You share a stage and a script and a schedule in a collaborative work of art. Everyone wishes everyone well because you share this production and you want it to succeed and you need everyone to succeed.

Movieland gives you a chance to inhabit a different world, to take a break from this one. You share lots of waiting around time – as yourself – in between the role you’re adopting. There’s something about putting on a role deliberately: because then it’s clear when you take it off. In Real Life, that’s not always clear. But for a time, with acting, you take a break from yourself, too. What a relief.

Notched Up and Flammable

Back in June, I read an article in my Head Butler newsletter from Jesse Kornbluth. He described a book, Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine. The passages he quotes highlight the ordinary insults/belittling/denigration African Americans face living in our society. But he said the book was like poetry, so I put it on hold at my library.

I started and finished it yesterday. It's short.

Part I of the book is bits of what white people will actually say to black people. Horrible things. But all very believable.

Who said that? She said what? What did he just do? Did she really just say that? He said what? What did she do? Did I hear what I think I heard?

Part II of the book is about Serena Williams and what she has had to put up with as a strong, black woman in the white world of tennis. Rankine describes the bad calls against Serena by tennis umpires – five of them in the 2004 U.S. Open alone.

By now, I’m enraged. I like and admire Serena Williams, but I don’t follow tennis, so I didn’t know any of the bad calls, public ridicule, etc etc. This is all new to me, and I’m in a lather. How dare they treat her like that! How dare they think her anger is uncalled for!

I am sputtering with fury, fueled with rage, so I go online to Goodreads to register that I’m “currently reading” the book.

Huh? Goodreads shows that I’ve already marked the book as “read” back in 2017. And it only has three stars.

My First Reaction
Somebody has hacked my Goodreads account! Someone is adding books to my “read” list that I haven’t read. How have they gotten my password? And they’re throwing in fake star reviews, too; this book is clearly four stars. This is terrible!

Tim, witnessing both my Serena rage and the uproar over my hacked book list, mutters something about how it wasn’t, after all, my bank account.

But this is my book list! So I inspect other books recorded for 2017: Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer, A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles. Yes, I read those. How deep has the hacking gone?

Ah, but back in 2017, I also kept a separate, non-Internet list of books I’d read. I can check against that. And there it is: I read Citizen: An American Lyric in May of 2017.

My Second Reaction
Dementia has set in, and I am one step away from assisted living. How could I have read a book, had such a strong reaction, and have absolutely no memory of it?

I tell people I have never read Kafka, that it’s a hole in my literary history. And then, many years ago, while cleaning out my mother’s attic, I came across a paper I wrote comparing the writings of Nietzsche and Kafka. I was thorough: the bibliography was comprehensive. Yes, I know my Nietzsche well, but I have never, ever read any Kafka.

Wherever Kafka is, so is Citizen: An American Lyric.

I read the rest of the book, hoping I’ll come across an aha! moment of recognition. It doesn’t happen. What does happen is Part III and Part IV and Part V and Part VI of regular and consistent humiliations and deaths of unarmed black men and mistreatment and the squashing of anger because to be black and “Yes, and this is how you are a citizen. Come on. Let it go. Move on.” But all expressed … lyrically … so it hurts to see ugliness described beautifully.

My Third Reaction
It’s 2021 today, and 2017 must have been a long, long time ago. 2019 was a long time ago.

Like the rest of America, I’m notched up. Claudia Rankine says it herself, that these moments accumulate in the body: “I wanted the book, as much as the book could do this, to communicate that feeling. The feeling of saturation. Of being full up.”

Her book does that, but in 2021, I am already saturated. I am a tinderbox and just one more story of social injustice, of people wronged or ignored, of rights lost, and I ignite. I am just a spark away from outrage.

So is the rest of America.

My Fourth Reaction
I’m coordinating meetings with my senators in support of the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. (Email me if you’re interested.)

There, that sounds reasonable and calm and restrained, right? Like I can conduct myself properly. You wouldn’t know the desperation I feel about things not getting better. I’m not running crazy through the streets, shouting on street corners, tearing my hair out. At least, not on the outside. (Trust me, I still am on the inside.)

My hope? That we all reach our own Fourth Reactions, whatever shape they take. We just need to do something.

Did this come in your email?

Do things look different?

Does this blog look different?

Is everything working the way it’s supposed to?

Just when I think things are stable and running smoothly, technology throws a wrench in the works. I write and illustrate the blog; then I post it. Then it gets to you and your email because you signed up. But Google did away with the sign-up thingie, so I had to find another.

It’s called follow.it. If you’re reading this, then follow.it works. Hooray!

If you’re not reading this, I’m going to have a big conniption fit in the corner. I may even throw things. I’ll call my friend, Steve, who also switched over to follow.it for his blog. And maybe eventually, I’ll take deep breaths and calm down.

Whether it’s my car, my wristwatch, my scanner, or public restrooms, technology has confounded me.

It’s confounded you, too. I had to explain how to comment and share my posts after so much shared confusion.

Some of these posts go back to 2015 – technology is a problem that endures. Back then, I was still figuring out how to work an Apple TV remote.

I’m going on and on, assuming you’re here with me, that I made it into your inbox. Oh, and if you’re reading this on the website (https://3rdthirds.blogspot.com) and not via email, you should see a great big box “To receive Our Third Thirds by email” with a big black “Subscribe” button. That’s compliments of follow.it. It’s easy.

We hope.

Silver Linings

As the pandemic winds down – or so we think – leaving many dead, many long-sick, the rich richer and the poor poorer, and me with my social skills fractured; I have to admit to a silver lining. Doesn’t that sound callous? I think so. But some people might call it “looking on the bright side,” which is yet another example of my social confusion.

Anyhow, way back at the beginning, when I was in Philadelphia for my “urban infusion” month interrupted by Covid, my sister Elizabeth rescued me. She drove down from Massachusetts and retrieved me. As the reality of pandemic hit us, Elizabeth was especially nervous because she lives alone. I promised her that I would not let her feel unsupported; I would check in on her every week.

And I have.

And I even went the extra step: I included my brother, Larry.

My brother once said powerful glue held all of us together. And then, ten years ago, I stopped speaking to him. Oh, he was still cc’d on sibling emails, but no visits, no phone calls, no private emails, no contact. The glue was dissolved. The siblings were in disarray.

So disruptive was this wound that we kept it from my mother. My mother died feeling that her legacy – four kids who would stick together no matter what – was intact. It wasn’t. I spoke to my brother for the first time at her funeral. In between, I’d manage the “I can’t get away” excuse when the family gathered.

So what did he do? Never mind. To me, it was very, very big.

But I’d made a promise to Elizabeth and now it was Covid time, and there was Zoom. So the siblings – all four of us – started Zooming every Sunday: noon Alaska time, 1:00 California time, 4:00 Massachusetts time, and 10 p.m. Berlin time.

 

Every Sunday. Except when that was impossible, so then it was Monday. One friend called it “sacrosanct.” Yup. Every Sunday.

For two or more hours.

I suffer Zoom fatigue. No, I suffer Zoom hate. I can’t stand looking at faces in little boxes, sitting erect in front of my computer, having people talk over each other, etc etc. I have a Zoom limit of an hour (if I’m generous).

But I can Zoom with my siblings for HOURS. This is what we do: we laugh, we tease, we agree or disagree, we try not to give advice, we get tired, we prattle on meaninglessly, we comfort, we talk movies and books, we listen.

At one point, Larry held up a stapler. Immediately, Elizabeth held one up, too. “I got it from Mom; she got it from her office.” Someone else got theirs the same way. I held up mine: “I got it when I was little and it turns out it had a lifetime guarantee, so I got a new one about twenty years ago.” “Who gives a lifetime guarantee on staplers?” And off we went, proving to Larry that we could talk about anything.

Anytime Allison’s eyes start looking down, we know she’s researching something. She’s relentless. So sometimes, when we see that, we all “stop video.” She looks up to see us all gone. “Where is everybody?”

Once one of us pulled out the masks we got on a family vacation in New England. Back then, we had spent an uproarious time in the general store trying on masks, hooting and freaking out. Amazingly, now, each of us then disappeared off-screen and returned with our own masks – even in the same general store bags. We spent an hour, carrying on in masks, disguises, costumes.

After several months, I told my brother I forgave him.

I started with the sibling Zooms as a gift to Allison and Elizabeth, knowing that they needed all of us together, but I was wrong. These sibling Zooms are a gift to me.

Yes, I know all those sayings like, “Anger does more damage to the vessel in which it is stored than the object on which it is poured,” but I’d felt wronged.

How wrong I was. I might have called this post Pearl of Wisdom #3 except that I’m too slow a learner. I don’t feel very wise. I feel foolish and stubborn. I needed a 2x4 to the head; I needed a pandemic!

Life is short. Love is long. I love my siblings, all of them. Thank you, Covid. Thank you, Zoom.

The Quest for New-ness #5

When I first started this blog, I was really intent on my Quest for New-ness. On my website, my New Thing label has 84 posts, more than any other. I described it this way:

If I don’t want to get stale in my Third Third, I need newness. I need jolts and shake-ups. Actually, my whole life has been about wanting and liking jolts and shake-ups, but the difference is that now I feel I need them to ward off any encroaching stagnation.

And that was even before the relentless staleness of Covid-19.

So here I am after days weeks months of same-old-same-old. But then we got vaccinated and Tim announced, “Off to Maui!” which jolted me so badly I had to hide for a while. But I emerged, boarded the plane, and traded Alaska snow and cold for Maui sun and heat.

This is the thing about sun and heat: you can lie down in it, you walk around in shorts and tank tops in it, you put sunscreen on in it. You maybe stay indoors during the hottest part of it, but mostly you are breathing air-that-has-not-been-in-four-walls – outside air! You do that for most of the day. It’s kind of miraculous.

But you still have to eat, you still have to acquire food and do something with it – cook it or order it or look at a menu about it. You still have to take showers and wash your hair. You still have to brush your teeth. You still have to put dirty clothes in the dirty-laundry bag.

You still have to wake up and go to sleep. You still have to decide what you’re going to do today: hike or beach or pool? You still have to get in a car that you’ll drive to wherever you might want to sightsee. The car will still need gas. If you read a book, you still have to open it and turn the pages.

Do you see where I’m going here? Most of our days repeat most of our days no matter where we are. And if you’re suffering from too much routine and the psychologists report an emotional state of “languishing,” then you just might not be getting the New-ness your spirit requires.

I grew up on Long Island, so I grew up on water. Beaches and pools. During those sticky, humid days, water was our sanity, our pleasure, and our thrill. I would body surf till my scalp was covered in sand, till I carried loads of sand in my swimsuit. The town pool was daily until my friends got driver’s licenses, then the beach became a daily after work option. I am better in water than on land.

And on Maui, the water is delightful. You can swim in it and play around in it, but it’s very shallow. The thing you can’t do is body surf in it. You just can’t grab a wave and let it take your body over a four-inch surf. That must be why everyone is holding a boogie board, which I don’t quite get: is it like a toy? A baby surfboard?

One of the new things on this trip was staying in a condo. We’d never done that. In this condo was a supply closet with beach chairs and beach mats, umbrellas and towels, flippers and wet suits. And boogie boards. It was like a personal summertime R.E.I.

So we took the boogie boards to the beach. Let me tell you about boogie boarding!

I stood out there, holding the board in front of me. I know my waves; I picked a good one at the right time, threw myself forward on the board.

And I flew!       I was a bullet, flying through the water or the air or whatever it was! 

I was on top of the whole world 

until the wave disappeared below me and dropped me down – free fall! – to the next wave which caught me and took me to shore

where the next wave positively drove me up the beach on two inches of water and sand.

Aaaiiieeee! It was incredible!

When the water went out, the board was buried in sand and I had to dig it out.

I woke up.

That’s it: my fog lifted and light emerged. It wasn’t the adrenaline rush of risk (I gave up terror after the Chilkoot Trail), and no fear was involved in this at all: we’re talking shallow shore breaks. It was the sheer delight of New-ness. A brand-new experience had entered my life, charged new neurons, ignored the same-old-same-old.

Finally, an 85th New Thing!

The Elusiveness of Normal

I’m not sure I can be normal again.

I’m fully vaccinated, about to leave 29° snow behind for a vacation in Maui, and these are my thoughts: Should I take some calming medication before sitting on a crowded airplane with a mask on for five hours? This is a plane where everyone has had to have a negative Covid test within 72 hours, but that’s not it.

I’m not scared of Covid; I’m scared of realizing that normal is no longer possible.

I look back at the past year; I’ve made a family recipe art book, tackled art projects, organized an online theater-watching group, read a bazillion books. I even was incredibly excited about getting a chocolate-dipped ice cream pop!

But now, I wake up adrift. Plans don’t excite me. I’m sick of snow, sick of skiing, sick of Netflix, sick of cooking, sick of grocery store pickup ordering, sick of my computer. I started posting poetry on signs on my yard, and now I’m sick of poetry. Sometimes I actually don’t feel like reading, which is truly cataclysmic. Vaccination has been like spotting a finish line and totally sagging before you cross it.

 

We just restarted our athletic club membership so I could swim again … and I haven’t gone. I’m not worried about catching Covid at the club, not worried about germs. I’m worried that swimming won’t feel good.

Early on in my Third Third, I discovered the Big Three that were necessary for a happy Third Third:

Without teaching at the Alaska Literacy Program, without in-person classes with OLÉ, my days have become sort of adrift. My ability to adapt has petered out. The only schedule I have is on the computer: a writing class, author interviews, recorded theater. Only occasionally am I “of use.” My community is on Zoom.

Our daughter quit her first job, one she had loved. For the last year, I characterized our phone calls as her trying to convince herself she was happy with her job. She faced workplace issues complicated by working remotely, and she was valiant in framing things positively, but her heart was no longer in it. It became just too hard and she quit. Hooray! She radiates happiness now. I’m a big supporter of eliminating negative conditions quickly and decisively.

But the ones I’m in – the ones we’re all in – just aren’t quickly and decisively going away, and I’m losing the ability to convince myself that “X will be fun; let’s do X!” Or even “I feel like doing X.” Or even “X has to be done, suck it up and do it.” I don’t suck it up anymore; I just drift.

I know that my negative conditions don’t include illness or death, job loss, or eviction – as many people’s do – and I’m grateful for that. I know that the snow I’m sick of covers a yard I may appreciate when the snow melts. For goodness sake, I’m heading to Maui! (stop whining!) But I also know that the Big Three for a happy Third Third have been disrupted, and it will take time to re-create the Third Third that works for me.

We’ve had our first fully-vaccinated guests for dinner, been guests for the first time in someone else’s fully-vaccinated home. Both those times felt just like the old normal once we were in them. Really. But they took some psychic lifting to actually do them. They’re still not a new normal.

We may have landed in this pandemic suddenly, but I think we’re going to have to lift ourselves out of it with baby steps.

 

Collateral Damage

My inanimate objects are suffering from Covid-19, and it’s not just my car. The latest victim: my beanbag chairs.

Yes, yes, I know: nobody has beanbag chairs anymore. Nobody in their Third Third. Nobody who has trouble getting up once they’ve gotten down. I have that trouble, too. But when the TV proved too hard to see all the way from the couch, it was easier to drag the beanbags out into the middle of the floor, closer to the TV. 

(Why do they insist on using text messages on detective shows? You have to race for the pause button and get right up to the TV to see what crucial bit of information the detective has just received.) 

But now – compliments of Netflix and Prime and Hulu, Disney+ and HBO Max and PBS Passport – the beanbags are pretty squashed and flattened. I’m not sitting on beans anymore; I’m sitting on floor.

I sewed my first giant-size beanbag chairs back when I had my first apartment. They have a muslin lining so I can wash the outside, and there have been many iterations of the outside as they wore out, were faded by the sun, or just got tired. Now the outsides are fine; it’s the insides that have Covid.

The issue is the filling: Styrofoam pellets. They start out round and roly-poly, but they flatten. Then you have to add more. That was easier in the ’70s. Since then, it’s been a challenge.

I filled my first beanbag chair in Berkeley, California. I’d driven there in my little Datsun and stuffed it full, really FULL. It was like an early version of air bags, I guess, but as if they’d already exploded. I ended up spending the night, and when my friend Jenny saw the car the next morning, she marveled that no junkies had broken in thinking it was some incredible bounty of drugs.

When I lived in San Francisco and my brother worked the early a.m. shift as a trolley coach driver, he used to show up at my place, settle in the beanbag chair in the sun, and fall asleep. So when he turned 50, I made him a beanbag chair and flew down to San Francisco in September 2001 with a bag and liner. I called all around and discovered a plastics place for the pellets.

The thing about filling beanbag chairs is that Styrofoam pellets have static. They stick to the plastic bag you’re emptying, to your hair, your clothes, to the bag you’re putting them in. We looked like a popcorn popper had run amuck with us inside it.

Once the bag was filled, planes flew into the World Trade Centers and my sister-in-law buried herself in the beanbag chair in front of the television. It was comforting: beanbag chairs hug back. She liked it. She said, “This is nice. You’ll have to make one for your brother some day.”

But now I have Netflix-flattened beanbag chairs, which means a Quest, a Quest for Pellets. I’ve been led on wild goose chases to Fred Meyer, Walmart, a bigger Walmart, a different Fred Meyer. Salespeople say, “Oh, yes, that’s in Crafts.” Crafts say, “We haven’t had them in years.” Salespeople in the front of the store have seen the pellets in the back of the store, but that is only a figment of their imagination. This happens in every store.

The Quest moves online, where – no, no, no! I’ve done this before! – I lose myself in the customer reviews of pellets.

This is too much complexity for my Covid brain. The floor is just fine.