Sallyacious

Baby Cyclamen

This lovely little bud just opened today. It’s in a potted garden I made for a $20 donation to the Master Gardeners of Chicago when I attended the Chicago Flower and Garden Show a couple of weeks ago.

The flower in the foreground is new. It wasn’t there when I potted the plants. I can’t believe my luck. Usually, I have none with cyclamen. To not only keep this one alive, but somehow get it healthy enough to bud is a triumph for me.

I don’t think I’d happened to mention to y’all here that I was taking a workshop taught by Tim Miller. Yes, that Tim Miller, Queer Solo Performer, one of the NEA 4. A wonderful storyteller, a generous teacher, and a thoroughly delightful person.

What can I say? This workshop may have changed the way I approach performance from here on out. It certainly has given me the foundation for a longer solo piece of which yesterday’s post will be the finale. (I certainly can’t imagine it happening any earlier in a piece. I mean, where would I go after that?) It also provided me with a safe, supportive and love-filled environment in which I could creatively explore all of the stuff going on in my life right now, despite my initial decision to “not go there” because I wasn’t sure I could keep a lid on the grief during a performance.

And it gave me a community. I spent about 18 hours total in a room with 15 other questing, striving, struggling human beings who loved me for who I was and didn’t make any judgements. God bless them.

Although, I think She must have, because the performance on Monday night was electric. Eventually I should have a clip of my piece that I can post, but for now, a brief description.

Imagine about 100 people sitting in a circle on the floor. I am standing in the center, surrounded by and in physical contact with three other actors whose backs are to me. Each time I say “I CLAIM THIS SPACE,” they take one step forward, their stomp an exclamation point to my sentence. And with that stomp, I pivot a tiny bit to my left, so that the entire audience is involved in my performance. They are making eye contact with me. They are part of the expanding circle as my fellow actors claim the space with their bodies. They are ultimately surrounded by the sound of the stomping as the actors eventually exit the audience and begin walking counterclockwise around the circle, still taking only one step for every repetition of the refrain.

It was fucking AWESOME. At least from my point of view. I got so many compliments and comments from both my fellow performers and the people I knew in the audience that it must have been quite powerful for them, too.

And then there was the woman I didn’t know, who specifically sought me out afterwards and said, “I just need to say thank you. I’m going through a divorce right now, and I really needed to see this. So thank you.” We chatted a bit about our relative experiences, and then she left. I felt, briefly, like I had found a sister, albeit one I will probably never see again. I hope things go well for her.

Now, of course, I am back in the world of the everyday, looking harder for a job, trying to figure all this out, growing very, very tired of crying at the drop of a hat and hoping that will ease off soon, yet still aware of this newly hatched empowerment thrumming through my veins…

I CLAIM THIS SPACE

This heart that tried to leap out of my body in that horrible, beige, 2am laundry room where my husband spoke the words that ended our marriage.

I CLAIM THIS SPACE

This same heart that has broken and been glued back together so many times because I know that choosing to love will not, CAN not kill me.

I CLAIM THIS SPACE

This throat, closing with grief.

I CLAIM THIS SPACE

These feet that have kept me moving forward, one step at a time, even when I have been so very, very tired.

I CLAIM THIS SPACE

This uterus that has never wanted children.

I CLAIM THIS SPACE

These bones that will dissolve as soon as I stop bleeding, just as they have for all of the women in my family who have come before me.

I CLAIM THIS SPACE

These breasts that are too small.

I CLAIM THIS SPACE

This ass that is too big.

I CLAIM THIS SPACE

These fat cells in my belly, butt and thighs that miraculously started shrinking when the dissolution of my marriage put an end to my appetite.

I CLAIM THIS SPACE

This ACL made of two tendons, folded over and fastened with titanium and bone.

I CLAIM THIS SPACE

These eyes that have suddenly begun to need additional magnifying assistance.

I CLAIM THIS SPACE

This grey—no, THESE WHITE—hairs I have found so hard to hide.

I CLAIM THIS SPACE

The crows’ feet around my eyes

The battle scars on my soul.

These hands that do, hold, build, make, give, feel, so much

I CLAIM THIS SPACE

This mind that can see, read, think, cogitate, ingest, interpret, express and create.

I CLAIM THIS SPACE

This Sallyacious seed, burning brightly in my belly. This new life of mine, first forced, now chosen.

I CLAIM THIS SPACE.

But events (and my memory) conspired against me.

I just spent the last two weeks in my beloved Pacific Northwest, working on the largest educational jazz festival in the world and then one of the smaller ones. I forgot to bring the password for the blog with me, and so couldn’t have posted even if I’d HAD the time, which I didn’t.

(Saturday was my first night off in two weeks, and I spent it lying on the bed in my hotel room watching really awful original movies on the Hallmark Channel. Interestingly, in a Hallmark Romance, no one is allowed to be divorced. The women have been single their entire lives–read virginal–and the men are all widowers with children. So there are no ties but you can be sure they are unselfish and full of love. Bleargh.)

Then, on Sunday, as I was gathering myself after the first festival, my travel laptop imploded and I spent the entire next week working from my cell phone and a thumb drive, with the laptop in safety mode. Thank GOODNESS I decided a year ago that I needed a cell that would let me check my email.

NDA’s prevent me from sharing many stories, but I do just want to say this:

• The Grief Diet works, I have lost 15 lbs since the end of January, confirmed by my doctor.

• Skinny-ish me gets a LOT of very flattering male attention. I will be working to maintain this weight loss.

• I have a weakness for dreadlocked jazz bassists. (And one drummer.) I didn’t act on anything, but, dayum, did I ever want to.

And now that I am unpacked and the cats have been fed and the bed has been made and my facebook status has been updated, I think I’ll close this up and lie on the bed and finish the Agatha Christie novel that kept me so absorbed on the plane.

It was a perfect storm. There are certain things I need before and during an audition. I got none of them. Just because of the way it was set up. Nobody’s to blame, it was just not my optimum audition situation.

On the way out, one of the monitors asked if it went well. “No,” I said, “I planned two pieces that required a lot of movement and there wasn’t the room I was expecting and I adjusted poorly.”

“Do you think you’re just being hard on yourself?” she said.

“Nope,” I replied. Because I wasn’t. I made stupid mistakes to try to fit my ground-covering pieces into a much smaller space. I had less than ten minutes to come up with a workable plan and that I couldn’t try it out first, because I was sitting in the house waiting for the performers before me to go. I think I did the best I could on the fly.

It was not as bad as the worst audition I have ever given (a 2nd callback for an Equity house in Portland, which I will someday tell you about because it was abysmal), but it was amateurish and I went over time.

Ah, well. It’s over now. Time to move on and focus on tonight’s callback. And maybe treat myself to a donut for surviving.

My friend Laura over at Rhinestone Armadillo has a post up about a project we’re doing together.

You should be reading her anyway. She’s fabulous.

(I hope.)

Divorce-free post here, I promise.

The Source of All the Trouble

This is Katala as of this morning. She’s two months away from turning nineteen. She’s also the cat who has been the focus of my attention recently. (Aside from Imogen, who developed a UTI this week. Expensive week.)

As you could probably tell from the above-linked post, I have been at my wits’ end trying to come up with a solution for the poor girl’s gastric issues. She’s terrifyingly sensitive to medications, but needs something to address the acid production problem, and every solution the vet and I had come up with so far had resulted in more problems rather than fewer. I was beginning to think I needed to say good-bye to her, just because there seemed to be no controlling the latest spate of issues.

But there was one thing I hadn’t tried. Every time I googled things like, “cat, diarrhea, vomiting” or “cat, pepcid, diarrhea” or “cat, vomiting” I kept seeing references to slippery elm bark.

I know that cats are not to be dosed with human medications or with herbal supplements. Their systems are different from ours. Spider bites don’t bother them nearly as much as they do us, yet chocolate can kill them. If their systems responded to things in the exact same way ours do, they’d be humans. So I was leery of trying an herbal remedy. Because the point is to NOT kill her or make things worse. On the other hand, she responds so badly to manufactured substances that I thought herbs might be a bit more gentle on her system and not have the nasty side effects. So I did some research on slippery elm bark and cats.

When I discovered a reference to the benefits of slippery elm bark on one of the feline CRF information sites I trust, I figured it was probably okay, but I wanted a bit more reassurance. Which is when I found this note from a DVM about how slippery elm is one of the few herbal substances that we can give to cats and dogs. Both sites had recipes for slippery elm bark syrup. Knowing how delicate Katala’s system is, I decided to go with the one that seemed to have the smallest dosage first, since I could always up the concentration if it seemed to be working but wasn’t working enough.

On Wednesday, I went to the store and bought some organic slippery elm powder. I made the syrup. Once it was cool, I gave it to Katala. It didn’t appear to affect her adversely, so I was hoping it would quell the vomiting or at the very least, clear up the diarrhea so I could keep giving her the Pepcid without the awful side effect. She still did a bunch of barfing in the middle of the night (so I gave her a Pepcid), and also had some loose stools, but they weren’t nearly as bad as they had been. Still, I was up every 30-60 minutes for a while there on Wednesday night/Thursday morning. I began to despair.

However. I figured I needed to give the Pepcid time to leave her system (if I could), and also for the slippery elm to really begin to work. And last night, I slept All. Night. Long. No vomit sounds woke me. When I got up this morning, there was no barf anywhere and no loose stool anywhere.

For the first time since early January, the cat appears to be having no gastric issues. She’s snoring behind me in the chair right now, and she had her last dose of Pepcid at 3:55am Thursday. We’ll see what happens at 45 hours or so post-dose, since that’s when she usually starts feeling punky again, but I think we may have a solution. Of course, it’s going to take a bit more work than just shoving a pill down the cat’s throat once every day or so, since she gets the syrup four times a day and the timing is kind of precise (at least 5 minutes before a meal). Plus, I have to make the syrup every eight days or so, but if it keeps her comfortable and vomit/diarrhea-free, I don’t care. It’s worth the work. I’ll keep you posted, but I think we may have found a solution, at least for now.

And because she was stretched out in the sunshine and I felt like the relief and sunbeams were warming my heart in the same way, here’s a little gratuitous Quickly to warm your morning.

Gratuitous Quickly

The outpourings of love and support from so many people have left me breathless. I cannot even begin to voice how much your comments and letters and phone calls are helping me cope.

It would be very easy to feel alone and isolated as I struggle with this, so thank you so very, very, very much for your thoughtful reminders that I’m not. I am overwhelmed with the number of people who have taken the time to tell me they care. I had no idea there werre so many of you.

Thank you. Thank you for the comments and emails and phone calls. Thank you for thinking of and praying for me. Thank you for texting me just to say I’m on your mind. Thank you for finding things to do with me. For offering to help me find work, for offering me a weekend away, for offering me a shoulder to cry on.

Thank you doesn’t even begin to express the depths of my gratitude or how much you have moved and buoyed me with your support, but it’s the only set of words I have, so thank you.