113. ON AUGUST
another week of absorbing art like a sponge
a little prose for you all. (don’t panic, i’m actually looking forward to much of this month — sometimes i just write things that are a little melancholy when i’m running late to meetings.)
if the sunday scaries were a month, they would be august. my birthday month. it’s a month that makes me feel like a bone in soup, sweating salt and leaching flavor. i am not good at resting, and this is a month when i am supposed to rest.
i have whatever the opposite of excitement is. not dread, no — but a kind of anticipatory grief. my mind is incapable of looking ahead only so far: if it can imagine how good something will feel, it can imagine how hard it will be to lose. if it can foresee the joy of an experience, it cannot help but prophesy the sting of its ending.
i turn twenty-eight in a little over a week. twenty-seven felt right. i don’t know yet how twenty-eight will feel. i get to see my family soon. i get to spend long days out in the sun. i get to relax, if i can figure out how.
p.s. this post is too long for email! click the title in your inbox or click HERE to read it on my little substack website so you don’t miss anything.
reading.
(read so much this week! my sister said, “we’re being so literate!”)
terrace story by hilary leichter, recommended by my friend lilla. read it in less than 48 hours — it was almost more like a collection of related short stories than a novel. spare, heartbreaking, strange, beautiful.
i LOVE when new york magazine delivers a totally wild longread. this one’s about four writers who cheat on each other and can’t stop writing about it. it’s also about jealousy and competition and the challenges of being in a relationship with someone who makes the same kind of art as you do.
if you liked that, check out this poem by one of the aforementioned writers (the one who i would describe as the most innocent out of them all, for what it’s worth).
this generous and transparent interview with theresa buchheister, outgoing artistic director of the brick. i don’t know theresa personally, but i can say that their departure means the impossible puzzle of trying to make both art and a living in new york city is once again robbing our arts community of a vital voice. they’ll be missed.
you may now kill the bride by kate weston. needed something easy. a palate cleanser. this was terribly written and i devoured it, along with several hilarious goodreads pans (see below).
angel cake’s list of perfect things and her list of things she hates.
the latest blue milk. i love the sort of scrapbook / notebook / commonplace book format.
more life hacks from platonic love.
seeing.
a reading of meet me in five by becca carter freeman, directed by acadia barrengos. so thrilled to see this play live, and hope the team will get another chance to put it onstage.
a milestone this week — i visited theatre on film and tape archive at the new york public library for the performing arts! i’ve been dreaming of visiting the archive since i was a little kid, and i finally had reason. there are officially two recordings of fiddler on the roof publicly available to view at the archive — the revivals starring harvey fierstein and danny burstein — but there’s another one they keep locked away. it’s a video of zero mostel as tevye in one of the many revivals or tours he did. you might ask: why is it locked away? i’ll tell you. jerome robbins, the director and choreographer of fiddler, notably donated his royalties from the show to the public library for the performing arts. as a result, robbins (and his estate) retained a particularly close grip on certain videos of robbins’ work that he was loath to erase from the historical record but that, for various reasons, he didn’t really want people to see. thanks to lonny, the director of fiddler, there now exists an email from the robbins estate to the library announcing that nina goodheart is permitted to access any fiddler material contained within the archive — including the zero tape. and in the case of that tape, it’s immediately clear why robbins didn’t want it up for grabs: at the performance in question (and supposedly at many others), zero added so much shtick to the show that it probably ran fifteen minutes longer than usual. i had read about some of his infamous ad libs in wonder of wonders, but still was barely prepared for their length and frequency. whole scenes became about an unrelated bit! there was the lazzi of the sleeve in the milk bucket, the lazzi of the spit in the ladle, the lazzi of the man on the wrong side of the partition, the lazzi of the knife and the rabbi’s son, the lazzi of the runaway tongue… if you know fiddler well and none of these sound familiar, robbins is resting easy. and now, i must confess: the bits were hilarious. the audience ate every one of them up. they would have happily taken more shtick! yes, it completely takes you out of the show. but it’s clear that the audience was just happy to be in zero’s presence. and for a few hours, so was i. i took at least ten pages of notes, marking the length of transitions and which way the turntable spun, how set pieces got onstage and off, and so on. you’re only allowed to view each tape at the archive once — IN YOUR LIFE! — so i tried to memorize as much as i could. so happy i got to see it.
played a little bit of detroit: become human at sophie’s this week as part of some research for the after wife.
more west wing with sophie. (we got to “let bartlet be bartlet.”)
after winning her cycle earlier this year, my roommate ari was in the finale of bitch fest, a drag competition! it’s always so cool to see her perform, especially given that i’ve usually watched her making her outfit over the course of the week leading up to a performance.
finished sex and the city. i do feel like i have a slightly better understanding of how lots of people see new york now…
hearing.
and finally, a cringe one — can someone who understands music explain to me why the chords in the chorus of the song below always make me sob?
making.
tickets are now on sale for the reading of road kills (by sophie, surprise, surprise) that i’m directing for the frontera series. this one is edgy, y’all — feel free to reach out for content warnings.
creative retreat with sophie! we spent two days straight working on everything related to good apples collective (and some things not). we started each day with a couple hours of admin focus — long term planning, organization development, analyzing data from our most recent projects. then we got lunch (poke is basically always my work lunch) and continued on to creative work — brainstorming and spitballing and outlining and debating. sophie even convinced me to open up an adaptation project that i haven’t touched in several years. (i so wish we could do these retreats so much more frequently, but the geographical distance between us and the necessity of getting paid sometimes get in the way… one day…)
one of the most exciting parts of our retreat was launching the rootstock reading series! we’ve been planning this one for a while, and it’s so exciting to get to tell people about it. in short, we’ll be selecting three director-playwright pairs to receive public readings of their work. it’s less of a development opportunity than a presentation opportunity, which is by design: when i first graduated from college, i was ready to direct a reading from an artistic perspective, but i didn’t know how to produce, and would have been so grateful for an organization to take care of all the logistics and leave me free to, well, direct. can’t wait to dig into the submissions (which are due by august 19, so we still have some time) and platform some new plays.
sophie and i also had some excellent and heart-filling meetings with close collaborators about gac’s future. i’m so proud of our little collective.
did some painting with my friend emily, who needed to check it off her list for her substack 129 ways to get a life. we had the loveliest afternoon drinking wine and eating pizza in domino park, catching each other up on our lives and painting whatever came into our minds (apparently a friendly purple demon and some rainbow blobs).
