Grandma's in the House!!!

Were I really really rich I would hire a tow truck to follow me everywhere.  And during those times when I've been sitting too long, the driver would insert the meat hook in my belt loop and hoist my ass into a standing position.  I, who have a surfeit of dignity and vanity, would dust myself off and get on with the business of being an ancient college student.  Aah, yes, it's Fall, I'm in school and also on one of my perennial self-improvement missions.

You know how these things start.  You go shopping and find yourself in a dressing room about to be reflected by half a hexagon of mirrors and out of your mouth comes the immortal words:  Is that MY behind?!?!?!?@**@#&#*@!!?!

The only thing to do, to paraphrase Shakespeare, is to get thee to a gym.  So, I have.  When these fits of fitness come over me I'm lucky enough to have a class schedule to have time to work out when most of the student body doesn't want to or can't -- mid-morning.  Not so this semester.  Twice a week around 5 o'clock I share the fitness center with half the football team, and 20 year old girls bench pressing 100 lbs.  My solution is to take my glasses off, put my blinders on and think of England as I limp from machine to machine setting the pins at no more than 30 lbs. of weight to resist.

As least the boys are nice to me, although a complicated mixture of pity and snot-shooting scorn has to be gotten under control before they ask:  You usin' that?  And I look at them as if to say, You think I come in here to pick up guyz?  Can't you see the pain I'm in?  But, instead I simply say,  Yeah.  But, this'll be over real soon.  And the deal is done.

As you can imagine during every step I walk to get to the fitness center I'm running a thousand excuses not to go.  (Can you tell I'm taking a programming class?)  But, I must, because if there's anything I'm sure of it is that life goes on until it doesn't.

Happy Fall, y'all.

Women of a Certain Art: Blondell Cummings, 1944 - 2015

It's Fall.  I'm back at school.  The generational dislocation resumes as I sit in a class where my post-collegiate employment history precedes my classmates' birthdays.

Another friend and collaborator has died.  Blondell and I met in 1980.  I was hugely pregnant and uncertain about all things future.  She was in Waterloo, IA dancing with Bill and on her way to creating her masterpiece, Chicken Soup.  We became friends as women do with talk of lovers, past and present, work and life.  I eventually moved to New York and worked for her for a while when fax machines were a novelty.

We created 2 pieces together:  she commissioned my first dance libretto, Orpheus and Eurydice, and I wrote Act I of For JB (Blondell's meditation on La Josephine).  We stayed in touch although not seeing each other much.  She kept making work through thick and thin, somehow making a living and keeping herself housed and travelling around the world.  She eventually received a Guggenheim Fellowship in recognition of her stature.

When we did chat it was sometimes about work, mostly about the this-n-that of life -- nephews, family, daughters, hair.  I sent her to Daughter No. 1 a few years back to have her hair done.  (I used to tell my friends, ask for the Dailey's Mother discount.  At least I thought it was funny.)  Dailey wasn't pleased, she finds most of my friends are too old, too indecisive, too tentative -- to make good customers.  Nevertheless, I enjoy sending her people who remember her before she could walk, talk, or make googobs of money.

So, good-bye Blondell, good-bye.