kerouac says

it's been a week of mama. such a lovely thing, to be the mistress here. she's probably the only person around who'd take me for a new york expert. it looked for a while like she wasn't going to visit, and means the world to me that she showed up for a whole week, stayed at the cheap hotel i found in chelsea and let me have the other twin bed, and bought me a bunch of middling presents.

my mother is an interesting case. it's hard to anticipate what she'll like in a new place--or rather, not hard to anticipate, since what she likes here are larger versions of things she likes in places she knows. fabric stores. dollhouse supply places. buying face soap, shoes, rubber stamps. petting other people's dogs.

in fact, i left her alone on sunday morning so i could sleep in with the monkey, and when we reunited she mentioned she had spent the morning in the dog park near the hotel. she told an amusing story about a young white curly doggy, like a bichon or a maltese, with a purple bandage on her tail. "her person said her tail was docked, but they did it wrong and she had to have second procedure. didn't slow her down, though. she jumped and spun!"

on her last day, we had an hour or so to kill. she wanted to go back to the shoe store, and on our way we passed the dog run. i saw her longing look, and so we went into the dog park to sit for a spell. the little bichonlike pup with a tail bandage was there, jumping and spinning. she and a border terrier got into a friendly dogwrestling match under our bench. lots of chewing.

eventually, the little bandaged bichon's person came over to collect her from under our seat. from a distance, she looked familiar. from up close, she looked a lot like parker posey. the bichon dashed out from under our bench.

"do you know who that is?" i said quietly, conversationally.

my mom said, "it's that nice white dog's mama."

"yes," i said. "she's also known as parker posey."

"who is that?" my mother said.

the bichon ran back under our bench. ms. posey pulled her out. she smiled at me, and i asked her about the puppy's tail. "doesn't seem to bother her," she said.

it wasn't the time for me to confess my love, so i stayed mum. my mum waved goodbye to the bichon. she left.

what do we take from this? well, for one, a non-traditional work schedule is best. who do you meet at the dog park on saturday? business analysts. investment bankers. nine-to-fivers. who do you meet in the middle of a tuesday? my people. or those i'd like to join.


i miss my mom already, but i'm also glad to be home.

mom's in town, and i'm all over that. sleeping in chelsea in a tiny hotel next to a dance club (thump thump thump) on a bed the size and consistency of a soapbar. we spent an hour in the dogpark last night, and it was great. there are stories to tell in reflection, later on. now i've got to hoist myself into the shower because we're going to go see an old fashioned broadway show. ta.

yesterday i helped some independent film producers out by reading the stage directions in a reading of some guy's screenplay--except i guess when it's a screenplay, that person is called the narrator, which sounds very third grade play to me. it was the first time i'd been in some sort of acting project with a famous person. Famous Lady looked younger in person, and was wearing an outfit that came straight for a 1983 k-mart. she was nice, if a little famous-y, and called me the wrong name all night.

Slightly Less Famous guy was sort of a dick, but only as an actor. as a person, he was nice, but while we were reading he kept cutting off the stage directions with his lines, and he couldn't or wouldn't actually read the script. he'd look down, sort of absorb the gist, and then make up something that meant sort of the same thing.

Cult Favorite was even more sarcastic and dark than i had guessed, and i missed my chance to tell her how much i liked her work. she did compliment my wonder woman bag, though.

and the two actors that did the best work were the broadway workhorses, the ones who do eight shows a week, singin' and dancin'. i wanted to fold them up and shove them inside my brains.

when it was over, Famous Lady thanked me (or, actually, she thanked Lynne, whoever that is) and i scuttled out, and the village was so freaking beautiful i wanted ice cream immediately. i mean, you should see it out there. the crooked streets like your old english professor's bottom teeth, those white trees blooming everywhere, the bricks on the old buildings. it was eighty degrees and fucking brilliant. so much so that returning to queens was a small let down, but. still.

i'm called back for a nice show tonight. hold your thumbs if you can.

how can i be poor? i never buy anything that costs more than ten dollars.

today one of my students got a call from her mom. she looked at her cell phone, the consternation rose in her face, and she said, "ho, snap. 's my mom." i'd never heard a snap before.

i know it's a joke that we speak different languages, but today i had to ask my girl veronica four times to repeat a story about her friend desiree and how she said behind her back that her (veronica's) boyfriend was ugly. it isn't just that the kids i work with have an accent. whole different sets of words are left out and meant to be unspoken but understood, and there's something weird about tenses i haven't grasped yet. when the kids talk with each other, they can keep track of strings of four or five pronouns with unclear antecedents but i have to stop them every fifteen seconds to ask which "she" we're talking about now.

and they can't understand me, either. it works both ways. i never would have guessed. sometimes i feel like we'd do better with a translator.

i was back in the casting director's office yesterday, as the reader for auditions for another independent film, and again it was instructive in ways i hadn't anticipated. i watched a young actress i had actively disliked on stage a few months ago give a pitch-perfect reading that somehow left the director and the screenwriters unmoved. the next actress in after her read the same scene, not nearly as well, and got a much heartier reaction. it may have been because she was an old comrade of the director, or it may be because the scene involved two girls saying their first lesbian i love yous, and the freaking girl PUT HER TONGUE IN MY MOUTH.

you never touch the reader without asking. you always ask. and you certainly ask if you're going to swap spit. geesh.

i think i earned some cred, though. the boys making the film (and pardon me for using the diminutive, but the writer, the producer and the director all must be under twenty eight, and they're very . . . rumpled and curly-headed) gave me a standing ovation after she left. and the casting lady must have been impressed because she asked me if i would be the official reader for the film (which, you know, sounds great, and i appreciate that she asked me because she thinks i'm good at it, but i'm sort of wondering if i'll ever get paid) and could i please come back tomorrow to audition for a camera phone commercial?

yeah. i think i could swing that.

i know some people are having hard days today. and if it helps them, i submit this, from today's manhattan users' guide. a word to the wise: think old-fashioned, possibly british goodies.

it's our first easter together. i can't remember what i did last year, but i know the monkey had a show and we weren't together.

i'm just catholic enough that i feel like today should be a bigger day. since i sort of blew off lent this year, easter doesn't feel like as much a relief as it could, but i'm reminding myself that it's one of perhaps two or three religion-mandated days in which guilt takes a backseat to joy. so i'm just going to stay here with my coffee and my tang (we forgot to buy juice) and not worry.

the shows went well this weekend, but by the time i've come home at three two nights running, sunday morning shapes up to feel like ass. my internal clock gets so fucked i can't sleep, which is really awful when you're that tired. i'm up now, and my foot's getting rubbed, so i'm on my way back to the living. it's almost time for us to honor the monkey's long-standing easter custom of listening to the entire jesus christ superstar album. love means: listening to each other's questionable music.

happy peep, ever-body.

some of you stalwarts may remember last april, when i told my boyfriend's secret embarrassing snowsuit peeing story, because i thought it was sweet and not embarrassing at all.

someone else finds it, um, sweet as well. this blog used to be googled every few weeks using the search terms "snowsuit + pee," and then it levelled off. i figured whoever it is eventually was no longer able to get much satisfaction over the same tired pee story, and had moved on.

but today--perhaps in honor of the approaching anniversary--he's back!

and i hadn't noticed before, but if his search engine of choice is any indicator, he's french-speaking.

me, i love that story. and i also think that if you have a pee kink, it's your own business and you should read whatever makes you happy. but i think maybe you should just print the fucker out. easier for you, and delivers me of a recurring reminder that someone is sexualizing a story about an eight year old and his endearing pee accident.

i spent yesterday afternoon in a casting director's office, being a reader for an independent film. i watched a dozen or so agented actors file in, do their little scenes, file out, and then get talked about. all actors should do this. it's illuminating.

i know it was just one day of casting for one movie, but i saw five black actors come in to play toughs, streetwalkers, madams and drug addicts. i get tired of the smallish range of characters commonly available to women, but this put it in perspective. much more depressing. i could tell how bad each of the actors wanted the part, too. if they had any feelings about their race restricting them to reading for the blowjob-offering drug addict, they kept them inside. also, the two guys with italian last names read only for vito, the bodyguard thug.

the ingenue? blonde.

also, the director (who wrote the screenplay) kept insisting that all of the small principle roles we were auditioning that day required a truly masterful actor. "each of these is a small aria," he said more than once. "we must have someone inimitable." he said that word so much i wanted to ask him if he really knew what it meant, ala mandy patinkin in the princess bride. also i wanted to say, guy, every writer/director wants to believe his script MUST be peopled by genius artists, and no one wants sucky actors. you think you're the only one? plus, the screenplay was sort of . . . commercial. not shitty, but not the kind of thing that requires genius. it was sort of like john grisham saying he needed no less than simon russell beale to lead his next movie.

and even so, the people he wanted to call back were not exactly inimitable. in fact, i did a fairly good impression of a couple of them in the bar afterwards, while sipped some beer with the monkey.

but i'm going back next week. the nice casting director told me she'd try to scare up an audition for me (for *something*) for helping me out, so i'monna keep helping.

holy crap. it's "beautiful" outside in terms of beauty=sun, but it is freezing fucking cold. i walked through so much wind, bent over and pace slowed to cartoon-level, on my way to the train i thought i was in a funny movie.

so i'm home now, after hanging out with the monkey and buying new glassware for our apartment (twenty bucks! hefty cool juice glasses and pint glasses that say, "drink cheer!" on them!) and eating gingerbread in the dog park. we made friends with a pit bull named teddy and a border terrier named archie who jumped in the monkey's lap. there was also a gigantic albino great dane and a tiny old blind fluffy dog who kept bumping into us but seemed remarkably high-spirited.

and now i finish reading a new play and do my taxes and revel in the fact that all warnings to the contrary, i am currently happy.

it's beautiful here this morning, and i'm on spring break. i am going to get a zillion things done, and then someone will crown me queen of the universe.

my mom sent me an easter basket. and also one for the monkey.

the opening went well, for those of you playing along at home. between the clean up, the post notes, the train from brooklyn, the daylight savings times and the opening night drinks, i got home both nights at 4:30. this can't continue, but i made it through one. maybe the next weekend will be smoother.

and, i'm still on spring break.

it's nice to relax back into the warm bath of domestic bliss. i live with someone who loves me, and how many people can say that? and while i know that we haven't cornered the market, i really do wonder what percentage of people are as happy together as we are right now (and i mean generally now, even with my crankisodes and anxiety issues, not only just this minute). in all likelihood i am both incredibly lucky and getting exactly what i deserve.

he is just so good. in the morning, he puts his man-shaped self all over me. his face is soft, his arms are big, he says love like it was something sweet he could put in my mouth. being with him makes me sort of abashed for the paltry stuff i thought was best before. whatever else is going on or not going on, i have this one thing. one thing, one thing, one thing.

dear rest of the world,

i'm trying, in the spirit of mutual detente, not to call you any names, but i just had girl scout cookies for breakfast so screw you.



lou.