By admin
I was sick last week – down with a flu for five days. An enforced stay-cation. Idleness without guilt. I spent most of my days on the couch watching TV and drinking tea. I watched a lot of TV – really, a lot. And so I feel I should take this opportunity to confess publicly: I love television.
And not just the good stuff on PBS or Discovery. Give me Tabatha’s Salon Takeover and RuPaul’s Drag Race. Launch My Line and So You Think You Can Dance. Fringe, Heroes and Doctor Who. Gray’s Anatomy, Private Practice and House. Bones, CSI and NCIS. I am addicted to Project Runway and Top Chef. I don’t give a fig for cars, but I can’t stop watching Top Gear. I love staying home to veg in front of the TV. It is with guilt and embarrassment that I reveal my weakness for the “Big Bright Green Pleasure Machine.”
But, why a confession? you might ask.
I am not supposed to like television. I am supposed to be far too sophisticated, too cultured, too busy to waste my time with the boob tube. I should find it boring, pointless, grating or cloying. I should be appalled by the poor quality, the ridiculous plotting, the vacuous people… but I’m not. (Well, there are some shows that fall below even my watchability threshold.) I am a disgrace to my upbringing – a failed culture snob.
I worship my DVR and I’m done trying to hide it.
By admin
There is a movie from the 1980s called Mr. North, based on a book by Thornton Wilder. Anthony Edwards, with a full head of hair, plays the title character, a cheerful, young jack-of-all-trades rumored to have mystical abilities. He installs himself in uppercrust Newport, Rhode Island, for the summer and takes on a variety of tasks from teaching tennis to reading to the elderly.
I think of it now because the story features a somewhat morbid local oddity – the “death watch.” Avaricious relatives impatiently await the demise of their patriarch, making every effort to be ingratiating and appear caring in the meantime. My recent death watch was not driven by greed, nor was it as protracted as in the movie. Nevertheless, I have been waiting this week for a relative to die.
We were not close enough to warrant a rushed trip east to see him before he was gone. So I waited, hour by hour, for news of his passing. As is often the case, he hung on far longer than the doctors expected. It has been a sad week.
And I feel guilty, too. Guilty that I wished for him to die on a schedule convenient for me. How selfish of me to feel the seeds of resentment at the thought of missing out on things for the sake of his funeral! My life will go on – I have many more opportunities. He is dead. The least I can do is be gracious in his final moments.
But I am human, and I am relieved that I will not miss my Thanksgiving. (Me, me, me.) The next few days will be for him. Even more so, they will be for his wife, who I am close to. And I am thankful to him for allowing me to be a comfort to her and still be home for turkey.
By admin
Writing your own bio is hard. Really hard. On my first attempt for this site, I wrote what is far more suited to a blog post, so here it is:
Rachel knew she was a writer in the 2nd grade, when her teacher, Mrs. Kleinman, told her mother she’d be a high school drop out. This is not to say that because Rachel was destined to drop out of high school, she knew she was a writer. In fact, these two events have no causal relationship whatsoever. Thus, it would be more correct to state, “In the 2nd grade, Rachel knew she was a writer. That same year, through no fault of Rachel’s new-found career, Mrs. Kleinman told her mother she would drop out of high school.”
Well, that’s not exactly true, either. The reason Mrs. Kleinman was convinced of Rachel’s impending delinquency had to do with writing. It had to do with writing too much. Rachel fell behind on her Alphabet Stories, and by the end of the year had only reached the letter “P.” You see, starting with the letter “F,” Rachel entertained her friends with a soap opera about a bowl of Fruit that lived in a Field. At “G,” a bunch of Grapes came to visit. And the saga continued throughout the alphabet, 8 – 12 pages at a time; and a second grader just can’t write that much in a single week.
Contrary to Mrs. Kleinman’s dire prediction, Rachel did graduate from high school – on time, even – and continued on to Smith College and the University of Southern California. She studied theatre and mathematics and earned a degree in technical direction for theatre. You may have noticed she did not study writing. Rachel forgot, for a while, that she was a writer. Or maybe being forced to finish her Alphabet Stories over the summer vacation soured Rachel on writing, for a time. We’ll never know for sure.
But Rachel couldn’t escape writing for long. As her job at Center Theatre Group evolved to fit the changing needs of both the company and Rachel herself, words and language played a larger and larger role. Before too much time had passed, words and language were nearly her entire job. And she couldn’t have been happier about it.
Because Rachel loves words.
