Welcome to the Blog Spot

Hello friends,

Why blog? I need a way to keep in touch. So I decided to write to you on my website.

It's not as good as sharing a delicious meal together and chatting long into the night. It's not as good as a phone call, hearing each others' voices. It's not as good as a letter, where the words are scratched onto the paper by a hand that you know and love. I know, it's not even like email, where there's a back and forth to it all.

But I had to do SOMETHING, fergoshsakes!

I miss performing in front of living breathing sneezing laughing people. I even miss the part of touring that meant that I came to your town and sometimes had time to share a delicious meal together and chat long into the night (though I don't miss sitting in airports and on airplanes).

But life takes us in unexpected directions. I knew life would change when we decided to have a child 5 years ago. I just didn't know how it would change. That's the whole point of adventure, right? To NOT know where you're going.

Well, it's a fine adventure so far. I had pretty good, concrete notions of what love and exhaustion were about. But then Q was born, and it felt like a piece of my heart lived outside my body, like love was an actual physical part of my body that could be held and amazed over. And it felt so precious! I understood that fierceness that comes with parenting, the need to guard the precious being. And then, there was the exhaustion.

Hey, I know exhaustion. I'm in the performing arts. I've gone weeks without sleep to get a show on its feet, working 20 hours days. Don't tell me about exhaustion!

But let me tell you about exhaustion. When you're involved in a project, say a play, you work long and hard, but there is an end in sight - an opening night, a closing night. There are limits, boundaries to it. This does not apply to parenting. Sure, you can look forward to school starting at age 5, or college starting at age 18, but we're talking years on end of 4-5 hours sleep a night. It's a whole different ball game. And, now that Q is 5 and has started school, it turns out that starting school was an ephemeral boundary. Yes, we're no longer changing diapers, but there are other, new, screamingly important issues that need to be addressed. And, in our case, Q still rarely sleeps through the night. I'm exhausted!

As for my music, much of it was on hold for the first few years of Q's life. I was able to tend to projects that were already in motion, but had no time or energy to do new things. That began to shift 2 years ago, and I now have a sketchbook full of new ideas for instrumental music (Spinning World 2), and was able to write and record and put out a new family CD ("I'm Growing"). That CD took so much longer than I thought it would. But I only have a few morning and afternoon hours when Q's at school to do my work. After that it's childcare, cook dinner, get to bed and grovel for grains of sleep until the sun and Q pop up.

Will I perform again? You betcha. I really do miss it. It's just not the right time now for me to get outta the house. Q needs me, my body needs to rest. So here we are, communing in cyberspace, making a connection that makes sense for the time being. While this blog is currently not set up to take comments, you are of course welcome to email me. Or write to me, a real letter!

What about the guestbook? Well, it was getting spammed hard, and took too much energy to clean up all the time. Sorry I couldn't keep that open.