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A Utopian Sorta DayJuly 11, 2009 Yesterday started off with a prolonged argument with the United States Postal Service about the non-timely non-delivery of an Express Mail parcel to one of my trade publisher clients. The more I hear about how big corporations function, the gladder I am that I've never had to work for one, and the surer I am that the country is in more desperate trouble than those big corporations think. Today wasn't like that. Today was much better. Today started off with an outdoor shower -- the air was remarkably chilly for mid-July but the water wasn't. I needed that shower when I got home last night, but the problem is that showers make me sleepy and I still had work to do. So I woke up feeling a little greasy. After shower, Travvy and I went for our brisk morning walk. There weren't many ticks on his legs after we got back -- yee-hah! I booted up Morgana V, set the tea kettle on to boil, de-ticked Travvy, read and answered e-mail, then got down to the essay in progress on "why this country needs an independent feminist movement." Worked a couple of hours on that, managing not to get too distracted searching the Bloggery for comments on a panel on the "new women's movement" that I attended at Katharine Cornell Theatre -- I thought four years ago, but it was only three. Then Trav and I went for a stroll, pausing to play on the platforms at the school playground. He loves jumping from one to the next, on, then off. Then I worked for another couple hours on the On Joanna Russ review -- I'm still in the read-and-make-notes stage, but the essays are good and the book is well organized; it also meshes very well with the "independent feminist movement" essay, and before I went to bed I took Russ's What Are We Fighting For? off the shelf and started to reread it. It being another glorious September day in July, I had to go for a ride. Travvy stayed home on the deck. Allie and I had a great ride, up the Old Holmes Hole Road, down the Dead Truck Trail, eventually across Stoney Hill to the trail that runs along the back of Thimble Farm, then up through Greenlands and along the edge of the state forest. We got back later than I'd planned (I don't wear a watch). I'd switched off barn chores so I could go to the second-to-last performance of Brian Ditchfield's wonderful Kim and Delia (which I saw as a staged reading a little over a year ago), curtain time 5 p.m. My plan was to run home, feed Travvy, and hightail it to Edgartown, but time was much too short -- the venue was old Katama Farm, now the Farm Institute, which is on the far side of Edgartown, almost all the way to South Beach. The play wasn't very long: Trav could eat a little late. Thanks to the summer bottleneck from the Triangle past the Shop & Shop, not to mention missing the turn for the farm (where did I get the idea that it was on the left??), I got there a few minutes after five, but the show hadn't started. Whew. Kim and Delia was staged outside, with the (good-size) audience seated on hay bales arranged in concentric semi-circles. The "stage" was bordered on stage right by a big old barn, whose hayloft door made for an excellent balcony. To stage left was the short end of a small house, whose porch became part of the set. As the play got under way, a wagonload of newly baled hay came in for storage in another barn a little ways off, and a couple of ducks wandered through the stage. It was a great venue, and the production made excellent use of it. The staging was wonderful, the acting likewise -- both wonderfully suited to the story: Kim is a young girl whose mother has just died, Delia is her new imaginary friend, and much of the action takes place in the land where imaginary friends go when their "real" friends forget them. Travvy got his supper a little late, but then we went for a walk and it seems all was forgiven. Being greeted upon one's return home by a woo-wooing malamute is very cool, even if one knows that the woo-woo subtext is I want my supper! Read some more of the Joanna Russ book and eventually went to bed. If I didn't have to work for a living, this is what my days would look like: write, walk with dog, write some more, ride, go see other people's creativity in action, come home to dog, write some more, sleep.
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