Mmm fresh starts
Oh, hi friends!
We often look for fresh starts. The Tuesday after Labor Day definitely qualifies. (I’ve written for five years in a row how much I love the “back to school” feeling.) Rosh Hashanah, for those friends who celebrate, absolutely counts.
But each day we’re given something new.
We can choose to do exactly what we’ve done the day before.
Or take a solo step in a different direction, towards an action we’re avoiding, a project we’ve missed, better communication, or whatever we need to do.
Today is always the day.
“At a first rehearsal, I lay out in the simplest terms my ambition for the play to my actors:
‘To create as rich, complicated, complex, confused, doubting, lost, hopeful, despairing, questioning people as any one person in the audience. And…’ I explain, ‘we of course will always fail. But that is our goal, what we are reaching for. So our ambition is not to argue a point, not to convince anyone of anything, but rather simply to try and put human beings on a stage and to share them.’”
This weekend we saw our first play in 18 months. What Happened?: The Michaels Abroad is described by its playwright Richard Nelson as a play less about doing (there is no plot) and more about being.
Well! I cried throughout, the ensemble is astounding (Jay O. Sanders and Maryann Plunkett are my dream actors) — and I also had the fun surprise to find the only open seats left in the theater happened to be next to my friend Maria, a former colleague at Money who I would talk to about theater every day. Neither of us had seen a play (or each other) since last March. It was a perfect moment to find that we both gravitated back to what gives us joy — and that these rich, complicated, complex characters are still there to receive us.
The Greatest Digital Stress Reliever
I’m not sure how I came across the site JacksonPollock.org, but I’ve kept up the tab on my phone and computer for weeks. Each time you click the white canvas, you “paint.” Click again, you paint with a different color. Double-click, it all goes away. It’s as addictive as throwing paint at the wall. (Less messy, though.) Maybe eventually I’ll get it to look like a real Pollock, above, which a museum in Syracuse auctioned off to diversify their collection with work by more women artists and artists of color. But seriously: try the site.
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Thanks, as always, for reading.
Love, Kara