Early Morning in May

It's 6:15 a.m. and I've been up for an hour. Oh me, oh my, I haven't written a blog in so long. So much has happened. My dad died on March 20; a little over two months ago now. I just realized the last blog I wrote was on March 15. I had no idea he would be gone in the next five days. He had been terribly ill, of course. We were waiting for him to go, actually. It was excrutiating, watching him be in so much pain, so frail. My poor mom hadn't been able to leave the house for a year without finding someone to be with my dad. It was hard. I feel very sad to lose him. I miss him a lot. In a way, it's gotten sadder for me in the last few days. At first, when he died, we were all so relieved. We were terribly sad of course, but we had been so concerned about him. His death meant that we could stop worrying about him and begin to just miss him. So, I've been missing him. Last week was a particularly hard week. It seems like every couple of days there's something on NPR's Morning Edition that makes me want to call my dad. We used to speak about three times a week about the news, and sometimes every day. Today I wanted to call him about Bush's speech yesterday so we could fret about the state of the world together. Then I wanted to talk to him about all those Boston Catholic Churches closing. He would have been sad about that.

I'm going to make a tribute page to my dad with a slide show that I showed at his wake: pictures that I was able to gather together in a day at my parents' condo. I'm going to put in a letter I wrote to my dad a year ago and a letter a co-worker and dear friend of my dad's wrote to me (and my brothers and sisters) after he died.

Since the funeral I have been here in L.A. working on my monologue and working on my book. Right now it seems like I work on it all day, every minute I can, and I get nothing done. I have to turn in the first draft of my book on June 1st. I will make that deadline, but barely. Oh, there's so much work to do.

I am so excited. Yesterday was a big day. I rented a theatre for my show, "Letting Go Of God." It's at the Hudson Backstage. I was going to rent the Court Theatre, my favorite small theatre in L.A. But it's very expensive, and I would have to bet on my show being a hit in order to break even. I don't want to have ticket prices be greater than $20. So, my accounting hat has been on, figuring out how it's going to work on every random piece of paper around the house. My assistant Pam Keller is going to produce, and I'm going to put up the money, which is the first time for me. It's scary, but I really am excited too. So, yesterday Pam and I went over to the Hudson and sat around the theatre and tried to imagine my show there. At first, it seemed like the worst space. It's not an intimate setting at all -- brick walls, it's 42 feet wide, the stage is not raised. It's a rather imposing, downtowny type feeling -- not at all what I was looking for. But, it has these five big flats on wheels that can be part of the set, and my mind began to imagine images that could be projected onto those flats. Also, when I sat up in the back seats and looked at Pam on the stage, she looked so small amongst the flats (which are about ten feet high, I think), and suddenly, I realized that this was exactly the feeling I wanted. I could project things like Biblical passages onto the flats, and I would look so small amongst the books or the passages from the books, or the images. It's a more in-your-face feeling, but I really think it might work. Now I have to keep working on the script and begin to assemble the images. It's so exciting, I can barely stand it. My head is exploding with ideas. This show is going to be so much different than my other two shows, much more visual, I will move a lot more, it'll be much, much, much more physical. I will have more music in the body of the show. It's going to be a feat getting all the images I want organized and on a central computer system. Last night I went to bed at ten, but then got up again at midnight to reread the first act and imagine music and imagery and it was like coming out of me so fast, like a symphony, I couldn't stop it. That is such a rush. I hope it turns out okay.

My show will go into previews in the third week of August. I believe I'll have two weeks of previews and open the show on Sept. 10th.

Wow, Mulan is still asleep and it's 7:15 a.m. I have been up for amost two hours. I better go get her up. We put up her bunk beds this week, and she's been sleeping in her top bunk surrounded by all her stuffed animals. It's so cute, you could almost explode when you see her up there. She comes into bed with me about three or four a.m. usually. But last night she stayed in her own room.

I have been up late at night the last couple of nights, scouring the internet for the Catholic Church's view of the Bible, how the Church justifies it's sacred nature. It's all very interesting. It turns out that at Vatican 2, in the mid-sixties, the Church made a big leap forward, (in my opinion) and accepted officially the historical nature of the Books of the Bible. But now it's all changing as Cardinal Ratzinger, (the Karl Rove of the Vatican) drafts all these encyclicals that reinstates the inerrancy of the Bible. The Church is getting so much more conservative from it's intellectual hey-day of the sixties. It makes me wonder what some priests must think. I would be very disillusioned and depressed.

10:30 a.m. Okay, now I am back home after taking Mulan to school and then working out for an hour and a half. I have to rework my first act of the show today. I am trying to get a dialogue going that's funny -- how the priest tries to tell me how you can read the Bible historically AND see it as inerrant sacred scripture at the same time. I remember the priest who taught me at the Bible Study class kept saying, "Well, if you look at the Bible with historical, modern eyes, then of course, it's very disturbing." Like historical modern eyes were some CRAZY MIXED UP way to look at the Bible. But then he wanted the flip side too, he wanted to be all informed and understanding of the critical literary nature of the Bible, telling me how the books were put together, and the "P" writer and the "E" writer and "J" writer. I remember it was very confusing to me at the time, and now I'm trying to remember it and make if funny.

I am doing Weight Watchers. So far I've lost about ten pounds. Well, about eight pounds in about eight weeks. I am a slow, slow, slow loser. When I do my big workout, I usually treat myself to a scone (which is six points) afterwards. I get it at Susina Bakery which has the most amazing scones. I figure, if you're going to splurge, then have the best. I get to add 6 points to my day if I work out for an hour and a half. So it's a swap: 1 1/2 hours of sweating for one delicious scone that takes about ten minutes to eat if I really eat it...s l o w l y. Hmmm... Tonight I am going out with my friend Bob Blumer, who is a chef. He's on the Food Channel, his show is called The Surreal Gourmet. I was a guest on his show a couple of years ago and I may be one again this summer. He shoots the show in Toronto and now he's headed there for six months or so. Oh, I will miss him. I'm not sure where we are going or what we are eating.

Oh my, this blog is so chatty. I am wondering about this whole blog thing.

I keep having to pinch myself, because I feel so lucky to be working on this book and this show. I feel so fortunate to be able to concentrate on the topics that are the greatest concern to me. For so many years in my working career, that was only a dream.

Every week that I've been doing Weight Watchers, I make this zero-point soup -- it's a vegetable soup and it ends up not being zero points because I roast the vegetables in a little olive oil before I put them in the soup and I add garbonzo beans and kidney beans. Anyway, last night I had Mulan be my sous chef. She picked up all the chopped vegetables and put them on the roasting pan and then sprayed them with oil. She was so happy with her job that she said she was going to change her name to "Sue."

I have to read more about Cardinal Ratzinger. He sounds really scary. Except first I have to write. Then eat vegetable soup. Then write. Then go to a meeting at three. Then pick up Mulan. THEN I can read about Cardinal Ratzinger. (I can't believe his name is "Ratzinger" -- it's like Edward Gorey invented him. It's like, if you were inventing a name for a character like his you couldn't use the name Ratzinger because it would be too obvious. The studio exec would say, "Come on...Ratzinger? Too on the nose..."

The Catholic Club

Hi. I'm taking a lunch break from working on my book. This weekend I spent a lot of time rereading the New Testament. Those parables are strange and odd. So much odder and stranger than I remembered them from my Bible study class and even from when I reread the New Testament a year or so ago. Take the parable of the wedding feast in Matthew, Chapter 22. So, the idea is that heaven is like a wedding feast that God is giving. God's messengers go out and invite people. Some of the invitees ignore the invitation, and other invitees kill the messengers -- just for inviting them to the party. Okay, that IS bad. I get it. You shouldn't kill someone for trying to invite you to a party.

But, then God (or the King in the parable) sends an army to destroy, not only the people who killed his messengers, but the ENTIRE CITY that these people lived in. A city filled with people who didn't ignore the invitation. They didn't even GET an invitation.

The Bible is filled with stories of entire cities being wiped out because of a few bad apples. That seems unethical to me, but let's just let this part go. So far, I get it. God comes and invites people to a way of life, and those that ignore the message don't get to come to the party (eternal life in heaven). Okay, okay.

But then what happens next? God (the King) sends his servants out into the street and they ask a bunch of other people to come to the party, good and BAD people. Okay, that's strange, because what do they mean by "bad" people? But okay -- let's just go with this -- good and bad people, OTHER people get to come to the party because the first people ignored the invitation. At this point I am asking myself, is there a limit on the number of people that can come to heaven? Does someone not responding to Jesus allow room for another person to come who wouldn't have been asked if the first person hadn't declined? Or been murdered when their city was destroyed?

But now comes the bizarre part. Since the servants ran into the street and hauled people into the wedding party, good and bad people, at the last minute, there was one guy who wasn't properly dressed for the wedding. Okay. Well, there's all kinds of people there -- good and "bad," and they were all asked to come at the last minute. But what does God have his servants do to this person who is badly dressed? Ask him to change? No. Ask him to leave? No. Give him some proper clothes? No. Explain to him how to dress properly for a wedding? No.

No, God (the King) instructs his servants to: (this is from my New American Bible version) "Bind him hand and foot and throw him out into the night to wail and grind his teeth." So, I'm thinking, even if you are a BAD person, but wearing the right outfit, you go to heaven. But you could be a good person, in the wrong outfit, and you get thrown into Hell.

The moral of this story according to the bible: Many are called, but few are chosen.

OK. So, I get how a story illustrating how many people may hear the message and few of them RESPOND to it properly could be important. But why the clothes part of it?

So, if you hear the word of God, and come to the "party" but aren't wearing the right clothes, you still get thrown into hell. I imagine a priest from my childhood would say, "The clothes mean how prepared you are to enter heaven, i.e. go to church, are in good status with confession/your soul, etc." But the story goes out of it's way to say that these secondarily invited guests were invited off the street and some of them were bad people. Isn't this a convoluted, confusing, and strange story, given the theme "god" is trying to express?

Now, when I was a Catholic, I barely paid attention to these parables, they seemed dated and odd even then. I just figured it was some benign way to explain a moral concept using a story. My teachers would probably have said that this story means, "Listen to the word of God, but even if you are listening to the word of God, you have to be in good standing with God in order to go to heaven. Just listening isn't good enough." Or something like that.

Why did Jesus speak in parables? Well, the Apostles ask him this very question in Matthew as well. Even though the Apostles seem constantly confused by Jesus's message, even when he is straightforward, Jesus tells them that the reason he speaks in parables is that the people, the general public, don't understand him, "They look but do not see, they listen but do not understand." (Mathew 13) Okay. Why? Why would stories be clearer for people who have a hard time understanding than outright lessons? Jesus does give a lot of outright answers to things, like about divorce and how people should sell every last thing and give it away to the poor. Why are these stories so special? They don't seem special. They seem confusing. And it seems as though even the Apostles are confused by them.

All right. That's enough for now. What I wanted to write about today is this whole idea that I'm against the Catholic Church. I got an e-mail today from an old friend who I adore, this wonderful and delightful person, who is doing work for the Catholic Church in Seattle, and she said, "I know you are against the Church." And I've been thinking about this all morning. I am not against the church. (I'm totally confused about when I'm supposed to be capitalizing Church and god, or church and God, or even Apostles, or for that matter...bible.)

I have a lot of affectionate feelings for the Catholic Church. It's my birth culture. I honestly am not sure that if I lived in Spokane, I wouldn't be sending my daughter to St. Augustine's, a Catholic school. Because I think Catholicism, at least as it's practiced in my home town, is a great club. I know that might sound flip, but I really think it's a great club. It has rituals and meetings and solidifies a group and creates history between people. It provides a place for the dispossessed, rituals for births, deaths and weddings. It organizes charity events. It has excellent schools. Great club.

I'm not "against" the Catholic Church. There are a lot of things I like about it a lot. I just don't believe in the dogma. I was on the plane recently with a high school friend who has a few kids in Catholic schools in Spokane. And he was telling me how he and another friend of ours, who also has kids in Catholic schools in Spokane, revealed to each other that they don't believe it either -- the whole dogma, god, catholic thing. But they went to those schools and had a good experience, it's where the people they know send their kids, there's this whole history and community for them there, and that's where they want their kids to go to school. And I totally get that. When he told me this I was nodding my head, like, "Yes, yes. That's how I would feel too."

But now that a few weeks have gone by, I am still thinking about it. Would I? I don't know. I don't know if I could casually not believe like that. Not believing in god and Catholicism in particular changed my world view so dramatically, it's not like I could just take god and religion out of Catholicism and have it still be okay. I don't think, anyway. I guess I'm still coming up with my take on it all.

I guess what I'm coming to grips with, especially as I talk about letting go of God more and more, is how outside the accepted norm I am becoming. And I'm not sure what to do about that. I know that my mother would say that the best thing is to not believe in God and not say anything about it. I don't think this is necessarily hypocritical. She has said to me, lovingly and sincerely, that "People who don't believe in god keep it quietly to themselves." I don't keep it quiet anymore. And I found that a lot of people, lots and lots of people, feel the same way I do. We accept a wholly natural universe. We don't accept the idea of a God who is concerned with us personally and who is in control or who orchestrates or reacts to anything that happens. We believe we evolved, with all the haphazard, accidental, wayward, opportunity-seeking moves that is the hallmark of evolution. Which, by the way, makes us humans so lucky and remarkable -- but that's another topic.

But what I'm really trying to get comfortable with is how this point of view I have colors how others see me. If I met a guy who was writing a book about how...how...say, how the Twin Towers were not brought down by Al Qaeda but by the United Nations instead, I would automatically think this person was a nut-case. And that's how people view me when they ask what I'm writing and I say this book all about losing my faith in God.

I guess that in our culture, and probably all cultures, there are certain beliefs that are the accepted norms. Whether they are true or not isn't important. But people who do not hold these beliefs are immediately flagged as outsiders or crackpots or, as in the case of Los Angeles therapy-speak, obsessives. I can see how efficient this way of thinking is. I can see how it would develop. I can see how I use it in other areas, myself.

Like say, take the...9/11, the terrorist attack example. If someone told me it was the United Nations behind it, I would think, "My not-fully-investigative, but casual research into this topic makes me confident that Al Qaeda was behind it and not the United Nations. I am going to label this person a wacko and avoid them or at least this topic with them." And that would be an efficient and, most likely, a correct move to make.

So, I guess what I'm saying is that I can see how the average person who accepts that there is a God, but hasn't put a lot of objective, investigative research into it (And why should they? The entire culture behaves as if this God does exist and they probably have no reason to doubt that ) I can see why they would see me as a nutcase because of this book and this show that I'm working on. I get it. I totally get it.

But what am I to do? I am a monologist. I write about my point of view. And this was a deeply life-changing experience. And, IN my point of view, it's dangerous what is happening in our world and in our society because of this belief in a god that, I think, is not well considered. And I think that not believing in God makes awareness, true awareness in the beauty of our world possible.

But if I try to explain this, then I come across even stranger! Oh me oh my. Ah well. Good thing I care a little about what people think about me, but not a lot. Enough to bathe and get haircuts, but not enough to change my world-view. So, I guess I will avoid talking to people about it, even if they make comments, unless they ask me a question directly. And I can write about what I think here! In my blog!

Oh dear. I wrote through my lunch hour. Back to work!

Wait.

Now I'm feeling bad about saying that the average person has not fully considered the existence of God. I guess I just think, how can they, when the facts are so obvious? But then, maybe they aren't all that obvious. If you are a casual observer of the intricacy of this life we are in the midst of, it seems sufficiently complex as to have to be created by a creator. Also, we humans are so much different than other animals that it must also seem obvious that we are created especially. But the thing is, now we have the facts, we've got the theory of evolution and DNA, we can observe how evolution behaves in things like viruses.

Maybe I need to just quit everything and go be a high school biology teacher.

The other thing is that if you are coached, like I was, to feel God's "love" all the time, then that's another tangible piece of evidence that someone might have to believe in God. Hmmm...

Life in the Slow Lane

What I'm doing: I'm writing a book. So far the title is going to be: "Letting Go Of God". It's hard. To write a book, I mean. Letting go of God was also hard, but I did that a while ago, so it doesn't seem so hard now. What seems hard now is to write this book. I am working on the outline. I have finished a preliminary one. I am terrified and overwhelmed. I have been doing the stage show of the same title, here and there, around and about, for almost three years. This is definitely my hardest show to do.

What's new? Well, I read this wonderful book, "Uncommon Sense" by Alan Cromer. His idea is that scientific, objective, abstract, rational thinking is not natural to us. But, as he says, "...when you think about it, monogamy, honesty & democratic government are unnatural human behaviors as well...." And I have to say, after reading his book, I agree with him. He also says that "Our claim to greatness is that we have at times gone against the grain of our own egocentrism to forge a higher vision of the world."

Also this: "Science is the end product of two unique histories: the biological history in which human beings evolved from anthropod ancestors, and the human history of the discovery of objective thinking and its application to the study of nature. The second history wouldn't be possible if the first didn't endow us with the capacity of abstract thought. But why do we have this capacity? What were the specific environmental factors that selected for high intelligence? Were they the same ones that first caused the hominid line to diverge from the ape line? If so, then science was the destiny of our line. If not, the hominid line from which we descended arose from extraneous factors having nothing to do with heavy thinking -- then human intelligence itself is a fluke, an unpredictable event along the chaotic trajectory of life. Maybe we got to where we are by such a tortuous path that it's likelihood of being repeated elsewhere is very small."

I loved the book, underlining things all through it. I tried to send him an e-mail but it seems he is alive but not able to get e-mail through the university he used to teach at (Northeastern University).

I think it's true, that science asks people to veer away from a passion for believing in spirits and gods and it's difficult. That scientific thinking comes, not naturally, but through formal education. In the end, that was the biggest transformation for me. I thought I was just seeking to find God, and what I ended up with was an entirely new way of seeing the world. It wasn't just God I gave up, but also my confidence in anything that I couldn't pass through my new method of finding truth, which included evidence and objectivity and probabilities and a deep attempt at freeing myself from projecting my own personal wishes and needs into ideas and concepts. Not only out went a personal God, or even any non-personal God, but a lot went with the bathwater -- from astrology, psychics, untested herbal remedies to ideas like transformation through transcendence. But I gained so much more.

This week a friend said to me, "You don't believe anything." And I couldn't stop thinking about that. Because that's not true. In fact, I think it's the oppposite. It's that I believe in so much. I mean, if you define "believe" as in "have confidence in." I have confidence in the laws of nature. I understand how objective truth is arrived at. I have a method that allows me to "believe" in things.

What else? I was in Spokane to visit my parents. I went to a Christian concert -- I took Mulan. I felt a little guilty taking her to her first big concert and having it be a Christian one, but I was curious. The first band was a local one, called Sittser. I couldn't detect any overt Christian references to their songs -- most of them having vague possibly religious themes, like "When you are confused, look up for direction," which of course, could mean looking at the stars or something. The second band was Newsboys, and they were yelling "Praise God!" as soon as they got onstage to a packed Opera House filled with believers yelling "Yes!" and "Praise Jesus!" back at them.
Mulan asked me, "What does 'praise' mean?" and I said, "It means...it means...adore or like...give a compliment."
And she said, "Why does God need a compliment?"
Ha. I said because he's omnipotent and omnicient and also really insecure.

The lead singer of the Newsboys started telling the audience a story. He said, "You know how it's easy to pray when things are going well, when times are good? But it's a lot harder to pray when things are going bad." Then he told about how his wife died of cancer the year before and how he and she used to pray. It felt very manipulative. I looked around at the audience. Couldn't they see how manipulative that was? Plus, it's not true. People pray much quicker and easier when times are tough. It's when they need something and the idea of a loving merciful God who has control or even just comfort is appealing. When things are going well, people usually don't pray. (Although I have to say, I used to pray all the time, good times and bad. I liked to pray in good times because it gave me the idea that there was someone to thank). In any case, this was about the time that I decided that we had to go.

As we were leaving the Opera House, I saw the lead singer of Sittser. I asked him if he considered his band a Christian band. I could tell he couldn't tell where I was coming from, and so he tried to have it both ways, saying that he didn't want to get pigeonholed, but that his band had deep faith, blah blah blah.

I went because I was curious. The radio station that promoted the concert is one of several Christian stations in Spokane and this whole, new, Christian music is a phenomenon. I wanted to see it up close. Mostly, I have to say, it was pretty boring. I mean, almost any gospel music has many times more "soul" than these two bands had. And more vocally appreciative fans.

Stop Skipping!

I am playing hookey. I should be working on the outline for my book. But Mulan was home from pre-school, sick, today. Wow, I just realized that I only write in my blogs when either Mulan or I are sick. In fact, we aren't sick that much. In fact, this is the first time Mulan has missed school because of it. I feel weird talking about school when it comes to a four year old. It's more like day care with an educational element to it. In any case, I don't know how full-time moms do it. I can't get anything done when Mulan is around. It's a miracle if I get to read e-mail and keep the house from turning into a dump. I have no idea how someone takes care of more than one kid and does things like... oh, make dinner. OHMYGOD. I am so glad I became a mother because I think I would feel uppity about at-home mothers. Now I know it's the hardest job in the world.

Even though we had fun today. It rained all day, hard. I had a fire in the fireplace and we set up a little table and chairs in the living room and played "Chutes and Ladders" and "Candy Land." About a jillion times. Which of course means three times. The top of the Chutes and Ladders game says, "The most fun up-and-down game in the world!" I wondered how many jokes are made at the Milton Bradley factory about that claim. Then we played "Old Maid." I have taught Mulan that if you end up with the Old Maid, it means you're the winner.

I wonder if she'll be in therapy talking about me and remember this. I suppose I deserve it, I spent hours on the couch talking about my own mother. It's pretty dramatic, how much forgiveness you have for your mother after you become a mother. Sometimes I think about how I teased some specific line, some awful thing my mother said once, and then spent time in therapy talking about it. Now I know that when you're a mom, every day, there are probably several lines that someone could pull out and justifiably spending time in therapy over. As a parent, you know that it's impossible to not say something stupid, you just try to keep your percentages as low as possible. Three dumb things to 75 appropriate things. Like that.

For example, whenever Mulan holds my hand as we walk down the street, or really anywhere, she swings my arm and skips wildly. This might sound cute. And it was cute, for maybe the first fifty five times it happened. Now it drives me crazy. This thirty pound kid using my arm as a balancing bar.

I imagine Mulan on a therapist's couch in the future, describing what kind of mother I was. Using the example of me on a busy street, holding her hand, angry, seething and barking, "STOP SKIPPING. I MEAN IT! STOP SKIPPING THIS INSTANT!"

And she will have reported it all accurately.

Oh well...

How much TV is wrong? When is it wrong? I try to keep it to an hour and a half a day. I know! That's a lot! One half an hour show in the morning while I make breakfast and one hour at night while I do, y'know, everything that has to be done to just keep up with the daily demands. We TIVO "Oswald" and "Dora The Explorer" and "Sagwa, the Chinese Siamese Cat" and "Blues Clues." I think the new Blues Clues guy is cuter than the old Blues Clues guy. But I think the old Blues Clues guy is sexier. Go figure. Weirder still: I had an erotic dream about the new Blues Clues guy. And I woke up astonished. Why not the old Blues Clues guy who I actually think is sexy? And another question: Why am I having these types of dreams about the Blues Clues guy?

How can anyone think pornography is inherently bad when we involuntarily write, direct and star in it for ourselves while we sleep?

Back to children's TV. I never knew I'd have opinions about this stuff. We are thankfully beyond Telitubbies. That show was so hypnotising, I found myself watching it after Mulan went to sleep -- just mesmerized. It reminded me of college when we would all go get stoned and then go see the midnight show of "Eraserhead" . So far I have only watched Telitubbies after two glasses of wine. I do think Tinky Winky is gay. Which, of course, I love.

Okay. So... I finished Jamy Ian Swiss' book, "Shattering Illusions." The last chapter made me cry, it was so good. It's all about mystery and the nature of mystery. It's about so much more than magic. It's inspiring me to think differently about the end of my monologue in progess -- which is all about me losing my faith. Here is a paragraph from it that I love: "Magic tells us that life is filled with mysteries, both grand and trivial. There is little doubt that we cannot face every mystery in the same fashion. There will always be some mysteries we wish to solve, and some we don't; some we are driven to solve, and do. I believe that how we face these mysteries says a great deal about us as individuals, and how we make our way in the world." And then later he says, "When you put the truly impossible in front of someone, and you place them firmly and uncompromisingly into that experience -- not the puzzling or the briefly distracting, but the deeply impossible, the impenetrably mysterious -- people react. Things happen. And it can be very interesting to be a part of it when they do." Wow. That's how I feel about experiencing close up magic. And it's how I feel about experiencing art.

And I love this: "For myself, I like that look in someone's eye when he has run smack into the experience of mystery, and there is no escape, no longer any way out but to face the fact that mystery is now right in front of him, as well as all around him."

And then...

"I am less interested than ever today in being a light amusement or a pleasant distraction. Leave that to others. I have within my reach -- not readily or easily, but with great effort, at least potentially -- the power to create a unique experience."

And then...

"I shall not merely amuse. I shall not merely distract. I shall bring upon them the experience of mystery, and with this commonality between us now, we will go forward and explore our humanity."

This is what I am aspiring to in my next work. It's such a tall order, one that I may not be capable of. But I can try.

The second to the last chapter, "The Elements Of Style" is a great chapter about persona on stage. If there's anyone who wanted to read something about the process of what I do, as a monologist, this would be the thing for them to read.

It's too quiet in the house. I better see what my daughter is up to.

Ohmygod, she is asleep on the sofa. She really is sick. Her fever is gone, but she's wiped out. Wow. It's raining, my beautiful daughter is sleeping in the living room under her favorite blankets, I am drinking cocoa in the kitchen and listening to NPR. I think this is a good moment. Life should have a lot of moments like this one.

I think it's gonna be Kerry/Edwards ticket. Very exciting.

No Such Thing as a Free Launch

Hi. Okay, this is my first entry that is officially for my website. This is so exciting. So... Well, the pilot I wrote for ABC is not going to be made and the NBC script is pushed to mid-season so there is more time to work on it. In the meantime I am working on... my WEBSITE. I hope you enjoy it. I am also reading this amazing book that is blowing my mind. It's called "Shattering Illusions" by Jamy Ian Swiss. I met him the weekend before last at the Amazing Randi Conference in Las Vegas.

Jamy Ian Swiss is a magician and he is mind-bogglingly talented. He turns out to be a delightfully good writer as well.

Weirdly, now that I know so much more about science and the laws of nature, I find magic to be, well... much more magical. I'm just figuring out why as I read this book. Watching someone as talented as Jamy manipulate cards in proximity, knowing he is merely a mortal being who must conform to known physical laws, and then appear to defy them is intoxicating. And maddening. And exciting. And confusing.

On one hand, it makes me just appreciate what humans can accomplish, the finger work, their dexterity, etc. On the other hand, it's very unnerving to realize that my sight is such an unreliable witness.

So, I got this book and I can't stop reading it. It's written for magicians, but it's about so much more. It's about deception and ethics in general. It's about how to deceive, honestly and with integrity. And what the nature of deception truly is.

There's one chapter that is so beautiful -- about Jamy when he was 12 and infatuated with a girl his same age. He entrances her with a magic trick and she demands to know how he did it. He finally relents and tells her and she is delighted. And then she is not delighted. He watches the light in her eyes turn cold and detached. Revealing the secret had ruined everything. Wow. Powerful. It's hard not to stop my whole life and just read this book over and over again. I can't stop thinking about when its musings and lessons apply to regular civilian life and when it doesn't. When it applies to theatre and film and general human interaction. What are our assumptions in the world? When are we being misdirected, at what point does knowing the mechanics of something enhance or detract from the experience? It's all so compelling.

Okay. So... my blog. Wherein I write about my life but not the most intimate or embarrassing parts. Hmmm... That leaves me little to talk about at the moment.

I Hate Writing Alone

Wow. I can't believe it's December already. I am over the flu. But I have friends all over who are sick. Jeez. I hope I don't get another strain. Well, I am basically in writing lock-down for the next week. I think I really hate writing alone. It's really excruciating when it's hard, and when it's easy -- it's hard to know if it's good or not. Next week I am doing another Frasier episode, as the same character. I am really excited to do it. I did my first episode on that show a month or so ago and I loved everyone so much -- such fantastic actors and writers. Having worked on many TV shows that were in trouble, it's such a breath of fresh air, so exhilarating to work on a show that is good, knows how to do it, does it easily, does it every week. I can't wait.

A Strange Influenza

I am still so sick, I can barely move. I walk around the house all hunched over, moaning involuntarily. I had to cancel performing at the opening of CFI West tonight. I am just so sick. I feel awful about canceling, but it's really out of my hands -- I simply cannot leave the house. This means I will also be missing the lecture at Cal Tech tomorrow, which I was really looking forward to. Damn.

The hardest time to be a single mom is when you're sick. Obviously my daughter has no idea why I'm laying around moaning and sweating and then alternately freezing. Last night was tough. It's easy to feel sorry for yourself in this situation. I have only been this sick around my daughter once before. It was really difficult. But today the babysitter arrived and now I can take a nap. My daughter and I spent the morning playing with this Maisy doll cutout game. Sometimes, I would just have to lay my head on the dining room table and breathe slowly. I told her I had a bug and her eyes were like saucers when I told her that. She wanted to know how the bug got into my body and if he was eating my lunch in my stomach and when he was going to come out.

I heard a line once -- that to have a child is to have your heart walking around in someone else's body. That is so true.

My Very First Blog Entry

Okay. This is my first blog entry. I'm not sure how personal this is going to get. I am still unsure how revealing I feel I want to be, but I figure I'll start out more personal and then move into more discreet writing if it's suddenly weird and egotistical to me.

I am right now sitting in my bed, sick with the flu. I have been working like a mad woman on two pilots that I'm writing. A pilot is a "first episode" script for a TV series and I am lucky enough to be writing two. This may be a great thing or a stupid thing.

One I'm writing alone and the other with two other writers. I think I like writing with others better than writing alone. Plus, I am better committing to writing schedules with other people than I am keeping to my own schedule. This huge writing crunch has kept me over-occupied for the last three weeks and will continue to for the next four weeks, I imagine. One pilot is for NBC and Warner Bros. and it's based on my "In The Family Way" monologue. The other one is for ABC and Touchstone and it's about a family dealing with cancer. It's obviously a drama, but there's going to be funny scenes in it. I have written one other pilot and been in several pilots as an actress and they almost never get picked up for a series. So you have to do this tricky dance where you build up your enthusiasm to write it, fall in love with it, and constantly remind yourself that the chances of them getting made into an actual pilot or an actual series is very, very small.

Anyway, I got sick starting yesterday and tried to write with my co-writers today but had to call it quits after one hour. I think it's the flu. My daughter, who is four, is off with the babysitter getting dinner and I am lying in bed writing this blog. Wow, that sounds so dilettante-y writing it. Well, please know that I have been sick a few times without a babysitter and it was very difficult. Does that make me sound better? Hmmm...I am already second-guessing this blog thing.

OKAY, the main thing I wanted to write about is that while I've been sick, I watched two things on TV. One I TiVo'ed, and one was on TV. The first one was Nova's Brian Greene show called "The Elegant Universe" (after reading his wonderful, but for me, way over my head -- ha! -- book) all about string theory. It's a two-parter. If you don't have a TiVo -- please, I urge you to get one immediately. $500 will change your life. My TV watching is entirely up to me, I never watch any commercials and I can get the TiVo to search for things I like (it actually does this automatically) and even though it's a little big brother-y, it's changed my TV watching habits entirely, all for the better.

Anyway, I watched both parts and will definitely watch them again. That night, I was so blown away by the ideas of quantum mechanics and the general theory of relativity that I couldn't sleep. I mean, of course I knew something about these theories before -- even gone to seminars on them, but the way Brian Greene and Nova presented it -- it was much more understandable to me than ever before. I couldn't sleep all night, waking up trying to come up with my Theory Of Everything -- which is completely absurd since I never took any math above algebra in high school and some statistics classes that I basically failed in college. I woke up laughing at myself. Yeah, me, Albert Einstein and all these amazing physicists, trying to come up with a Theory Of Everything. I tried to tell a few friends why I hadn't slept the night before and all I got were blank stares -- like, "Y'mean a 'theory of everything…in your life?' Like a 'theme to your life?'" Which is actually also pretty funny if I was up in the night doing that and calling it a "Theory of Everything."

Okay, anyway. Nova's The Elegant Universe is really, really great. (Wow, I'm so articulate...) It made me want to stop everything and work for Nova for the rest of my life. Hmmm...I wonder where the Nova headquarters are? It seems like it would be Washington, DC for some reason. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/jobs/

The next thing I watched was so upsetting and disgusting that I was really glad I watched it before my daughter came home from preschool. It's called "Hell House". It's a documentary just out on DVD that chronicles a church in Texas who makes a Hell House every year near Halloween time at their Church -- called Trinity Church. It basically scares teenagers and kids into accepting Jesus Christ as their personal savior by depicting scenes of people who have made, in their opinion, wrong choices, and, in their opinion, suffer eternal punishment. It's really, really creepy. (There I go with the really, really's again -- I'm sick! I'm sick!)

In the documentary they recreate scenes, like in one, there's a man dying of aids in a hospital bed, and a "grim reaper" stands over him in a skeleton mask saying that he shouldn't have "chosen" the gay "lifestyle."

There's another really upsetting scene reenacted where a young girl, who has been sexually abused by her father as a child, goes to a "rave" and is forced to take a drug that seems to be a muscle relaxant. She passes out and then is gang-raped by several boys. Later in her room, when she wakes up horrified, the grim reaper tells her that she is going to hell because she made a bad choice -- I'm not sure if it was for going to the party in the first place or for drinking the drink that the boy put the drug in -- and then the "devil" encourages her to kill herself, which she then does. They also insinuate that her father abusing her was her own fault. Oh, there are so many horrifying parts, it's too much to tell here. Okay, here's one. They reenact the Columbine murders because the perpetrators were supposedly angry at god.

I think the part that bothered me just as much as all the reenactments was the decor in the church and the people's houses that were in the documentary. It's like Walmart has taken over people's lives. It's so sad looking; cheap wooden furniture with fake gold edges and bad knick-knacks. There's a little boy with epilepsy whose father thinks that his seizures are stopped when Jesus is asked for it to stop. The very saddest moment for me was in the extra-features part of the DVD where they interview some of the congregants who participate in this, and one young girl goes on and on about how ugly and evil this world is, but that it's okay because she's going to go to heaven.

You must by this DVD. I think it might be my Christmas gift this year. Is that bad?

Okay, here's what I'm reading right now. It's called "The Ape And The Sushi Master" by Frans De Waal. I'm only about a hundred pages in. It's says "Cultural Reflections Of A Primatologist" on the spine. It came out in 2001.

My favorite line in it so far is, "I often get the impression of being surrounded by two distinct categories of people: those who do and those who don't mind being compared with animals." Obviously, I like the book very much so far.

One of the astounding results of me losing my faith, (which was a beautiful experience and the subject of my next monologue), was that I suddenly saw how alike we are to our fellow animals. And how different. But different in ways I had not previously considered. I saw my own behavior being influenced by millions of years of evolutionary history, but I also gained a new respect for ethics and the ability of the human race to make informed choices. Much more informed choices than many other animal species. After I lost my faith, I stopped anthropomorphizing in a childlike way and started anthropomorphizing in an informed way. This book seems to deal with this subject.

All right, I must go to sleep. My shoulders are cramping up from writing on a computer in bed.