Life in the Orchestra Pit

Tuesday Bones took Lizzie and Baba and Dharma Dog and me to the Martin Luther King Memorial. We walked and danced and sang and played music down the Katie Trail, to the bemusement of the joggers and bicyclers.

What's it like living in a theater, a rehearsal hall, a writer's colony, a performace venue, a house full of astonishingly creative and lively souls? And this weekend more than ever. Our houseguests include six lovely people from Louisville the Soapbox Sirens, here to perform and share their joy. Tonight is the first performance of Lizzie's and Baba's Tumbleweed Cabaret, Acts One and Two. They have been scripting and rehearsing intensively all week, and I mean all day and most of the evening. They've pulled James, our great friend and fellow thespian, into the show, and I mean it literally when I say he wears many, many hats.

Alicia and Ron came by with a huge pot of spaghetti and sauce, ready to feed us all. FD showed up this morning, fresh and glowing, ready to jump in and do everything. What a gal. Huge smiles, encouraging hugs, generous energy. Bones, who is now also part of the Cabaret. People, smiles, warmth all around. Involving, a little exhausting sometimes, literally head spinning. Baba, point man on all things practical as well as musical, the engine that drives it all, the vehicle, in a sense, for Lizzie's driving vision.

I sit quietly in front of my computer listening to chatter, singing, guitar playing in the background. Lizzie has just finished what is likely the last run-through of tonight's show (note: nope. At least one more coming up as I write ...) and, like the matador preparing to face the bull, can now retire, relax, refocus, concentrate, cleanse, whatever she does to ready herself.

It's raining as I write, again. It has been doing this for over a week, off and on. Baba put out grass seed and covered it with straw a couple of days ago, and now the rain gently falls on it. Tulips burst forth yesterday, or today, not sure. I rise and walk downtown every morning as usual and I don't always open my eyes as I should. I chant as I walk: "Thank you, thank you, thank you for this day!" In time with my steps. I'm not awake yet and it's not until the walk back that I really appreciate the amazing flowers blooming all around me. Spring, it's such a natural high.

Yesterday I finished the first draft of my first short story. I've put it away and will go back to it in a couple of weeks and re-read it and probably rewrite it. This morning, on a whim and to clear my mind from the mainstream realism I've been drafting the last couple of weeks, I wrote as many tiny playlets as possible. Five "plays" - short description of a stage set and character, in some cases a bit of dialog and action. Each more whimsical than the last. Like I said, I'm living in a theater.