• 18:29 It's always a little bit gratifying when a guy who is staring @ you walks into something... #

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• 17:14 Doesn't matter what she *actually* said... I was momentarily convinced that my co-worker was asking me to bring her a neon squirrel. #

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• 08:41 Nothing puts me in a Bangles mood faster than cops at the donut shop. #

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There is no way I can possibly do justice to a description of the fascinating character who just came in to the bookstore. A wiry-looking man in his late 50's, with a thin, pilled sweater fresh from the thrift store & a bulging backpack... Short, dark gray hair and a fantastically bushy mustache, arms crossed in a nervous, protective pose worthy of any sulking 4-year old... and eyes flitting constantly back and forth, to book covers, to me, to the door and back...

He's trying to sell me a Sociology textbook, and seems very concerned that I understand that it is "a very good book, very interesting, very intellectual - it retailed at $40 when I got it!" He assures me that it is "very old. From the early 90's!" and is not at all convinced that the fact that the book is 15 years' outdated does not make it an antique and therefore extremely valuable.

Upon deciding that I am not, in fact, going to buy this book from him, he begins an unsolicited and decidedly 1-way conversation with a description, in enthusiastic detail, of a scene in a book he once read in which a man slits open and sleeps inside of a dead horse. He's not looking for the book... he just wants to know whether it is "still required reading in our high schools today, do you know? I mean, not that you can really have 'required reading' in America. [Insert guffaw.] No. But I read 1984. I gotta read that last page again, where is that, I love that last page.. I remember, huh, yeah. It was set in Russia. And there was the man who was.. well, the master- I can't remember what it was called, but he was - but it was cold, and he had to open that horse. I read that in high school. And he had to get out - I mean, I read some of that in high school; I didn't read it all the way through - but, before it froze, or he would be stuck. I mean, inside the horse. The frozen horse, can you imagine?"

He then leans suddenly over the counter and peers intently into the area for employees only, where I am standing. "You do have a fire extinguisher in here, don't you?" He looks quickly up at the ceiling, then back and forth at the towering stacks of books, eyeing them nervously as if they are threatening to burst into flames at any second and engulf us both. I assure him that we do have a fire extinguisher, and he lets out an enormous and slightly frightening sigh of relief, as he buries his head in his hands and begins to mutter "nightmare. I just thought - oh, that would be - nightmare. Books, oh!"

At this point I can only assume that he sees, through the cracks of his fingers, an old black and white photo on the wall of a Native American, because he quickly recovers and proclaims that he is "very concerned with Native American issues! Quintessential. I read the paper every week. The Indian paper. I'm very concerned about it. Very important. The languages are almost all gone, some of them. But of course, you know, it's a very intellectual neighborhood. I just can't believe they put the library in that building. No. There's a pictures of Hades on the wall in that room on the right when you walk in the door, you know. You've seen it? No, it's awful. We used to have meetings in that room for the Photographic Society. But then we changed the name to the Camera Club. Really, you know, classy photos. Cars and things. Boats. I was the president for two years. We had to meet in that room. I can't believe they moved the library into that ugly building... You know, you should have that man - the man - the tall man, he works here - you should have him put an antenna on the roof, then you can listen in to the Citizens' - to the Citizens' Radio. Very intellectual stuff, you know."

I take this opportunity to tell him that "the tall man who works here" will be back at the weekend, and that perhaps he can try his luck with him on the subject of his antique Sociology book. I get this sentence out only by talking over him when he interrupts me, as he has done every time I've opened my mouth in the last five minutes. He is at this point telling me what an attractive young lady I am, so I'm not at all sorry to bulldoze the conversation and end it with a definitive "Have a great day!" as I sit back down and pretend I'm doing something very important on the computer. He says, "God bless! God bless you!" at least half a dozen times, interspersed with something else about 1984 and today's high school curriculum, and walks out still talking and "God Bless!"ing. He seems still to be talking as I hear the bell of the door shutting, and I burst into laughter at the same time as the one other customer in the store, a girl about my age, peeks around the corner, also laughing, and smiles. "Meet all kinds, working here, I imagine," she says.

Yes. Yes, I sure do. :o)

the energy is good today, with english breakfast tea & milk; and cool, breezy walks through quiet streets.

i slept for about 14 hours last night, and woke up feeling refreshed (and not to the sound of an alarm clock) for the first time i can even remember in months. and there are so many other things i should be doing today, but it is so delicious to take a mental health morning, and to remind myself that my life is good, and to determinedly enjoy being alive.

i always know, when i find myself not being able to breathe properly, that i'm letting my life slip away from what it should be; becoming unbalanced. and this week i lost my wallet and had heart palpitations and nearly had a brain-meltdown when i couldn't get my rehearsal reports out on time, and then someone burned a hole in my living room floor...

and i finally just had to laugh at myself.
what petty worries! nothing lost that can't be replaced; nothing broken that can't be fixed... and frankly, i could stand to lose a few material things anyway. it reminds me that being a whole person is more important than having my living room decorated just so. :o)

...

fall is coming, and it's my favorite time of year. spring may be house-cleaning time, but i always find that the cooler weather and crisp, fall scents in the air bring a more reflective mood - a spiritual cleaning time, of sorts. :o) i start to ache for travel and new knowledge; i slow down and enjoy my senses more. i start baking again and reading better books... i usually decide to teach myself some new skill...

i love it that every year i get older, i learn new things about myself. and i absolutely savor those times when i recognize just how much a season of my life has taught me, and what changes it has wrought in my attitude and perspective... this past summer has been one of those pivotal times, i think. i felt it the first weekend of faire, and i am even more convinced now, looking back on it, that doing the ren faire was the 2nd best thing i've ever done - right behind my semester abroad in london. and i can't even put my finger on exactly the right reason... (but after half an hour of composing and deleting i'll just have to accept that, like the semester abroad, the experience of working at faire is something that i can't verbalize, and that no-one but those who were there will understand.) i suppose its refusal to be defined or quantified is a better testament to the magic of faire than any words i could give it in any case. :o) but while i won't pretend to have done any more than scratch the surface of learning everything i should know about it, i did gain some confidence, learn some important lessons, and meet a group of the most amazing, talented, warm-hearted people i've ever had the pleasure of working with.

i won't bore you with a list-of-lessons-learned, but i will tell you that i cannot wait for next year, and the opportunity to start the season with the knowledge i had gained by the end of this one, try out new ideas that i've formed in retrospect, say hello to the hundred faces that are now old friends instead of strangers with names to be learned, and set out with my toolbelt and notebook, ready for another season's worth of new information, problems to solve and challenges to overcome.

for now, however, i have an empty canvas of a fall to work with, and i think i feel a season of personal growth coming on. next year i will know to take a break after faire, instead of diving right back into stage managing, but i have promised myself that i will not take on a winter show, and will give myself a well-earned break once this one closes. it's time to be a little bit nicer to myself. i'm really looking forward to it.

now, if i can just survive rehearsals....... ;o)

Caribou is hopping today. Not even an outlet left for my poor little computer... guess I'll have to charge it at work. It is hopping today, of course, because most of the neighborhood is without power. Including us. I wish I'd had a camera on my way home from work yesterday, just after the brief, violent storm came through... I stood in Pier 1, watching it through the enormous windows, as the sound drowned out the music, as the roof began to make so many pounding, creaking noises that we were sure it had at least sprung a leak, as the lights flickered and the registers beeped in protest at the power surges... We watched shopping carts being flung across the parking lot, bouncing off of cars and into the street, and the grey wall of water and wind bend trees sideways.. and when it slowed to a trickle I made a dash out the door, hoping to make it home before it started up again. I didn't run for too long. After coming around the corner of the shopping plaza and into the residential area a few streets from where I live, I stopped, amazed at what I was seeing. Just... trees... everywhere. Pieces of trees. Branches, debris, broken tables and chairs littering the street. In my 15 minute walk home I passed three streets completely blocked off by fallen trees, saw several cars with windows broken in from falling or flying objects... it was like the streets and sidewalks were carpeted with leaves and branches. It was incredible. And the water was so deep in many places that I had to wade through it, more than ankle-deep. It was while standing in one of these puddles that I noticed a nearby downed power line and nearly had a heart attack as I scrambled away. My pants were soaked to the knee before I got home, and I actually had to take off my boots on my porch and pour water out of them. I've just never seen anything like it.

But the powerless evening was entertaining. Amanda headed out of town in the early afternoon, so Adam and I were left to fend for ourselves. We made soup and biscuits and drank wine and read and chatted by candlelight.. it was really pleasant to have an evening without electronics, actually. Kind of festive. We could hear the people downstairs playing guitar and singing.. and it made me happy, thinking about how much of people's lives really used to be dictated by the rising and setting of the sun. And how baking had more to do with an innate sense of timing in the days when you couldn't just set an oven timer. It felt good having to actually pay attention to what I was doing. We'll see how long this outage goes on before I get severely annoyed, but right now my only concerns are the things in the fridge that are probably going to go bad, my geriatric cell phone that dies unless it's charged twice a day, and keeping up with the e-mails that I need to keep up with for the show. As long as Caribou has internet & Pier 1 has outlets in the breakroom, I think I'm fine. We'll just ignore the possibly rancid contents of the refrigerator.

And this shrieking kid behind me. Seriously. It's screaming "LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LAAAAAAAA! MOOOOM! MOOOOOOOOOOM!!!" at the top of its lungs, and its mother, busy conversing with a friend, is completely ignoring it, absolutely unphased. Dear god, now it's crying about absolutely nothing except for the fact that it's not receiving enough attention. Why is this behavior acceptable?? I'd have flattened the brat by now. For the most part, I think ignoring this kind of attention-seeking behavior isn't a bad tactic, but when it's in public, I think it's extremely rude to allow it to go on. Okay, it's not just me. The man next to me looks disgusted as well.

You know what? I've added a new thing to my list of Life Goals. I want to be one of those completely eccentric, crazy old women who says whatever the hell is on her mind, whenever it's on her mind. And people will let me get away with it because I'm old and they think I'm senile and can't help myself and because I'm smiling fondly even when I'm telling them that their children should be put down and they have no clue how to react. How old do you suppose I have to be before I can get away with it?

Anyway. 15 minutes of free internet time left here, but my chocolate muffin and my apple cider-ish drink are gone, and if I have to hear one more verse of the "LA LA LA LA LA" song I may scream, so it's about time for me to head out. Back to my powerless, internet-less, phone-less apartment. I think a few hours of reading are in order before work. Empire Falls, here I come!

this is kassi. we went to college together. i used her old ID to get into bars before i was 21. i saw her two weeks ago and didn't say goodbye before i left. i figured i'd see her soon enough. she was cast in the show i'm stage managing right now.

she passed away this afternoon.

when it became clear that she would not pull through, a chaplain was brought in to perform a marriage ceremony for her and her fiancé. i think she lived for a few hours after that, though she wasn't conscious.


i didn't know her well, but i just spent four hours sitting around with 20 or so friends from college who knew kassi. passing a bottle of jim beam, offering up toasts, sharing stories and memories, crying. i felt out of place, but grateful and so moved. ... opening night went well except for some annoying technical problems that i had to overcome, and this post would probably have been a light-hearted rant about it, but lindsay didn't want to tell me about kassi before the show, and now, after learning what happened, all of the other stuff doesn't seem so important anymore.

...i just wanted to say my little bit. the most difficult thing about death, for me, is that nothing else stops when it happens. it's still a beautiful day, and there are still people laughing and living, and the world keeps rushing by in a weird, swimmy haze of color and sound. and your mind has to race to catch up to what has just happened and you wonder how other people can be making jokes, waiting for buses, buying coffee... eating, talking, worrying about things that don't matter.. when someone else's world has stopped...

like i said, kassi & i weren't close. but i always liked her. and she deserved so much more. and her family, and her close friends, and the man who would have spent the rest of his life with her.. they deserve more, too.

i don't know why, but i just felt like it was the least i could do to tell other people that a wonderful person left the world today. ...i felt like i should show someone her picture, and tell them her name, and say that she lived and died and will be missed.

...the very least i could do.

Angie's kitties have eating disorders, but I haven't figured out who has which kind yet. Yesterday, when I came rushing over here between work and rehearsal, terrified that the poor little kitties were starving, the bowl was still completely full from the day before and Emmy & Oscar seemed quite uninterested in the fact that I had access to their food. 24 hours later I show up thinking, "Eh, no rush." and the bowl is completely empty and they practically pounce on me when they hear the bag. Even Emmy, who is usually extremely difficult to coax out of the closet, came rushing out to see what was up. And I filled their food and water up... and I've been sitting here reading them articles about Fall Fashion, Ashley Olsen, Easy Glossy Perfect hair, and Sarah Michelle Gellar (Nice choices on the magazines, Ang.) for about 20 minutes and they seem to be listening attentively... but neither of them has touched the bowl! They don't seem to want to eat in front of me. And apparently I'm also supposed to be watching out for kitty-vomit because the last time they had a kitty-sitter, there was kitty-vomit involved. All I'm saying is that between fasting, binging, being reluctant to eat in front of company, and purging, these kitties may need a good talking-to about healthy eating habits and positive self-image. Just something to think about.

Also, I'm drinking coffee and reading magazines and it's kind of fun because it's something I don't often do. There is an article about women choosing 'Starter Husbands' in here and it kind of makes me want to paint my toenails and go to a salon or something. I don't know.

Oh, and P.S. Ang - where is this attractive new neighbor of yours?? I keep hoping for some exciting encounter in the lobby, but no luck so far. ;o)

Anyway, yesterday I got to play with four kitties!! Emmy & Oscar, of course, and Hugo (Brandon's cat) and an 8-week old dark grey kitty with creamy white stripes and a ring on his side that prompted his new owner to name him Frodo. This thing is adorable. He belongs to the director of the next show I'm SMing (Dog Sees God. Way too lazy to look back & see if I've already told you all about it, but basically Dog Sees God is what happens 10 years after the Peanuts strip, when Charlie Brown & all his friends are angsty, effed-up teenagers. It's pretty funny, and has a fairly poignant ending.) Anyway. The actors seem like fun & the director seems pretty well-organized & rehearsals don't start 'til the 17th of September, so once my current show wraps up I'll have a few weeks to recover. And I'm seriously going to need it. Most of it probably just to get the house back in order - yikes! Feel like I've hardly been in it for the past month.

There's an airshow going on here so there have been deafening roars of low-flying planes going on for 2 days now. It's getting old.

Okay, but in other news, I explored Ron's (DSG director) neighborhood a bit before rehearsal yesterday and found a great little shop (Equinox, or something. Ooh, and now that I think about it, I was in a sunglasses shop called Solstice the other day too - weird!) with fabulous decor and cards and jewelry and all sorts of kitschy and fantastic things including the coolest & most attractive lamp I've ever seen and a spectacular vintage bag that I'd love to own if I were the kind of person who could spend $200 on a spectacular vintage bag... but I'm not, so I dropped $40 on a stack of pretty and amusing greeting cards instead. Whoops!

For the record:
1) I want to write Stage Managing for Dummies. I think that kind of writing is right up my alley.
2) I really, really like Mucha.
3) An appeal to the general wisdom of the masses: Need a wireless signal booster of some sort. My roommate's computer gets signal everywhere in our apartment. Mine, however, only gets it on the porch. And only sometimes. This will be a problem, come winter. Any suggestions?


K. Think the kitties have learned enough about how to keep their hair glossy and perfect for the day. It's time for me to make my way back to Roscoe Village to grab my SM bag and go over my cues in my head a few more times before tonight's opening performance. Oh, yeah. Update on that front. We were originally supposed to have 1 time slot. 1 in the morning on Sunday. Then we also got a closing slot - like, 10:30 Sunday night.. and then the festival director decide to honor us with the 2nd slot of the festival, right after his own group opened, because he wanted to kick things off with a bang and he thinks our group will come up with something really great. No pressure there!

...Had internet here for a few minutes. Now I do not. Well. I shall likely be posting this from Caribou Coffee then. And off I go!

there is also a yard-bunny.

oh! and i saw a mugging on the way home! yeah! so i came around a corner and glanced down the alley, and there was this one big bird with something in his mouth in the center of a circle of much smaller birds, fluttering excitedly, and when they saw me, all the small birds flew off in a big flock and the big bird started hopping up and down and chirping angrily. presumably yelling "and STAY out!"

i guess it was either that or i interrupted some kind of bird-drug-exchange. Big Bird may have been chirping angrily with me for scaring off his young, impressionable clientele. either way, it was kind of cute in that, you know, neighborhood-bird-crime type of way.

anyway, so i'm back on the porch and watching a bunny.

just wanted to say that after the rush off to work this morning, i sat outside and waited for an hour and 20 minutes for a manager to show up. no big thang - i finished Coyote Blue, and got paid for the inconvenience. :o)

and rehearsal got pushed back to 7:30. so i have time to take a breather and encourage the chest pains that i've been having for an hour to stop. (why does this happen??)

got a nasty message from the landlord the other day. it was actually kind of funny. (she has this weird old-lady accent that i can't quite place. it's stuffy and sniffy and walrus-y with elongated consonants. like a cross between richard nixon and julia child.)

Hahy, Casey, this is Sheri R--------- cawling. ::annoyed sigh:: Youw're renting [my address].

[Am I? Seriously? Wow. I wasn't sure, but thanks for informing me.]

::another annoyed sigh:: I'm cawling to tellll you to take the grillll off of youwr back powrch. ::nasty tone, extremely annoyed sigh::

[Uh, Sheri? We don't even have a grill.]

It's very dayngerous to grillll on the powrch. ::condescending tone, enough with the annoyed sighs - I get the point!!::

[No shit.]

If you wahnt to grillll, you have to do it in the yaahrd.

Thanks for the update, babe. Can I just say that even if we owned a grill, and were for some reason keeping it on the porch (a great idea in Chicago, by the way, keeping expensive things outside where everyone can see/steal them) I wouldn't have appreciated that message. Tiny as this apartment is, if we had a grill, who says we might not just be keeping it on the porch & taking it into the yard when we use it?

mkay. chest pains have subsided. think i need to go change (hot-hot-hot in chi-town) and head off to rehearsal. good times, great oldies.

i need a replacement for "exciting."

So a friend of mine at work had a real doozy the other day. I would just like to preserve this brilliant moment forever.

Your Newly Resurrected... (Drat! Another word I can't spell! It's those dastardly double consonants, I tell you!) Pier 1 Moment Of the Day! (I know you missed it!)

A customer holding a silk flower approaches Stephanie and says, "I'd like to know how many of these there are per can."

"Can?" asks a bewildered Stephanie. "We don't... the price on the tag is just per stem."

The customer replies, "Right, but where are the cans of them?"

Poor Stephanie. "Ma'am, we don't have cans of flowers. We sell them individually."

This is where the customer chooses to get snotty, and in a righteously indignant sort of way she thrusts the price tag under Stephanie's nose and reads, "Price, $6. CAN, $8. Now WHERE CAN I GET A CAN??"

...I have to hand it to Steph. I think I'd have been rolling on the floor laughing by this point. Her reply was, instead, a very meek, "Ah.. yes... the price is $6 here, and $8 in Canada."

I love my job. :o)

Also, if you like tea, check out the new White Peach by Harney & Sons. You can find it at at B&N. I need input - the smell is absolutely divine, but the taste is somehow incongruous... I think I may merely have oversteeped, though. Need to be careful with white teas...