Aorta lern my lines

When you got up at 4:30 and had to pack for a day of sitting in the waiting room at the hospital surgery center and you remembered to bring all the important stuff. So that’s good.

Dad is having what’s literally called a “re-do” on a five-year-old abdominal aortic aneurism surgery that had recently started leaking. Two weeks ago he had an exploratory aortogram—which it turns out does not, unfortunately, involve someone showing up at your door in tap shoes and an aorta outfit to sing Happy Birthday or a Valentine’s Day song—and he’s having the surgery today as the final gala event in his five-day 80th birthday celebration.

To complete the circle, I’m sitting in the waiting room memorizing my lines to Aortahoma!

Do we pose ourselves artistically and look adorable atop the piano when there ISN’T a ratty old book ruining the composition for a photo?

No. We wait for a ratty old book to ruin the composition for any potential photos and THEN pose ourselves artistically and look adorable atop the piano.

With profound apologies to Florida

Flashback Tuesday: Aging Gracefully Edition

American artist Ivan Albright painted his lurid, mildewy Picture of Dorian Gray in 1944, inspired by Oscar Wilde’s 1891 novel of the same name. It hangs just around the corner from Grant Wood’s iconic 1930 American Gothic in the Art Institute of Chicago’s American Art wing.

But the point of this post is that some stupid white-shirted jerk totally photobombed this handsome, distinguished formal portrait of me.

Dear LORD that was a long day

I cleared some stuff out of my storage unit, sold a ton of books (for a meager $20, but still), learned choreography for 4.5 hours with a delightfully talented choreographer and a cast of dancers half my age, did a show that was spiced up with a tornado delay and a couple dropped lines on my part, emptied the litter box, decided to sleep with my gross wrist wound unbandaged to see how it survives a night in the open air, and took a helicopter selfie with Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged neck creases (too soon?) in our Kountry Krafts guest room where I’m still sleeping because the final push of my bedroom project has become kind of overwhelming. Good night!

Fifty Shades of Gray!

OK, Four Shades of Gray. If you count the car. Which I hear is recently paid off. And is named Eleanor. Presumably after the Roosevelt Eleanor. Who also ended up gray. Which takes us all the way up to Five Shades of Gray. Almost there!

Rob and I just ran three miles in our matching shirts. Scott, presumably mortified that we were all tripleting, entered a loop of scampering ahead of us, circling back to us and then scampering ahead again. I think he ended up running 497 miles. He was a rabbit. Which made me Mitch McConnell. Except I rooted for the team that actually won the Civil War. (That was a tortoise-and-hare allusion, in case it was as abstract for you as it was challenging for me to write with any helpful context. Scott was the hare. I was Mitch McConnell’s stupid tortoise face. The rest of Mitch McConnell is a racist, zealously dogmatic, chancre-scarred tortoise butt. But I digress.)

Anyway, it was nice out so we ran because it’ll get hot out again soon and we—or at least I—won’t want to run. So for at least today I’m facing the world feeling athletey and lithe. Even though I run like a turtle butt.

Hurry up with your courtship, little flirty birdies!

A big storm’s a-comin’ and you’ll want to be makin’ your own thunder and lightning someplace where you won’t drown.

Great-read books that rose to the tops of the piles in tonight’s brief excavation of the storage unit:

Two are bipolar. Two are totally gay. One is a fascinating historical-fiction fantasia (Let the Great World Spin—read it!). One is the pre-McSteamy actual reference book that I received for Christmas 1981 back when I had dreams of being an ER doctor. But it qualifies as a great read only if you really REALLY want it to be.

Books I have recently purchased, in alphabetical order:

• Debussy: Favorite Piano Works
• DO NOT LAUGH IT’S FOR BUILDING DEXTERITY AND TECHNIQUE YOU PERVERTS
• Gershwin: Three Preludes for the Piano

I’ve been wide awake for no reason since stupid o’clock this morning

so I pulled up some blue tape and Liquid Golded some furniture and shelved some books in my bedroom and now I think I’m going to go for a short run so I can be good and exhausted by the time I get to work. IT’S A FOOLPROOF PLAN!

#UnwantedIvanka

Treasures I uncovered today in my storage unit, part two:

• My collection of tourist-trap figurines from my world travels that I figured I’d never find again among the bajillion unopened boxes I have yet to spelunk BUT I DID
• The glazed ceramic Eiffel Tower ring stand/change dish I have no business owning because I don’t wear rings or carry change but it’s charming and Francophiley and I love it so shut up
• A red Chicago Marathon cowbell that all the spectators jangled along the race route to keep us fired up or at least running in fear from all the crazy people jangling cowbells at us
• National Treasure, the American Da Vinci Code and my gateway drug to swooning over all things Justin Bartha
• MY HELLA COOL A CHORUS LINE BOOK
• Three stray unmatched socks I thought might possibly pair up with the pile of lonely, forlorn unmatched socks I’ve been holding onto for years just in case their prodigal other halves eventually showed up ... AND TWO OF THEM DID!

Remember how last year my Big Birthday Broadway Bash Blowout! was delayed NINETEEN HOURS

because of bad weather and broken planes and canceled flights and I ended up DRIVING IN A CAR WITH COMPLETE STRANGERS ALL THE WAY TO O’HARE to get on the last possible flight to NYC and I ended up getting there at 2:00 am and I missed my Jimmy Fallon taping and my window for a show the night of my flight in? Remember? REMEMBER?

IT’S. HAPPENING. A. GAI. N. N. Nnnnn.

Our goddamn plane broke between the gate and the O’Hare runway and then officially was declared out of service and we came back to a different gate and got kicked off and the guy seated behind me had already established himself as totally goddamned obnoxious because He Was The Most Important Person On The Plane Who Therefore Will Kick Me Repeatedly In Every Way Possible Even From Under My Seat and Now He Had To Get Off Immediately Because Fuck All You Little People so I made a point of getting in front of him as we got in the aisle and OH NO IT TOOK ME A VERY LONG TIME TO BEND OVER AND PICK UP MY CARRY-ON FROM UNDER THE SEAT IN FRONT OF ME AND THEN OOPS I FORGOT MY BOOK SO I HAD TO SEARCH FOR IT IN THE SEAT POCKET HMMM WHERE DID IT GO OH THERE IT IS so that part was at least kind of awesome but anyway American just happened to have a spare of the almost exact same plane just sitting around—kind of like I do with peanut butter and lack of boyfriends—so our flight wasn’t canceled but we had to move to yet a different gate WHERE THE DAMN GATE AGENT ALSO PRONOUNCED IT CONCI-AIR and now we’re on the plane and we lost our exit row and Cap’ Assholepants has resumed kicking me plus the guy next to him is playing shitty music really loudly because of course he is and I’m doing the math in my head and I’m pretty sure I’ll still get there in time for a matinee but in the mean time look at my selfie and say our new gate number really fast and you’ll know what I think about my Big Birthday Broadway Bash Blowout Bad Breakdown Bummer Bane Bungle Burden Bullshit Boobies.

I might have added boobies at the end just to see if you were still paying attention. Or to complete the rhythmic alliteration. Or because I’m catastrophically immature.

CID > exit row > breakfast in my lap > new book > ORD > probably another breakfast > totally another exit row > BECAUSE I’M ROYALTY > LGA > Manhattan > Big Birthday Broadway Bash Blowout! > crippling debt

Let’s hope we get there faster than last year’s 19-hour PR ...

#SparksOfJoy: A weekly post about something that makes me happy

Flesh and Blood by Michael Cunningham

I read this book years ago in a book club in Chicago. Even though I was an English major in college I'd pretty much lost all interest in reading fiction by then--and still to this day--preferring instead to bury myself in books about social science and American and European history. But I DEVOURED this book for our book club. Then a couple years later I devoured it again. And for some reason, something reminded me of it a couple months ago. Then I had an opportunity to bring it up in a conversation soon afterward. If I still own my original copy, it's currently filed away in one of more boxes than I can count in my climate-controlled storage room across town. So I ordered another copy and it now waits patiently in my pile of unread books for a third devouring. Anyway: In Flesh and Blood, Cunningham crafts a richly complex family narrative that germinates literally from the imagination of an eight-year-old boy as he plays in his father's garden in pre-war Greece. That boy--mightily named Constantine Stassos--eventually emigrates to America, marries an Italian immigrant, and becomes the imperious and by degrees powerless patriarch of an expanding family dynasty whose story is told both as a beautifully messy, eminently human drama and as a faceted metaphor for the American Dream filtered through a prism of post-war immigration, the uncertain but dogged progress of cultural assimilation, and the inconstantly evolving boundaries of familial love and obligation. It's as engrossing as it is complex, and as beautiful as it is essentially American.

Memes like this give me hope for the future of humanity

We ARE clever, and we can survive anything.

We found a worse Barr than Roseanne!

#SparksOfJoy: A weekly post about something that makes me happy

An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness by Kay Redfield Jamison

This fearlessly, brutally honest 1995 memoir examines the exhilarating highs and soul-crushing lows of manic-depressive illness (now more commonly called bipolar disorder) from the perspective of a psychiatrist trapped in the disease. Her frank and intimately personal insights bring the disease's cycles of terror, elation and crushing, abject despair into stark and sometimes heartbreaking clarity. It was recommended to me soon after I was diagnosed as bipolar in 2008, and it grabbed me on every level--from its smart writing to the recognizable, relatable, almost comforting details of its narrative--and I all but literally didn’t put the book down until I’d finished it. I have an indelible memory of reading it on the Red Line EL train home from work one night in Chicago, and a man who’d clearly seen me reading it made sure we made eye contact as he stood up and then he patted me reassuringly on the shoulder as he got off at the Sheridan stop. That encounter--a direct extension of this book--made me literally weep as I was coming to grips with label “mentally ill” and discovering the signs I’d never thought to notice until then that I wasn’t alone. If you are or love someone who is bipolar--or struggling with any mental illness--this book will make you weep, give you hope and quite possibly change your life.

On this holy and widely celebrated National Grammar Day,

let us pause—using the punctuation of our choice—to give thanks that the holiday’s name has been shortened from the National Violent, Racist Grammar Day that was established in the bygone era of this venerable childhood grammar primer that up with which my mom grew.

When you FINALLY put away the Christmas decorations in your bedroom and bring out your regular decorations and rediscover that you’re a bit of a Francophile

Also: Covet my freshly polished, super-awesome bookshelf built from remnant wood by my homebuilder great-grandfather!

Also: My beanbag juggling cows have started yet another year (decade?) being shelf decorations instead of teaching me how to juggle.