Last night was our last night rehearsing at Upstage. The space was such a big part of creating this show, leaving it feels almost like leaving a cast member behind. From the first hot, sweaty "read through," when we worked together to make a usable space for ourselves, WHERE we were influenced WHO we were. Kudos to our director for that - it was brilliant! Making a place for yourself, living with what IS, finding what you need within what you have available - these are all important pieces of the "Rent" story, and being at Upstage allowed them to be an important part of our "Rent" experience as well. We worked hard there, we ate & drank, we laughed & cried, we made music, mistakes, magic, and memories. Upstage served as the birthplace and home of this production.  Now that it's time for us to move out into the world and share what we became there, I feel the need to acknowledge my gratitude for what the space provided - because I have certainly come to value the importance of the walls around you throughout this process.

Last night was our last night rehearsing at Upstage. The space was such a big part of creating this show, leaving it feels almost like leaving a cast member behind. From the first hot, sweaty "read through," when we worked together to make a usable space for ourselves, WHERE we were influenced WHO we were. Kudos to our director for that - it was brilliant! Making a place for yourself, living with what IS, finding what you need within what you have available - these are all important pieces of the "Rent" story, and being at Upstage allowed them to be an important part of our "Rent" experience as well. We worked hard there, we ate & drank, we laughed & cried, we made music, mistakes, magic, and memories. Upstage served as the birthplace and home of this production.  Now that it's time for us to move out into the world and share what we became there, I feel the need to acknowledge my gratitude for what the space provided - because I have certainly come to value the importance of the walls around you throughout this process.

Home is where the heart is, they say,
It's where you hang your hat
No place like it
Sweet place

Lovely words to frame and hang
If you have walls
Soft words for a throw pillow
If you have a bed

I've never seen a plaque which reads:
"Home means meeting basic needs"
Wind from my back, rain from my head
A place to store a loaf of bread
A place to hold what can't be carried
Somewhere safe to change my clothes
A door to close when nature calls
When love wants making
When tears need shed
A door to open

Look within your walls today
Imagine what you'd take away
Inside a sack
And upon your back

Imagine what you'd take away
And all you'd leave behind

I've been thinking quite a bit about how a woman like me would end up where she needs to be for this. It's not really a difficult path to imagine. I lived in the Connecticut 'burbs as a teen, worked as a "mother's helper," saw women's lives. What if I married my college love - maybe before my degree was finished, took an MRS degree and went to work in an office to help out while he got his MBA? Some time goes by, a child or three come along. He works in the city, I mom in the 'burbs - what if he loved me, but had what would have been considered at the time a "dirty little secret?" Spent some time in the city letting who he really wanted to be come out to play... I'd have known on some level that we weren't okay, but I know a lot of women who used a little vodka & Valium to keep the secrets quiet. Maybe when he got sick, I leaned a little harder. Kids grown, or damn near, bailing fast on the mess we've made for them. He's never home, but the checks still hit the bank; nobody needs me, I like things better fuzzy. Then fuzzier, when the job's gone, the kids are gone, the wolves are howling. Maybe I try the city for work - nobody knows me there, I can make my own way, start over. But I can't. Now I'm sick too, and there's no net. Fuzzy's harder to come by, but way more valuable. Not much left but anger & fear, trying to find a place to be; a little solitude for my aloneness, a little something to keep me from starting scream & cry, cuz I'm pretty sure I'd never stop. Yeah, I can get there from here...

I have a few thoughts about a year in the life today... I started my job at Fair Oaks exactly one year ago. I'm not usually great at remembering dates, but today is also my mom's birthday - the third one she hasn't been around to share with us. (She would have been 77)
So, it makes sense that the whole how do you measure a year in the life thing would be bouncing around my head as I went into work this morning. It's been quite a year. For 15 years before I went to the housing authority, I was the story lady for the outreach department at our public library. The switch from deciding which stories children at Head Start would hear each week to determining which of them might get to have or stay in homes has been about as difficult as you might expect. The highs are higher, and rarer, while the lows are extremely low and way too damned consistent.
My mother spent her whole life working in social services. I channel her quite often when I think another day of it might be more than I can take, and it helps. But, on this day, a very, very, very horrible crime was committed in the early hours of the morning. We have violence as a part of our daily bread it seems, but this was different. There was none of the usual edgy anger and energy that seems to break out after a serious crime; it was quiet as hell in our office today. The only resident I spoke with about what happened told me about her connection to it as a way to explain the silent tears she couldn't keep off of her face during our previously scheduled appointment. I sent her home.
The only regular business came from applicants - people looking for a home who aren't yet part of our community, and were unaware of how we'd been hurt.
Enter the voice. A tiny, beautiful baby girl came in with her mother, and I swear she smelled the evil we were all holding in our thoughts - she screamed, she wailed, she sobbed. Every woman in the place took a turn trying to comfort her, but there was nothing anyone could do to take her pain away. And no one could not hear her.
There was nowhere to hide from her full out anguish, and it sounded exactly the way we all felt - it was the anthem of this day, and she sang it.
And in the middle of all that, I thought about the voices I heard in rehearsal Sunday night. Being able to add the emotional resonance of music to the story we're telling is an awesome gift. I believe that the process we're going through to make this thing real is going to create a sound no one will be able to not hear, and I need to believe that the love and hope it generates will help us to create a community working to find a way to stop the kind of story that baby girl's anthem told.

I love words. I love to know them, use them, choose them, write them, read them - they are dear to me. Really. So spending the first week of the production listening to the words Rent is made up of worked really well for me, and eventually sent me running for a dictionary. I didn't grab it to look up unfamiliar words, but to read about a very ordinary one: rent. It's worth about 6" in the Webster's dictionary I use, when you count variations...
Rent: to pay for the temporary use of - money owed for a space, but deeper for me now. In the face of death spread by love, or lust, is a virus the rent on the use of a body? In the face of addiction, is need or withdrawal rent on the use of a drug? What's the cost of using someone else's needle? If life is a temporary gig - and it is! - what do we pay for our stay?
Rent: payment received for the temporary use of - what do we gain when we allow others to let space within and around us? What are we paid when we allow others into what is ours, what is us?
How do we measure the cost, the gain; the rent paid out and taken in during the course of our stay? What's the cost of a year? How can you measure it? Things gain value when they're in short supply - is a year worth more when you're aware that you may not have many of them? Can we recognize the value of any year, of every year, more clearly if we see a year through the eyes of those who live on !borrowed time"?
Rent: a variation of rend - a hole or gap made by rending or tearing, a breach of relations, as between persons or in an organized group; schism...
 (Yeah, schism. A split or division in an organized group or society, esp as the result of difference of opinion or doctrine - sound familiar?!?)
Rend: to tear apart, to rip apart with violence (a tree rent by lightning); often used figuratively (a roar rends the air); to tear one's clothing to show grief, anguish...
When everything is rent, it's all been torn apart. When everything is rent, there are divisions in a community. When everything is rent, we're grieving. When everything is rent, every moment comes with a cost, and with a gain.
I love words...