Players.

Theater, she says to me as we eat incomprehensibly complex burgers and drink straightforward beer, is dying.

It's news to me, because we have just left an enormous theater, practically a stadium of a theater, with every seat filled. The tickets to the show we watched sold an entire run in a few hours' time. It's news to me because I had just done the very same thing just a few days before, sat in a full theater with few vacant seats on a Wednesday night in October. It's news because when we ran some numbers on the last show I helmed, we realized that 5% of the population of our town watched us over three days. If a similar phenomenon occurred in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, it would mean that nearly a quarter of a million people would have attended the theater each night of performance.

It's news because theater does not seem like a killable thing.

We make the mistake of believing that just because something is marketable and profitable that it is a business. Business is a killable thing - we call supply and demand a law for a reason. But despite the capital flowing from investor to company to patron to performer, despite the army it requires to build and clothe and light and create, despite the illusion of supply and demand, theater is not an industry. It is not a business. It is not a product. Theater is the art of storytelling. It is the art of empathy.

At the heart of theater - at the heart of any storytelling - is a performer that tells a story that speaks truth to the audience; the truth has to be, to some extent, universal. The audience, in return, must recognize and acknowledge the truth that the performer speaks. They must understand each other. Empathy.

We don't need majestic edifices filled with sculpture and light to trade these truths. We don't need to gather five thousand watchers to a dozen actors to understand or empathize, and yet for millennia that is precisely what we have done. We hew stone into amphitheaters or line cushions with velvet, we play before royalty or in converted barns. Children playact for one another in schoolyards. The words of playwrights are so revered that we have translated them down the centuries and the stories that echoed in those stone amphitheaters are spoken aloud still today.

Theater is dying? No. You may as well say music is dying, or painting is dying, or storytelling. You cannot kill the thing which makes us human.

All the world's a stage, wrote the Bard. We would do well to remember that we are merely players.

Persuasion.

So, my friend. Yesterday, on my social media, I shared a silly list of Jane Austen’s best insults. I post things about Jane Austen pretty often. I love Jane Austen. It’s no secret.

Something about yesterday’s silly list of scathing insults spurred you to reply. You know I love Jane Austen, you said to me, but you don’t know why; she’s a terrible writer. One of the worst, you said.

It was a surprise, coming from you. We have been good friends, if not close ones, for a very long time. We share many common opinions, but enough differing ones that our conversations are lively.You are progressive and open-minded, and I consider you a man of taste. So I answered you respectfully, explaining to you the connection I feel to the characters she penned. You did not reply; I left it, thinking the matter done.

But another surprise: a message, from you - an apology of sorts. You didn’t mean to offend; you rarely indulge in such displays of negativity; there are so many emotional weights at present, your heart heavy with worry for your dear ones in danger’s path. And yet you took the time to exclaim again, you’ve read all of Austen’s writing, and still find it miserable; you’ve been to her house, you’ve been to a lecture in hopes of figuring out her deep appeal, which still escapes you. You fail to understand why people like her. This, after I had merely hours before laid bare my own reasons.

I do not like being captive to my own anger, and so I will with patience again try to make clear to you the affection I have for her, and that I know others have for her. Rather, I will try to parse for you your own disaffection, which is perhaps more satisfying for me though less illuminating for you.

You do not like her because Jane Austen is not for you.  

She did not write in the hopes of garnering male acclaim or pleasing male sensibilities or bolstering male pride. She did not write male characters with depth or complexity, she did not examine their stories or even entertain them. She never wrote one single scene without a woman in it.

She wasn’t writing for you. She was writing for me, and women like me, and women like her.  I see myself in Elizabeth’s ferocity and pride; I see myself in Elinor’s reticence as well as Marianne’s candor; I see myself in Emma’s shortsightedness; I see myself in the loving, teasing letters Jane herself wrote to her sister, Cassandra; I see myself in the brilliance and pettiness she assigned to even her gentlest and most lovable protagonists. Jane Austen is so beloved to me because she wrote me, two hundred years before I read her, and she wrote the difficult, convoluted, precious relationships I have with the other women in my life.

Jane Austen did not write for you, and somehow to you that translates to her being a bad author. Hemingway did not write for me - you were the intended recipient for his spare, angry prose - but I know he is not a bad writer. DeLillo and Palahniuk and Franzen are not for me; Wallace is not for me; Fitzgerald and Dickens and Dostoevsky are not for me; even Tolkien and Poe, whom I cherish, are not for me. None of them spun their tales with me in their minds; I call none of them poor authors (except perhaps Dickens.) I know the appeal of each and every one of those authors, and while I find Hemingway’s bloodlust upsetting and Dostoevsky’s melancholy boring and Wallace’s elaborate word-play tiresome, I understand that none of that diminishes their mastery of their craft. That you do not find Austen appealing and therefore consider her unmasterful is not what I consider a valid literary criticism.

I do not thank you for offering your opinion, unprompted, twice, to me about something which is very close to my heart. I do not thank you for disparaging my taste, even obliquely. I do not thank you for proving that, two hundred years on, women are as subject to men’s unsolicited ideas as the Bennets ever were in the ballroom at Netherfield.

Men have been bricking women up behind the walls of their opinions since time immemorial. I kindly ask that you refrain from mortaring me within your commentaries.

Yrs,

-S.

p.s. I am not persuaded; Austen is to my mind one of the finest writers of the Romantic age.

Five.

One.

The day after the day we meet for the second time, I am in a hotel room hungover and spiralling down from an adrenaline high. I can’t remember when I put on the mascara that shadows under my eyes like sleeplessness. My lips are hard-edged still in red like a comic strip, the color within fading and feathering from neglect. In the weirdly dim glow from the fluorescent bulb over the mirror, I scrub at them, at the bruises I thought were mascara circling my lids, at the vestiges of the woman you thought I was last night or this morning with my bass cradled against my hips like a lover.

Four days ago I did not know you existed.

Two.

It has not begun to rain, yet, and neither of us is prepared to clamber down these slick rocks in our leather-soled shoes. The night is thrumming just under my skin, the smell of the crowd’s sweat and your aftershave and the ozone tang of the microphones effervescent. I pull you down to sit too close to the surf, and notice that I was wrong. Your shoes are not soled with leather; they are low-top canvas sneakers, the ubiquitous kind that are so ordinary that they have attained a sort of mysterious cool. The cocktail of your sneakers and the show, the vast susurration of the tide makes me want to press the perfect crimson of my lips against your pulse. I am desperate to know if the night is coursing through you, too.

Six weeks ago you did not know who I was. Six hours ago you did not know my real name.

Three.

It is the day after Valentine’s Day, and I did not kiss a handsome sailor in a karaoke bar last night because I couldn’t stop thinking about how I would be breathing your air this morning. I am crouched on a dirty sidewalk outside a thrift store on Broadway, trying to parse the whispered apologies and excuses you’re doling out in equal measure. I had been luxuriating in the skim of a silk shirt when your name lit my phone; I had left it carelessly crumpled, abandoned in the dressing room in my haste to bask in your voice instead. I can’t will my mind away from it, even while you chant: I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry. It’s urgent that I return, drape it back on its hanger, suspend it meticulously on the rack where I found it. Back away. Refuse to think of it again.

It is the month before she finds out, the month before the the first time you leave me.

Four.

Some days the gulf between what you want and what I need is so broad that we cannot even speak in terms of ‘want’ and ‘need’. I am prone to analogy, to simile. I draw parallels, tell parables. You are given mostly to silence and reproach. The more I beg to see into your heart, the tighter you draw the blinds. I ask you once, only once, if I should stop singing the songs I wrote in anger during the tense week when you wouldn’t answer your phone. You recoil as if I’d slapped you. It occurs to me that I talk too much in metaphor; maybe you presume to think that I sing in metaphor, too. I try not to feel resigned during each second set, which is when the songs invariably are played.

You have played the guitar just a few months longer than you have been the rhythm guitarist in the band. This thing between us is no longer new.

Five.

It is four days after I stained my body as a reminder to guard my heart. I am standing on a pier outside of a bar that serves only tequila, wondering if tomorrow’s headache would be worth feeling known for a moment - provided the pretty young man working will grace me with his name as well as a professional smile. I have already decided that just like when I went to Texas, just like with the sailor, just like when I introduced myself to you, I am not me, I’m the best invented version of me. When my phone rings and I see that it’s you, I thumb it on and answer, “Stella,” because that is who I have decided to be tonight, and that is all that you deserve. I haven’t answered my phone like this for you in a very long time. You draw a breath, take a beat, and then you say it. I know I am beautiful today; I have made extraordinary effort to be beautiful for these strangers who will never know my name. You cannot see me in my flawlessness; it’s wasted on you, too. I want nothing more in this moment than to feel the urge to test your heartrate with my mouth. The pretty bartender smiles at someone I can’t see.

It’s been nearly a year since the last time I could feel your pulse.

+

She is a lovely, lace-clad porcelain doll. You are blatantly, joyously in love. I am drowning in guilt that I cannot simply be glad for you, that your happiness diminishes me, that I am muted by your brightness. I am taken aback by my defenselessness; even all this time has failed to dull the sting.

Five years later, I am caught by the memory of my faultless kiss just under your jaw, marking the spot where your heart beats, sure and sound.

Two Decades.

I never really wanted to.

When he asked me, wind whipping my hair into knots, the fly of our tent unstakeable, the round river rocks pressing into my shoulder blades and hips, I said: Are you going to let me up if I say no? He laughed. He did not move. I said yes.

Seven months before that, I had told him: Whatever question you’re trying to ask me, the answer is yes. He made me a salad with wild things, led me over moss-covered fallen trees that terrified me. Yes, I kept saying, even when the leaves were bitter in my mouth, even when my heart stuttered with fear of falling. Yes.

We waited until we had rented a two-room apartment in a converted government office building to tell our families. My sister asked if he’d given me a ring. No, I said, I don’t care about jewelry. He bought me a flute in a pawnshop in Rifle, Colorado, asked me to play etudes again and again. I said yes. He never learned to read music. I struggled through solos without an accompanist. I played anyway. She told me it wasn’t real.

It was two years, almost, before we stumbled into the courthouse to say: Yes, yes, we will. I wore an ugly blue dress. My hair was filthy, I had missed a nap. Our son was turning restlessly, endlessly inside me. We used a borrowed ring. We used a borrowed witness. There was no music.

Afterward, my mother took us out to a steakhouse. Until I learned that I was pregnant, I had been vegetarian for nearly a year. I ordered the sirloin.

A year after that, we had a proper ceremony, with rings and a cake that I baked myself, champagne and the baby in a backpack. We wrote our vows; I quoted Hemingway and he spoke about how much he loved my breasts. I can’t recall what we ate. There was no music.

The girl who kept saying yes although she didn’t really want to is a foreign country to me. I know my borders, now, I know the rushing rivers and the spits of sands that reach out into the sea, I know the roads and hills and byways of my heart.

Today is my wedding anniversary.

My lovely, unknowable girl, I wish still you had had the courage to say no.

Exception

Let's make no bones about this: I am a middle class woman who is neither so young as to be ignored nor so old as to be dismissed, ambiguously ethnic enough that it makes no nevermind to those who "don't see race" and also enough that it confuses racists long enough for me to see a friend across the room and escape at parties. I'm past the point where Planned Parenthood is the only healthcare provider that is not a strain on meager resources.  I am educated, but I don't work a white collar job. So far, the President's poisonous net of executive orders have literally zero effect on my day to day existence.

Except. Except.

Except, I used to be so poor that Planned Parenthood was the only place I could get a pelvic exam. Hell, I used to be so poor that my mother bathed me in ice water rather than taking me to a doctor. We were so poor we got food stamps and still ate white rice and hot dogs the last week of the month.

Except, once I was a terrified 18 year old filled with guilt and regret and sorrow who had $200, a borrowed couch, and a phone number for an empty apartment in Van Nuys.

Except, a Neo Nazi looked me in the eye on a city bus and told me Mexican girls needed to be raped to be taught a lesson. I'm not Mexican. I told him I was Cuban. I'm also not Cuban.

Except, when my daughter was three she took swim lessons but was scared of the water so I took her out and decided to wait until she was old enough to be brave. When Alan Kurdi was three, his family fled Syria, fled civil war, left everything they knew behind to climb aboard a rubber raft. The raft was overloaded. It capsized. Alan drowned. He didn't have a chance to be brave.

Except, I don't call myself an artist but I write and I sing and I try my damnedest to make the world come alive for an audience, even if it's only for a night. All of my friends are artists, too, pretty much all of them, painters and photographers and actors and musicians and tattooists and poets and dancers. Every act of creation is a tiny spark in the darkness that is smothering us. We are struggling. We are trying. We are trying. I am trying.

I am failing.

I have a script next to me, marked with 44 scenes that need blocking and revision. I've done two of them. I have a ukulele and an unlearned song. I have this, whatever this is, this story or essay or cry in the night.

I feel as though this is not enough.

It does not mean she cowers

Two weeks ago, I asked one of my best friends if I should do NaNoWriMo. I need to do this more, I said. I need to practice. I need to vent a little of the pressure that’s in my head.

Do it!, she said. I’ll do it with you. We won’t write a novel, we’ll just write. Maybe we’ll send each other prompts, or maybe we’ll just sit down and let the words come, but we’ll write.

So I did. I wrote a story about All Soul’s Day, and I wrote a story about our ancient urge to tell stories, and I started a story about the power that language can have. I felt like I was on a roll, like I was accomplishing something. I wrote four thousand words in six days.

Then the election happened. It feels as though it should be capitalized: The Election, as if it won’t require a footnote in a history book in some distant future. The Election happened, and that night my writing time was squandered obsessively refreshing the New York Times, Fivethirtyeight, Huffington Post, the Guardian, watching the margins narrow and the numbers pile up. Words escaped me. I just kept saying over and over to those around me, What is HAPPENING.

I didn’t write on Tuesday. On Wednesday, in an attempt to spit out something, anything at all, I brought my computer with me to a technical rehearsal for the show I’m performing in. I opened up my story about language, intending at least to make a pass at its next paragraph, and instead I found myself writing the beginnings of a blog post about the time my mother took me to stand within sniping distance of a guard tower on the Berlin Wall. Coincidentally, Wednesday was the anniversary of that wall falling, and with it the tenets it symbolized. I got as far as describing my mother’s boyfriend’s car, a magenta muscle machine that should never have had children in the backseat, and then I tapered off. My two day total was 167 measly words. Not a one of them felt valuable or useful.

I brought my computer again tonight to rehearsal, and I opened the story I wrote over a week ago, just to see if the woman who wrote that story was still with me. Here is what I think is the best line from that story:

She could feel fear, but still practiced boldness, because just because a woman fears it does not mean she cowers.

I feel so much fear right now. I fear that we may see attempts (and likely successes) to strip us of our rights, especially those of us who already are vulnerable. I fear that the morals and values that I have worked so tirelessly to instill in my children will be seen as worthless or laughable by those who feel they hold a higher moral ground. I fear that those whose beliefs differ so wildly from mine will be emboldened and weaponize those differences, turning them on me and those who believe as I do in order to dominate and control us. I am full of fear.

But I will practice boldness, and I will not cower. I will offer up what I can, build a resistance out of my very existence, and use the power I have to hold up those who feel powerless. I will practice radical compassion, fierce love, and ferocious connection.

And hopefully, I will write.

Peaches

You say there is no way to know

but to know

you ghost your loops and whorls over reddened skin,

linger over the deep seams and high curves.

There is no way to know

but to know

your palm rounding, thumb denting the resistance.

There is no knowing

but to know

you drift closed and open

lift and breathe in -

push and close again.

You know

latching on with delicate suction,

pulling off,

the sweet of it deep

the wet of it long.

You know

if you had a knife,

every translucent shaving would

lay on your heat

like it was a benediction

like a blessing

a prayer.