My Pilates instructor playfully calls me Kitten and Kitty and doesn’t understand why I screw up my face when he does – oh come on, where’s your smile? he chides – I grimace at him.
After Pilates yesterday morning, L came with me to get my dining table and coffee table and chairs – he then sat in the back of the truck, Jethro style, and held the tables while we inched home. Once in the Can surrounded by piles of heavy teak patio furniture that are stacked beside the sofa, as well as a large gas grill that I wheel here and there, we pushed yet more furniture into the apartment. In the bright white light coming through the big industrial windows, I saw the chinks of wear on my used furniture – even though the big white disks made me smile and look forward to seeing these pieces find their places at the LaLa.
I received a missive from an artist in San Francisco about a new series she has created of horses – she is wonderfully talented – http://www.kimfrohsin.com – check out her Equine series.
G has been involving herself in the legal aspects of the movie industry here and I went to meet her and others at Bacchanal as they gathered to talk about scripts and movies etc. M and K are both lawyers and K has written a screenplay that sounds like it could easily be a hit. M was there as well, he is putting most of this together with his actor friend who is already steeped in a couple of movies currently underway. I sat next to R and A who lived at the Can before buying a house by the Fairgrounds – they took no water – both are from LA and their work centers around museums and curating rather than Hollywood. We had what is now the usual round table discussion on who did what for Katrina, a snapshot of before and after for each of us, who was committed to staying – reasons to stay: New Orleans is one of the few bohemian cities left in the world, the city inspires the creative to create, and then there are the people, sigh, it is always comes back to them. A said if he was still in the Can he might have not come back but now owning a home sort of locked him in.
I looked up from our table littered with empty wine bottles and saw P who was my neighbor on General Pershing in 1988 – and E was there with him too – they both shouted RACHEL at the top of their lungs, and these are not usually expressive people – and everyone turned around to watch the reunion. Amazing how almost twenty years have passed and they both looked relatively unchanged by time. I told E I could remember when she finished the biography of Jim Morrison at 2 in the morning and decided she needed to hear the Doors full blast – which meant full blast projecting into my bedroom. Or when P showed up at my door in full Santa regalia and I was worried he was a murderer or something and wouldn’t open the door for him. Or Gert their big old Irish Wolfhound who used to jump through the floor to ceiling window everytime it thundered – and it thundered a lot! They remembered I had a lot of crazy friends. They have spent the last two decades accumulating crack houses in the Bywater and converting them into decent rentals – P’s business has blossomed into a good thing for them. They were on their way to selling out and moving to Costa Rica when Katrina hit and they both decided to commit to staying here to help the city.
I left everyone at some point at the R Bar and made my way home – I laughed when I walked in the door and had to negotiate a maze of furniture – this is the most expensive storage place I’ve ever rented.
S is back in SF where it is pouring down rain. He said he was going to start making a conscious effort to not frequent places we used to go that remind him of me. I told him while I am doing much better than I had been, there are times when my mind, body and soul feel like the site of the World Trade Center – so devastated – everything crushed – even the foundation seems as if it needs to be built anew. And since that is the case – I am picturing this endeavor as an opportunity to build me different. It presents an exciting and challenging occasion; however, there are moments of darkness when rebuilding seems daunting if not nigh impossible. Sort of like trying to get the LaLa done.
They say you can’t change your life – but I am here to say you can. In 1990, I left New Orleans for San Francisco and 2500 miles later on the Number 42 bus going down Van Ness Avenue I had an epiphany that changed my life. Unfortunately, new to the people reconstruction theory, I threw out the baby with the bathwater back in ’90. Now to quote Carly Fiorina – now is the time to keep what is best and throw the rest out the window – so make the list – what is best about me? – profound capacity to love, inclination to laugh out loud, an intense appreciation and wonder of my body’s physical capability, a freak for love of family and friends, and a Pollyanna view of the world as well as being an indefatigable seeker of life’s experiences.
Although S might see the two last points as my romantic tendency to live in an unreal world, and L might see the Pollyanna as what is both good and bad about me – it could be a design flaw but I’d rather cling to optimistic hope than drown in dull reality – I get this from my mother – who became an alcoholic because she could not suffer the reality she saw – my propensity towards health doesn’t allow me to have my reality buffered by an addiction – so I would like to believe I could imagine my own world and live in it. To paraphrase Louise Nevelson – I have created my world and it is better than the one that surrounded me.
And in an interview about her life LN said: Well, in some ways, all my life I didn’t feel quite that I belonged here. I didn’t really, in my closer being, identify too much on any level, so I just had to fill something in myself, and there was that great hunger, great search. And so, at one time, I thought maybe religion would do it; at one time I thought philosophy would do it; at one time I thought heroic things would do it. I didn’t care where I could communicate with it as long as it somehow gave me a measure, some measure, of just contentment. Not really contentment — gave me some measure of peace between the storms, you see. I had to have my rest period. And so I would search desperately, and search desperately. But I must say that not one yet has fulfilled what I’m searching for. Consequently, I don’t stay with it; it isn’t that I thought it all, or understood it all. I’m not saying that. It just doesn’t quite seem to fit this thing. But it fed me at certain times in my life and, at least while I was searching and hoping to find, it gave me a little contentment. And also I think it absorbed my mind enough to move with it, you see. That is the whole thing in our times that is really difficult for mankind on earth, no matter where, because so much as been broken down and I don’t think there’s been enough built up. So there’s great chaos. That may be in the world, but I don’t want that to be with me because I need more structure than that. And so that was a search on that level. But I never found it totally.