I am mostly crying

Honestly, I think I'd rather be in desperate financial straits on my own.  That wasn't how I felt before this past weekend.  I thought that Barry was helping: looking for bargains, making dinner, even running to food pantries (which is how bad our situation is).  But now I have to wonder how much money he was siphoning off for things we can't afford:  cigarettes, chips, soda.  Maybe our finances aren't even that bad; maybe he's just been misspending too much money.  But it's exhausting to have to police him on top of everything else I do.  Plus, I don't really trust that he's doing that much as far as job hunting.  First and foremost, he absolutely needs to be working, whether or not I leave or kick him out.

At least on my own, I would know exactly who was handling money well or fucking it up.  I would not have to discover that someone who was allegedly helping me was actually doing harm.  I felt a lot of love in pitching in together in this very bad situation, and absolutely heartbroken that he was actually working against me.  And it's not just the cigarettes or the money or the lying:  it's also that I'm the one who would get to nurse him through emphysema or lung cancer.  It's spending money we don't have on something very harmful.  I quit a cigarette habit twice as bad as his -- I smoked twice as much -- and it's been six years.  I'm not asking for something I wouldn't and didn't do myself.

I was really, finally feeling settled into this marriage, feeling a lot of love and appreciation despite a lot of lacks and problems (like no sex for many years), but now I really want out.  I want to be responsible for myself, period.

Of course, the big problem here is that there's no way to separate.  We have one reasonably priced apartment and one job.  I'll be trying to set aside money to move, although it's really not my preference, but he has no income and can't really stay alone or move.  (I'm not close to being that mean.)  So we're stuck together for the time being, which is really awkward.  I might even consider staying together in the apartment if he gets a job, and has some of his own fucking money to waste.

Barry is in denial.  He met me at the subway yesterday, which he had been doing some in better times, and I asked, "What are you doing here?"  He said, "I came to meet you.  What's wrong?"  I said, "I'm trying to decide whether or not I can continue to live under the same roof with you."  So he turned and walked home, then got into bed.  Didn't get up to make dinner or anything else.  He takes to bed when there's something he doesn't want to deal with.

I guess there's not much else to say at this point.  I'm going to Jannah's for a weekend a week from tomorrow.  All of these discussions with St. Ann's people are depressing me dreadfully.  Some of them want to meet.  But as much as they share the problems they had at the school and their feelings of worthlessness, they're all achieving now and I'm not.  These are not friends I want.  I don't need any help feeling bad about myself.  And I really wish they would all stop asking if I still write poetry.  Considering the fact that Emmett Jarrett, the teacher who edited the literary magazine, only saw fit to publish one of my poems in all those years (and it wasn't even one I considered one of my best), I can't imagine how these people identify me as someone who wrote poetry.  Everyone wrote poetry at that school, and a lot of them still do.  It's been many years since I even tried...in the early 90s, I may have tried my hand at some song lyrics, but that went nowhere.

the question of congestion, and goodbye to Stanley

I'm home (8:41 AM) and will most probably be here all day.  I have something that is either a bad cold or the worst possible allergies, but allergy mes are not helping and it's been getting worse since Monday,  I can't stop coughing, sneezing, or blowing my nose.  I've e-mailed my intern and hope she can man the ship today; I can access office email at home, but I'm waiting to hear from Sarah.  I hope she checks e-mail before she goes to work (she usually starts at 10:00).

And I must say -- coming home last night was extra-miserable.  It rained, but since this was not in the forecast, I had no umbrella.  So I got drenched between work and the subway, and then got on one of those extra-freezingly-air-conditioned trains.  So I shivered, coughed, sneezed, and blew my nose the whole way home.  Still, I did finish that Preston/Childs books, and started The Strain by Gullermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan.  (Now Blogger feels like doing italics -- not bad.  Couldn't get a bold or underline to save my life some days back, but of course my text wasn't posting, so it didn't make much difference.)  I'll let you know if it's any good.  I may go back to Preston/Childs after that.

I went to Saint Ann's School for ten years, second grade through the end of high school, which was a school for gifted children -- fairly dysfunctional back then, better now.  It is in fact a highly regarded private (not religious) school at this time.  When I started in 1965, it had 63 students and was very experimental.  (The school was housed in the undercroft of St. Ann's Church for its first couple of years, which is why it has a religious-school sounding name.  You can't imagine how many times during my life I've had to explain that -- although these days, at least in NYC, the school is well-known enough that people actually know what it is.)

Over the past 20 years, until five years or so ago, when I mentioned Saint Ann's to parent-age New Yorkers, they say something like, "oh, with that guy..."  "That guy" was founder and headmaster Stanley Bosworth, who died three days ago.  The linked article pretty much says it all.  Stanley was brilliant and maddening and inappropriate.  He never hit on me, before or after school, but Beth Bosworth, "wife number three" as he referred to her in the article, was in my graduating class. Ewww!  To me, he was warm, difficult, and confusing.  And he pissed me off a few times.  But the bottom line is that he created a really amazing school, where I had some amazing teachers and amazing peers.  I was a bit of a social misfit when I was there, but have since become reacquainted with a lot of former alumni via Facebook, and I love almost all of them.  And just for that, if nothing else, I must be ever-grateful to Stanley.  As much as we in the Facebook St. Ann's Alumni and Faculty have bashed him and told bad-Stanley stories, there's a lot of grief there today.

places I'll never go

One of my favorite types of book or movie or TV show is the type set in a locale where I am highly unlikely to ever set foot. I adore just about anything involving Mount Everest or the South Pole or space. I have a good amateur knowledge of the Mercury program. The Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo astronauts are like mythological figures to me, and I even share a birthday with one (Alan Shepard, first American in space). Just that visual of a rocket going up, seen on a small black-and-white set in my childhood, makes my heart ache.

But I'm actually watching a Mount Everest show of late, on Netflix (on my computer): the second season of Everest: Beyond the Limit. I'm starting to know my way around Everest a little, a bunch of the landmarks, where you have to start using bottled oxygen and the like. The big heroes here, although anyone who successfully summits Everest and comes back alive is a hero, but the big big heroes are the Sherpas. The Sherpas are just breathtaking in their abilities, spirituality, and extreme good humor. Because they have lived for generations at higher altitudes, their hearts and lungs are bigger and their frames are smaller, perfect for dealing with a low-oxygen altitude. These guys have strength and stamina that makes even a triathlete look like a wuss.

I guess I'm also pretty impressed by elite athletes...I always watch at least parts of both Olympics and used to have a pretty severe baseball habit (I mean reading box scores and stuff). I actually like seeing anyone who is the best or among the best at what they do. I made sure to see Pavarotti when he was still singing, maybe a little past his peak, from the nosebleed seats at the Met. I don't much like opera (though ironically, I ended up working at the Met for a short time some years later), but I knew I had to see the guy. If it had been 1905 or whenever, I would have had to see Caruso.

It's good to see greatness or to be in its presence. At my last job, I got to shake hands with Paul Rusesabagina (I hope I spelled that right or nearly right), the Hotel Rwanda guy. This man had goodness that just spilled off him. Sometimes I see an aura or get to a kind of trance-like place when I know I'm seeing greatness, generally at a live performance. (This is why I saw Bill Irwin three times in Fool Moon on Broadway). It happens a lot when I see Elvis Costello, though I can't afford to see him as often as I used to.

I really hope I can get out and hear some live music soon. It involves a lot of variables, like can I leave the house, how far away is it, can we afford it, is it something we both want to see?

I've been posting a lot with people from my old grade/high school on Facebook, and it's strange how much we're all bonding, especially with people we never knew before. And maybe we never knew them for the plain and simple reason that they were one grade below. Crazy.

more about summer camp theater and school

I can't believe I didn't include this story when I was talking about plays in school and summer camp. Maybe it's because I felt super-uncomfortable about playing a male role. This was summer camp, and I was maybe 11 or 12, and we were doing Camelot. Unlike the summer before, where I had a good (female) singing part in Peter Pan, I don't think I did well in the singing auditions the Camelot summer, and they gave me the absolute best non-singing role: Merlin. This was bad in a couple of ways. There was a scene where a nymph named Nimue (played by one of the prettiest girls in our age group) had to cast a feminine spell over me -- I had to stand on stage and pretend to be falling deeply in love with this much-prettier-than-I girl. I actually had a bad crush on the (male) drama counselor and somehow could not use that experience in this scene. Did not yet know that I could admire Ann's beauty without it taking anything away from me...except that I was cast as Merlin. And somehow, they didn't get me a beard -- just sprayed my hair white -- as if to say that I looked EXACTLY like Merlin except for the color of my hair. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I wasn't too confident about my looks in the first place, so this one was really rough.

But the story I wanted to tell about that play was that the kid playing Lancelot, a very big part, quit maybe a couple of weeks before the night of the performance. (I think we only put these plays on once or twice.) All of the best kids our age with the talent and desire were already cast. So what they did was this: they cast an *older* kid, maybe 16 or 17, who was a lifeguard. I think I heard at the time that he was very interested in acting and they felt he could learn the lines in time. There was a girl named Helene who played all the leads (she was also Peter Pan), and at maybe 12, she looked kind of silly playing against this 16 or 17 year old guy with bright, bright red hair. (His sister Randy was also a redhead and one of our counselors, one of the nicest and sweetest young women I met there.) Anyway, when I saw our replacement Lancelot again, it was on TV, on Happy Days: Donny Most.

Back to the Peter Pan year: Helene, who was very show-offy about her school theater experience and vocal talents, was clearly the one to beat. And I think I was the closest challenger, because I was a pretty good actress, as 11 year olds go. But there was this nasty, obese girl named Francine who seemed to think *she* was a shoo-in. In the end, Helen got Peter, Francine got Mrs. Darling, and I was cast as Toodles, one of the Lost Boys. (Once more, cast as a guy.) But there was a twist: Mrs. Darling had to kiss the kid playing Mr. Darling, and Francine would have none of it. (I think he had braces.) So she quit, and I got her part. I got to sing Tender Shepherd, which was a lovely song, and kissing brace-face was no problem.

My school, on the other hand, being all for-the-gifted and avant-garde, did not do musicals for the entire ten years I was there. (They did have a good chorus, in which I sang for years, and eventually branched out into a madrigal group and an SATB group.) Here are the plays I remember from school -- I was only in some of them. Moliere's Le Malade Imaginaire in the original French. Benito Cereno, which I think was Melville. The Proposal by Gogol. The Crucible. Gigi (the straight play, not the musical). The Women (we all dressed in sheets wrapped as various kinds of togas, to impart a timelessness). A student-written theater-of-the-absurd thing called It Seems To Be Getting Much Colder Now where the characters spoke in monotones, punctuated their speeches with the word "money", and ended up throwing around shaving cream studded with play money. I think it was some sort of commentary on plastic suburbia, etc. We did Indians by Arthur Kopit. We did Twelvth Night in a circus setting (I was actually one of two banjo players providing occasional music in it, which may be the only time I've ever played in public). We did All The King's Men (the Huey Long role was played by Joe Avellar, late of WNBC-TV News in New York). Golden Boy. A straight-play version of Casablanca (I wasn't even permitted to read for Ilsa, since an extremely tall boy had already been cast as Rick).

Although some other drama teachers came and went, the important and long-lasting ones were Nancy and Maurice. Nancy never liked me, which was a real problem. I think I was way too bourgeois for her, or she was way too avant-garde for me. Maurice actually started as a history teacher, and though most of us didn't much care for him then, we liked him better as a drama teacher and director. I actually ended up adoring Maurice because I felt he somehow really got me and I wasn't sure how, maybe through some of the essays I wrote for him in History.

I once wrote an essay (I think it was actually a three- or four-part essay exam) on Civilization and Its Discontents. I got a good mark on it, or more likely, good comments, since our school usually had no use for A-B-C or 70-80-90 type grades. My mother, a serious psychoanalytic junkie, photocopied it and brought it to her analyst, who was a really big-time guy in the analytic world in New York, as well as being an author and chess grandmaster. (Many years later, I worked for him.) And I swear that every time my mother told about my "essay on Freud," the age at which I wrote it got younger and younger. I seem to remember her saying I was nine. It's not impossible, but I was more likely 10 or 11. (Wasn't that impressive enough?)

The school taught us in a lot of ways that we had no limits, which was good, but skimped on the fundamentals, which was not. Our parents got written reports twice a year and excellent/satisfactory/needs improvement check-off slips twice a year, in lieu of number and letter grades. This was good in some ways but I believe there was an unspoken understanding between the headmaster and the teachers that *all* seniors got excellent written reports. This was because the school was still pretty new and small, and had to make its bones with good college acceptances. I was in a class of 68 students and 66 went to private universities. I was admitted to three excellent private universities but went to a state school because my mother was a little freaked out about my signing myself into a ton of debt at the age of 16. My brother remembers the headmaster referring to my mother as "hysterical." I remember the headmaster didn't speak to me for months after I chose SUNY-Binghamton (now known as Binghamton University).

Oh, and the school forgot to teach me geometry. I took some really interesting advanced math classes (after having to take algebra twice): Logic, Number Theory, and so on. But no geometry. So there was a 200-point difference between my math and my verbal scores on the SAT.

Our school had a really fierce biology program, mostly due to the head of science, Mr. B (one of the few teachers who would not tolerate being called by his first name). He was one of the few teachers who was really really strict and would lose his temper. You had to show up to class and you had to do your work. You had to make a special little black binder just for Bio. Right before the Boards (the achievement tests for college), we actually had a review section at his apartment on Jane Street, which was something like being invited to Superman's Fortress of Solitude. Apparently the exam was particularly hard the year my bio class (which was a year or two older than my grade) took it; I seem to remember a lot of graphs. So, no 800's. (They scored 200-800 then -- don't know if that's still the same.) But we had a few 790s, as I recall, and I was awfully proud of my 730, being only 13. (I was *really* into Bio, and really responded to Mr. B's method of teaching.)

I've mentioned him here before -- Mr. B eventually became head of the high school, and I became one of a little gang of four who hung out there. (I'm glad to say that two of them are now my Facebook friends.) The four of us somehow ended up writing the school's daily newssheet: one page. mimeographed, called The Galley. Denis, who was good at drawing, would make a wonderful title every day, and we typed the thing on (I think) a manual typewriter. It was about half school news items -- play rehearsals, class cancellations, and the like -- and the rest with our in-jokes and a serial someone wrote called The Shadow in The School. We'd take tape and stick copies up all over the walls.

The weird thing is, newsletters seem to follow me around. I have had so many jobs and hobbies that involved working on newsletters, writing for newsletters, editing newsletters. I've also written for college papers (besides SUNY-B, I went to NYU, finally getting a BA in 1993). And in that publishing job, I wrote many really excellent press releases.

The start of all that writing, and all this writing, was a book I picked up in the school library when I was eight: Harriet the Spy, by Louise Fitzhugh. So like every little girl who read that book, I started to keep a "secret notebook," but I never stopped. I wrote years and years and years of journals, and I think that writing about your own life and thoughts is the best practice any writer can have. When I started back at NYU in around 1985, I took a basic writing class to find out what I did and didn't know. My professor was great, the late Bill Decker, very old-school, and he filled in some gaps for me, and taught me not to be too flowery. The latter was achieved by extensive reading of E.B. White -- can't beat the guy for clarity.

decision about Facebook invite

What I decided to do about the Facebook invite from some I did not want to "friend" is this: I've ignored it. My husband "friended" her for some reason, and he did show me a fairly adorable picture of her younger daughter (who has just started college, and who was the flower girl at our wedding). My quarrel is mostly with her husband but also with her. We were close for a long time and I ignored a lot of bad behavior and frustrating situations, but there was a last straw -- then there was one more chance, a number of months later, and he blew that one too.

When I worked in publishing, I worked on a book about narcissism, and when I read it, it rang a lot of bells concerning this male friend. He's someone brilliant and quirky, with an eager inner circle, who plays helpless to get others to do things for him. And I was number one in the inner circle, maybe after his wife, or I was the shadow wife, the one who did the things that his wife didn't. (He was, and is, a performer, and for a long time his wife didn't want to go to his shows, so that fell to me.) Even my husband referred to him as "your other husband." I knew this man, I'll call him V., way before I knew my husband. Coincidentally, my husband also belonged to the micro-cult of V. before we met, so he was really psyched that I was close friends with V.

So what I think happened is this: for many years, I had jobs that I didn't much like, just a lot of boring office jobs, and a lot of my attention went to V. There was a lot of support and advice and running the hellish e-mail discussion list (a couple of really mean people made my life miserable), plus trying to run interference with various people. And I did enjoy visiting with his wife. But then I got that publishing job -- yes, that publishing job again, the one I really, really liked -- and there was finally some Me to bring to the relationship with V. And that's when I read the book on narcissism and that's when I realized that V. was 100 per cent about V. V. didn't really want to listen to how my life was changing, the adventures I was having, the great people I got to work with and meet.

That might be all I really want to say about V. My husband hopes we'll be friends again, and obviously his wife does, too. She has frequently been selfish and insensitive as well, and I think I'm better off without them, period.

Sometimes you have to let go of people, even people you've known a long time. Then again, I'm making some very nice reconnections on Facebook with some of my classmates. I always felt like an underachiever after high school graduation, so I steered clear of most of them for most of this time.

I'm not really sure why I feel so free to be myself, all of a sudden. Maybe I'm judging myself less.

School

I may have mentioned that I recently got a Facebook page. I have something like 20 "friends" now, about half who were friends or friends of friends from the old-timey music scene in NYC when I was a teen (with some number of ex-boyfriends and missed connections), and half people from my grade in school. I just say "school" because my school ran from first grade or pre-K, I forget, first was the lowest when I started there in second, all the way through the end of high school. Additionally, being a "creative" and "experimental" school, all of the grades had weird names that were really hard to convert to public school grades. Plus they'd change their numbering and lettering system every year or two (this was in the early days -- I was one of the original students, starting six weeks into their first year). So one year I'd be in Team IIA for "Core" (which meant homeroom, English and history), French 3, and math B, and the next year I'd be in Middle Sch0ol 3, French B-prime, and math South. I kid you not. Due to this extreme mess, which had mostly settled by my senior year, I never took geometry. I took number theory and I took logic and I took pre-calc, but never geometry. SAT scores: English 750, Math 550.

But I really wanted to talk about my social life there. I felt like a bad fit, as I did everywhere I went. As a bright child, my early social life was about showing off to adults, which didn't really translate well when I tried it with peers. Still, I think everything went OK in my first few years at school -- I had a terrific best friend who shared my love for The Monkees and a boy named David Zimmern, though she left for one of the experimental public schools in Brooklyn.

But I think everything got really screwed up when I was nine, when my parents split up. I didn't know another kid in school who had divorced parents; my folks were at the leading edge of the trend, around 1968 or 69. The thing that was so traumatic to me about the divorce is that they were always so careful not to fight or argue in front of "the children" that it was an incredible shock, because I thought they got along just fine. (Would it have been easier if preceded by months of screaming and crockery-throwing? Discuss.)

I just wasn't right after that and I was in therapy and I still wasn't right. Perhaps this is when my depression started to show itself. I would have a friendship with one girl at a time which would maybe last a couple of weeks or a month or two, and then just sort of trail off. I never had a group of friends and I was definitely not one of the "popular" kids (though I realize that they may not have seen themselves as "popular").

Well, I did have a little crowd for a while: two boys and a girl, of varying degrees of nerddom. The three of us hung around the high school office, powerfully transfixed (each for unspoken reasons of his or her own) by the head of the high school, who we will call Mr. B. Mr. B. stood out for a few reasons: he was one of the few teachers (including the headmaster) who did *not* say "Call me Charlie": he was always "Mister" B. The other truly great thing about him is that he was the only person in my life who seemed to care enough to discipline me in any way. My mother was dating; my dad lived elsewhere; the other teachers were too groovy or lax or elsewhere to make sure our assignments were in and good and that we showed up to the classes. (I once took a history course called "research seminar" whose only requirement was a research paper. I didn't write a paper but got credit for the course.)

This actually comes right back to the other group of friends on Facebook, because I got swept away by old-timey music as a young teen and started playing banjo and going to these weird hole-in-the-wall joints to listen to this weird old music. But for some reason, I had to push this interest in everyone's face, which I suppose made me wildly unpopular. I guess I was a little snobbish about what most of my peers seemed to be listening to, the Grateful Dead and the Allmans and the Doobies. (I've grown into a way more open listener, and in fact I write for a national blues publication. Please do not respond to this by telling me how much you like Eric Clapton. -- Gee, I guess I'm *still* a music snob.)

I think I also had a problem with my mother treating me more as a friend and confidente than as a daughter. So I tended to identify with her generation more than my own. I remember -- cringingly -- turning in a play for a playwriting course that concerned a boy bringing his "hippie" girlfriend, "Moonflower," home to meet his folks, and the hilarity that ensued, because -- she was such a hippie! My playwriting teacher, of course, wrote plays that were performed at LaMama, and ripped the thing to shreds. And why not? I had written a lame, conservative sitcom. And I even came from a funny, liberal family. My only excuse is that I guess I watched too much TV and my idea of entertainment was "Barney Miller." I dunno.

That's all for now but there's probably more to come.