Attention to Details

Awoke with that familiar rush.
That surge of adrenaline.
Mind racing full of details.
Do I wrestle the monster to the ground?
Do I embrace it?
Or do I surrender to it?

And so it goes - my love- hate relationship with the theatre.

This sweater or that one?
These handcuffs or those?
That badge or the other one?

Update the stats on exoneration for the power point.
Make the sound effect for clanging jail cell doors.
Purchase the lumber.
Find the steel case metal chairs.
Borrow a Priest's collar.
Get the tummy padding for the kid playing the lawyer.

Details.
Make Believe.
Obsession.

Five hours of pulling costumes in the attic of the local civic light opera.
My students amazed at how much work it all is.
Labor intensive.
Schlepp Schlepp Schlepp.
"You'll need a big vehicle to schlepp stuff," I said loading armloads of costumes, a 1940's style microphone and an army cot into the back of my Ford Explorer.

The guard hat was black.
"It needs to be blue," I said.
"I don't care anymore," my student responded.
"Oh no," I said. " You must care. You always care. If you don't care then you shouldn't be doing this."

This is why I love the theatre. It matters what color the hat is.

Thanks. Yes.

For all that has been, thanks. For all that will be, yes.
Dag Hammarskjold

I wonder if this will last?
This enthusiasm.
This sense of purpose.
This joy.
This gratitude.
It feels so different.
This time.
I wonder why?
Is this what it feels like to be an elder?
To not be rocked by the little ups and downs of the day in day out?
To see a bigger picture?
To know that it will work out. One way or the other?
To not roll over.
To be persistent.
To not feel like you've anything more to prove.
To see it for what it is.
To see your place in it?
Is this what Erik Erikson meant by generativity?
Is this what if feels like to have chosen?
Really chosen?
Nothing accidental about this time.
Intentional.
Everything intentional.
Is this what it feels like to embrace one's limitations?
Is this what Rilke meant by seasoning?
Patience?
Living your way into the answer?
Is this what Shaw meant when he said
I want to be all used up when I die?
Is this what a second chance feels like?
Is this what Maurice Chevalier meant when he sang,
I'm so glad that I'm not young anymore?
Whatever it is
Thanks.
Yes.

Buttons Popping

When I was a junior in high school, my ship came in and when we set sail, my life was forever changed. My father, who was my coach, sent out to all of his employees an invitation to see his daughter perform the title role in Meredith Willson's musical, The Unsinkable Molly Brown. The top of the invitation read, "My buttons are popping."

I remember auditioning for the role, and the musical director, Eugene Ober, asking me if I played the piano. I told him, "No." Then added, "But I can learn."
And learn I did. One song. Well, 36 bars of one song - Chopin's Minute Waltz - My father saw to it that I had piano lessons and when the show opened, I indeed sat at the piano, rented for the production by my father, and played the 36 bars live on stage only to find out from Meredith Willson himself, who in the latter years of his life made a practice of attending high school performances of his musicals, that I was the first actress he'd ever seen actually play it!

My senior year in high school brought to an end an era that had begun when I was eleven in the gym of Servite High School as Brigitta in The Sound of Music with the musical How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.
On closing night of the show, my father, brother, and entire family walked into the gym wearing sailor hats with the words, Once in Love With Amy, appliqued on them.
"Low Key" was not my family's style.
That was over thirty years ago.
The memory is as fresh as if it were yesterday, brought home to me only the other day by a phone call I received from my beloved nieces, Hannah and her sisters. They had called to deliver the news that Hannah had been cast in the role of Anna in Rodger's and Hammerstein's The King & I. My two other nieces, Mckenzie and Elise, both were cast as well. There was much celebrating going on in that arm of the Luskey family.

I have cast hundreds of students in countless roles over my twenty plus year career as a high school theatre director. I've watched families bursting with pride as they walked through the lobby doors of the theatre. I've read the heartfelt messages from parents in my programs and seen the families swarm their children after performances with armloads of flowers.
And now, it's my turn.
Aunt Amy's button's are popping!
And I imagine my father and my brother, both beaming with pride as the Luskey family musical theatre legacy lives on through their grandchildren and great grandchildren.
But don't worry, Hannah.
We'll leave the sailor hats at home on closing night.

Nine Eleven

We have met the enemy and he is us. Walt Kelly

This is a 911 emergency call.
I'm frightened.
Disappointed.
Bothered.
Disturbed.
Saddened.

My world is a world of words.
Text is important.
Words matter.
We are speaking a language of hate.

Hate seems to be everywhere.
Intolerance is on the rise.
Extremists of all kind dominate the news.

Many years ago in the eighties I was a part of movement called
Beyond War.
The principles of Beyond War were:
We are one.
I will resolve conflict.
I will not use violence.
I will not preoccupy myself with an enemy.
I will maintain a spirit of goodwill.
I will work with others to build a world
beyond war.

Beyond War principles changed my way of thinking.
I began to recognize that violence comes in many different forms - including our thoughts and our words.

The notion that "sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me" is simply wrong.

The level of intolerance on display on this this ninth anniversary of the September 11th attacks deeply disturbed me. Like so many Americans, I was relieved that the threat of the Koran burning was averted. This act would have been tantamount to the book burnings of the 1930's during the rise of Nazism in Germany.

A few years ago I participated in a program called
Bearing Witness.
Sponsored by the Anti-Defamation League, this educational program is designed to promote
Catholic-Jewish dialogue.
It teaches educators about the history of anti-semitism and how the Holocaust emerged out of centuries of anti-Judaism.
One dive into the anti-Jewish propaganda, cartoons and artwork of the most hideous example of man's inhumanity to man provides a disturbing lesson for we Americans who cling to our 1st Amendment spouting justice for all, the land of the free and "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free."

The image of the ugly American is not limited to travelers abroad, refusing to speak a foreign language.
The ugly American is right here on our own soil.
It is time for us to rise to loftier ideals.
It is time to embrace nuance.
It is time to reject outright the hate mongering.
It is time to look in the mirror.

On this anniversary of the September 11th attacks, I hung my American flag.
I also hung a flag of the planet earth.

I refuse to allow narrow minded, hateful bigots to speak for me.
As Santayana wrote
Those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it.

Dachau Concentration Camp was twenty minutes outside of Munich.

What are we refusing to see in our own backyards?

Labor

I am thinking about the death of mothers today.

I am thinking about how long they go on
without
their men.

The old women
who once wore heels.
Glamorous
with cocktails and the occasional cigarette
who remember
for more years
than they can remember
what it was like
back then.

And their men
who escaped
the frailty
of old age
who live on
youthful and vigorous
as the day they dropped.
I am thinking about the death of mothers today.
And the love affair that lasts well beyond till death do you part.

I am thinking about the death of mothers today.
How their minds go.
And their looks.
And their heels.
And their control.

And how the daughters
are there when the morphine drip
starts
and the breath slows
and the hand grows cold
and the head falls to the side.

How the daughters
usher them out
hold the memory
preserve the dignity
honor the legacy
remember the love affair
tell the story.

Ode to a Koosh Ball

This Monday classes finally start. On Monday, twenty-four students will file into my new classroom and my twenty-first year of teaching drama will begin. Whether the class is called Introduction to Drama - as it once was - Fundamentals of Theatre - which it became when the class was changed from a semester-long to a year-long class to meet UC requirements - or Theatre One, which is the title of the current class I will be teaching - one thing has never changed. I have begun my classes standing in a circle, tossing a Koosh Ball.

I have, for twenty-one years, used the same Koosh Ball. Every single student I have ever taught has held that ball, tossed it from hand to hand while pondering what plays they've seen or what their dream role is. They've pulled on the soft rubber-band like spines and squeezed it in their palms. They've tossed it, dropped it, thrown it and held it.

And now, I've lost it.

I can't find my Koosh Ball anywhere. I feel a little like Tom Hanks in Castaway when he lost Wilson. I am mourning my Koosh Ball and thinking about how much we've been through together.

He was with me on my very fist day of being a drama teacher in the auditorium of Cornelia Connelly High School.
He was with me on the first day we started the worskshop on the stage of the Servite Theatre.
He was with me when we started the Friday Tri-School Theatre Conservatory.
He was with me in classrooms, on stages, outside on the grass, and under the stage in the pit.
He rode in the car with me when I traveled from school to school - teaching Drama Class at Rosary, Connelly and Servite all on rotating schedules. Sometimes he rode in the trunk in a crate and sometimes he was stuffed in a back pack. He was faithfully atop my clip board as I began every rehearsal warm up for every play I ever directed.
He even lived in the Muckenthaler Cultural Center Gallery for a while.

I'm not sure I even know how to begin without my Koosh Ball. I'm not sure the words will come out of my mouth or the thoughts will come into my head. I'm not sure I can teach Drama without him.

All things must come to an end. Somewhere a long the way in my most recent move, my greenish, purplish, soiled old Koosh Ball must have fallen out of a box or was mistakenly sent to the rummage.

If a Koosh Ball's life were counted in dog years - then my Koosh Ball served me for 120 years. Not a bad run.

I will miss you, old pal. Once I finally accepted the fact that you were gone - after countless prayers to St. Anthony - I ran to Toys R Us to buy a new one. They didn't have any. I bought something rubbery - it's actually kind of gooey feeling. I tossed it in my hands and thought, well what they don't know won't hurt them.
My students won't know that the ball they will be holding is a poor imitation of the real thing.

Goodbye, old friend. Wherever you are, I hope your landing was soft.

Daddy

On this hot August night
as I walked along the moonlit canals of Naples
I remembered
for the first time today
that Monday morning in August
twenty-nine years ago
when I walked down the hallway of my home in Anaheim
to hushed voices
announcing
the end of my childhood.
8-17-1981.