I want a kid in the corner office

I have a fantasy in which a moving truck pulls up to a glass-and-steel office building in Sorrento Valley, drops off a crib, a changing table, and an infant play gym and leaves with a row of potted palms. This happens not because the CEO who inhabits that particular corner office is female, but because that CEO is a parent who finds the elusive “have it all” balance between work and parenting to be something worth changing the rules for.

I was just dreaming about this while surfing BlogHer, where a podcast interview with Lisa Belkins unearthed her controversial 2003 NYT Magazine cover article, The Opt-Out Revolution, and its infamously quotable centerpiece, “Why aren’t women running the world? Maybe it’s because they don’t want to.”

Belkins notes that the “revolution” part was coined by an editor writing headlines, not by the actual text of her piece, and deflects as obvious the criticism that many women can’t ‘opt out’ because they are so singularly short of options.

Obvious, indeed.  But neither BlogHer nor the Times have asked Belkin to address the lack of an “opt out” trend among women who don’t live in upper to middle class, hetero, two-parent homes.  I guess that isn’t her beat.

Five years later, Belkin is encouraging moms and dads alike to follow their hearts, and to work out an arrangement that suits their unique personalities and temperaments. She shares the personal truth that her husband would go “stir-crazy” in the house all day, while she doesn’t have any interest in putting in the corporate thirteen-hour day.  That’s why she’s the primary caregiver for their two children.  Because it just made sense.

I’m a primary caregiver, too. And the lesser wage-earner. I opted out of my fast track (ish) corporate (ish) gig a long time ago, for reasons completely unrelated to childbearing. One of the things I’m doing with my flexible work day is reading “Speaking from the Heart: Gender and the Social Meaning of Emotion.”  I borrowed it from Renee Moreno, that super cool co-owner of the Pannikin in La Jolla, who made me a cinnamon-honey latté to accompany a conversation about playwriting. Good life, hmm? Here’s an excerpt from the book:

The key to answering questions about gender is to try to understand the contexts in which gender effects show up. This means we must shift from merely describing what women and men, boys and girls do and believe, to examining those beliefs and behaviors as they operate in the ongoing social relationships within which those beliefs and behaviors have meaning.

Hello, academic speak.  I don’t know who this Stephanie Shields lady is, but I can give her at least the respect I give Belkin, so I’m gonna give this a try.

Part One: Isolate the Behavior.  What Belkin and I and the other married women in her opt-out army are doing is…drum roll please…taking care of our babies. Whether that means giving up jobs, or renegotiating them so we can work at home, or going part time, we’re going where our babies are.

Part Two: Add Context and Stir.

1. Our babies aren’t welcome in the workplace. Generally speaking, we of the two-parent middle/upper class had babies because we wanted to. Your babies maybe aren’t quite as amazing and wonderful as mine, but they’re probably pretty close. We like them.
2. Someone has to take care of them. There is no daycare in the world that fully replaces a parent. I know we’re not addressing single working parents right now, but if we were, we would need go no further to see how challenging it is to keep your kid well taken care of while you work. Kathy G. just quoted the poverty rate among single-parent homes at more than twice that among married couple families. (And I’m only estimating that low because her government-issue stats split by gender.) But I digress. My point is, even during the hallowed work day, parents are still parents. Ultimate responsibility for the well-being of your children doesn’t magically go away between the hours of 8am and 6pm.
3. The men aren’t opting out. Well, come to think of it, some of them are.  But not in equal numbers. In my household, a prime reason for job assignment is that baby’s primary food source is my body. The other is that hubby makes better money than I do. I bet we’re not the only ones. In fact, run either one of those functions across our sample, and you’re going to get a gender disparity. The wage gap persists. Even if we manage to get our sample down to women who really aren’t worried about money (and I have to admit I don’t know any of those), everything about this decision triggers gender-specific socialization. My temperament could hardly be less suited to domesticity, but somehow, here I am.

My personal truth is that Nick and I are socialized into gender roles within which he experiences the most psychic distress related to being “irresponsible” by not working enough, while I experience psychic distress related to “burdening” him with the care of his own child.  I have a feeling that sort of insecurity will fall by the wayside as we mature, but right now it does affect what we do.  Nick misses Milo like crazy while he’s at work. I’m bored and lonely while I’m not. But we’re doing the best we can.

I’m thinking about this almost obsessively as I prep for a six-week contract at a company that isn’t as baby-friendly as MOXIE and New Village Arts. It’s hard to avoid psychic distress when I literally want to be two places at once: where my baby is, and where I can be a fully functional working artist. In this scenario those two places are across town from one another. I hate even thinking about it.

Personally, I don’t find a whole lot of opting involved in our opting-out. That’s why I’m aggressively dreaming of a baby-friendly workplace.

What about you?

How do you find this stuff?

Aside from the thought provoking “how do you memorize all those lines”, the number one question MOXIE patrons have for us is where we find the work we do. Although they are asking HOW we find it, the implied question is why this type of imaginative work isn’t being produced at other more “established” theatres which should surely have the means to find and develop new work. Yeah…we were wondering that too. Is that to say that all other theatre are cowards and produce boring work? No…not all of them. That was snide. I apologize. The truth is that producing theatre is a risky business even when you are producing Annie…however it grows much more risky when it is a play that has no track record by someone nobody has really heard of yet. The more secure and “established” a company becomes, the harder it is to produce new work…or so it seems.

We aren’t naïve. One day we will have to discuss whether or not opening a season with a new play where the f-bomb is dropped 17 times on the first page is a smart business idea. We named ourselves MOXIE for just those moments. We hope we will remember that we can’t keep our name and produce the latest proven off-Broadway hit. That is not to say that we won’t have to discuss it though. We have already had MOXIE discussions where we debated whether we could do another play where chicks make out without getting put in a box as a “Lesbian Plays Only” company. I’m not afraid to say I was the voice of doubt and then that play slipped away into another theatre’s hands. BUT what I hope we never do is doubt a play based on it’s novelty or “newness” alone.

I still haven’t answered the question though. We find this stuff because we ask for it. Well Delicia asks for it. That is her main gig at MOXIE in case you didn’t know what an Artistic Director does all day. Delicia reads plays, calls agents, playwrights, friends at other regional theatre around the country and says “Give it up! Where are those kick ass chick plays with big imaginations?” Most people aren’t searching for work that way. They see what hit the cover of American Theatre Magazine and sold out at “insert city name here” Repertory Theatre and there it is. That’s smart business but we are trying to make smart theatre so we have to go about it another way.

Enjoy this excerpt from an email Delicia copied me on recently that she sent to a favorite agent who has hooked us up with bad ass work in the past:

“So, I need a play from your stable of kick-ass chick playwrights that is: Funny, smart, sexy. Something where magic or fantasy are a part of the story (i.e. Gibson Girl, Devil Dog Six). Where the world of the play itself is unique. Because it is our final play, I would prefer something not real dark. I’m already doing a play where a teenage girl befriends a guy (from the internet) who thought he was meeting a 12 year old boy. Happy stuff. So a little levity after that one will be appreciated by my audience. Even if it’s not real funny, I need something totally cool in terms of storytelling and characters. After three full seasons as a company, I have learned what we provide for San Diego no one else can touch. We introduce audiences to very interesting voices they have never heard. That is not to say that I may not be contacting you in future to do a Sarah Ruhl play or another Mary Fengar Gail play, but at this time I’m looking for a dynamite talented woman who no one knows. Or, a script like Devil Dog Six that no one else had the moxie to stage. Will you pretty please send me a small bouquet of scripts you think fit that bill?”

And the rest is history.

thoughts like feathers

I’ve been thinking about the concept of time.  Most everyone would agree that time passes a hell of a lot faster now than it did when we were kids.  While I agree that the universe is a-changin’, it has not changed drastically in the twenty seven years I’ve been on the planet, so I think it is safe to assume that time is not, in effect, passing faster.  Agreed?

It’s obviously our perception of time.  I have the good fortune of studying under some of the most awesome teachers in the world- the itsy bitsy children in my life who run and play and don’t give a thought to ”later” and definitely not to “tomorrow” or “next year.”  Bottom line and main difference between them and me?  They live in the present and I am continuously dipping my toes in the future.

I started thinking about my life, especially my life in theatre, and everything seems to be geared toward the future.   Deadlines, openings, closings…. I live 99% of my life in my mind while the remaining 1% is spent twittering around making sure all the tasks my mind delegates get completed.  And time is just flying by. Which leads me to

Nirvana.  A seemingly intangible concept reserved for a select group of eastern buddhas, but now that I think about it…. I’ve experienced moments of nirvana. Maybe that’s a contradiction; ”moments” of nirvana. But I accept that it is not my lot in this lifetime to achieve true spiritual nirvana.  I wish it were.  But my hands are too deliciously muddied with the indulgence in the human experience- so I’ve got to get it where I can.  And the only way to describe my particular nirvana moments is being completely absorbed in a full sensory experience at the time  I was experiencing it.

One such moment:

I was sitting in my car in a parking lot several years ago.  I had an old spliced Doors cassette playing that I had recorded from an LP.  It was dusk, and overcast, and two seagulls and a crow were scrapping over some spilled crackers that were scattered across the asphalt.  Riders On The Storm came on, and I swear to god, the music was in exact alignment with the movements of the birds…. they dove in sync with those wicked keyboard waterfalls, and it was like… I couldn’t breathe.  Then the baseline came in and my heart probably stopped.  Time stood still, it was so perfect.  The grungy lot, my foggy car windows, the gray sky and the black wings crisscrossing the white…. Total visceral perfection.  The world for me was in complete alignment and god was scratching at my ribs.  Which brings me to

Hot coffee on the crotch.  Or tea, as the case was with me.  One of the kids knocked into me once while I was holding a huge mug of the hottest tea that ever existed.  Spillage, directly to the crotch-al region. Well, as the denim of my skirt (which was now approximately six thousand degrees) conformed right to my skin and I couldn’t pull it away,  there was absolutely nothing else happening in that moment other than my tenders being in excruciating pain.  Boy was I in the moment.  :) 

Which makes me thing about the sense of touch.

I think as humans, we favor this sense above all others.  If it feels good, lordy, sign me up.  And I have a thought about why…. The sense of touch, more than any other, has a way of disconnecting us from anything else going on.  I can be having an intense conversation, but if someone comes up and starts tickling my arm…. My head drops, I stop talking… I don’t want to do anything but feel that.   Or how about kissing someone?  Feeling someone’s face against yours, all the different touch sensations involved with that.  Let the world spin on brother, I’m kissing.  That’s all I’m doing.

I think we crave this sensation of being in the moment, because it is here where thoughts can stop whirring… Where time slows down and where we can begin to feel our own essence.  Maybe it’s why people feel such a connection with sex, because another person is helping you towards nirvana.  When normally it’s such a sad and solitary endeavor.

All I know, is the times when I have felt the greatest peace, were times when I stopped to appreciate the wind, or listen to the way gravel crunched under my feet, or watch a spider spin a web, eat a slow meal or sing a baby to sleep.  Moments when I didn’t have to do anything other than what I was doing.

Mon dieu.

Now, this last theatrical experience, with The Listener, seemed different than usual. I was really enjoying the company of my friends, the artistic outlet… it was equally about the process as it was the product, and it felt really darn good.  And so that is what I will work towards… being present and grounded in each moment… putting all of myself into whatever it is I’m doing… allowing time for connection, and slowing gently down.  

I don’t know y’all.  These are just thoughts I am having tonight.  Thoughts that may seem foreign and outdated come tomorrow… But that are alive tonight.

 

 

Countdown: Four Shows Left

…this strutting fantasy bears the fingerprints of Sonnenberg, a director who can make everybody –- audiences and colleagues alike – believe.

–Welton Jones, sandiego.com

…assume that Moxie Theatre’s Listener opened last month, not last weekend, and that theatergoer friends urged you to see it before it closes June 29. 

–Jeff Smith, The Reader

…with a creepily effective sound design by Tom Jones, moody lighting by Eric Lotze and spot-on costumes by Jennifer Eve Thorn and Sheri Kraus, “The Listener” rewards the viewing and Adams’ distinctive, sometimes startling voice is again worth hearing.

–Anne Marie Welsh, North County Times

Thursday Inspiration: Eggcubism

How much do I love that word? Nick and I eat very little meat, and lots of eggs.  Lots of eggs.  It’s enough to make me worry that I’m personally maintaining the very sketchy drugged chicken industry.  The switch to free range eggs is totally next, just as soon as I get on top of my No Plastic Policy.  

Incidentally, on the very first day that I implemented the no plastic thing, my neighborhood grocery store was out of paper bags.  Out, none, zilch, as in, plastic or the highway. I was surprised, because wasn’t it just the other day that they used to always ask, “paper or plastic?” My weekly grocery shopping is about ten bags, so it has always seemed absurd and excessive to bring my own. But after that experience, I’m inspired to do just that. Hey, I’m an American. Restraint isn’t one of my core values. Ten mismatched cloth bags (do you see pillowcases?), here I come!

In the meantime, please enjoy Eggcubism:

This is Lichtekooi, by Enno de Kroon via Cult Case.  How cool is that?

And here’s Kiss III (frontal)

Check him out on Flickr.

It takes a village…Or does it?

Okay, time to address the sensitive subject of raising other people’s children.  For those of you who don’t know me, here are some facts:

I do not have children.

I do have five nieces and one nephew (all under the age of seven) and all of whom I have cohabitated with at sometime or another, and for various reasons including but not limited to:

*Their parents splitting up

*My sister removing her kids from an environment she didn’t have control over; one that was physically unsafe (small finger in mousetrap, mothball consumed, grandparent’s pills left within reach, insulin syringes left within reach, etc.)

*The home environment being emotionally unsafe (great-grandparent yelling in the face of a four year old child that she is the reason everyone in the household is fighting, little girls being told they look like hoochies when they dance a certain way, put on make-up, wear their mommies bras, etc.)

Talk about maddening.  To be over the moon for these kids, and 100% emotionally invested in them and their wellbeing and yet, having no control over what they are experiencing daily.

What’s an auntie to do?  Say my piece, that’s what.

I don’t hold back from telling my sisters when they’re allowing themselves and their kids to remain in harmful situations, (not that they always listen to me).

I try my best to un-do any damage caused by insensitive elders saying mean hateful things to little open hearts.

I cut off the sugar and pass out glasses of water when a gaggle of whiney partygoers start acting the fool post cake/ice cream/piñata/party bags.

I treat these kids as if they are my own, which means, that on top of all of the love and fun times we have, I correct their behavior when they’re acting like a-holes, whether their parents are in the room or not.  And what’s great is that my sisters want me to.  They don’t get bent when I put one of their kids on time out, or confiscate the stick they’ve been stabbing each other with, or reprimand them for talking back to their mommies. 

It gives my sisters a break.  They benefit from knowing an extra pair of eyes are on their kids, and from having another adult voice supporting the rules that they’ve established.

These kids are my family, and I feel like it’s my job to protect them physically and emotionally.  Of course, when differences of opinion arise, the word from their parentals trumps anything I have to say.  That’s the deal.  And it seems to work for us.

With all of that being said, I do wish I could be the all-fun-all-the-time auntie with a purse full of gum, and an anything goes attitude.  And my day may come.  But for now, I’m too close, and to deeply involved in the day-to-day (I currently live with 4 of the 6). 

Now, I know that many people out there have something to say about this.  Many people disagree with me, and feel it should be the sole right/responsibility of the parent(s) in seeing to how their children are raised.

So my question is this… where is the line drawn?  Should other people be allowed to step in only when kids are in danger of physical harm (i.e. walking with key towards light-socket)?  Even then?  Is it okay with family, but not with anyone else?  When does the village step in, and when does it stay the hell back?  

Countdown: Six Shows Left

See?  I already have something to tell you.  Keli Dailey of the San Diego Union-Tribune reviews The Listener here.

The U-T is also getting into multimedia, which we love.  Here’s an audio interview with the Chini-dog about creating the set.

My favorite thing about that link?  The photo, pulled from this blog or our Flickr set, taken by yours truly. The credit line is to John Brooks, who took all rest of the load-in photos, so I don’t mind.  I still feel awfully good about it.

It inspired me to post a few more.  

These are set shots, mind you, not production shots, which we still aren’t giving away.  If you want to see how cool it looks under light, you’ll have to come and see it.

On Art, Ego and Time Management: Signing Off

My top ten methods of procrastination:

1. You Tube
2. Flickr
3. Facebook 
4. the infinite blogosphere
5. my photos
6. following the Mars Phoenix on Twitter
7. Lengthy conversation with dear friends in which the ills of society are revealed, categorized, bemoaned and ultimately ignored.
8. Play dates at which the ills of society are revealed, categorized, bemoaned and ultimately ignored, while our children play!
9. telling my husband about my day, see items 1-8
10. and, the MOXIE blog.

I thank you for reading. Lots of people have been reading, although we never did convince you all to comment. When I started, some of you knew that I was in a “writing slump.”  Maybe, to be even more cliché, I was suffering from that “blockage” that always sounds vaguely intestinal or otherwise related to diet and exercise.  Basically, I hadn’t written much of anything since I got pregnant.

Well, there’s nothing like a daily date with loyal readers to get things moving again. My blockage is no longer. I’m writing up a storm. Fiction, poetry, and even sketches for Annabelle and the Dragon. The only problem is, I’ve stopped eating and am in danger of not showing up to work.

So…

The MOXIE blog is diversifying. Never fear. Amy is going to write. Jen is going to write. We’ll be sure to tell you when there’s something you need to know about MOXIE Theatre. And I’ll still write when I REALLY have something to write about…which is possibly quite often.

I’ve been winding down this week as we approached opening night for The Listener (kudos to those of you with a nose for that sort of thing.) And, although I have several pages of notes for future posts, they’re woefully disorganized and basically completely otherwise lame. I even struggled through the most recent post, changing my mind midstream as to what exactly it was that I was writing about.

It isn’t that I’ve run out of things to say (and will I ever?), it’s the nagging awareness that I am needed elsewhere. I’m barely two weeks away from first rehearsal on my next play, which dovetails into another, and then another. And I’m a few days away from auditions for the fourth. I’ve been blogging for five weeks, which is exactly the length of a standard rehearsal period, and my theatrical metabolism tells me it’s time to shift gears.  

I thank you for reading.

Now, go see The Listener.

PS. If you are late to the ball and looking down at a month’s worth of outdated blog posts, here are the greatest hits:

Building Junk City

On Art and Motherhood: the First, I’m Sure Not the Last

You Don’t Look Like a Director

When I Don’t Have Rehearsal

On Art and Motherhood: or How I Save Money on Toys

Y’all are my dogs

Act of God?

From the North He caused great cold to bury the people in ice.
From the South He caused great floods to bury the people in water.
From the West He caused great bolts of lightening to bury the people in fire.
From the East He caused great quakes to bury the people in sand and mud.

The above is what John calls a “mytho-historic representation of events,” specifically those events that, in Liz Duffy Adams’ fertile imagination, transformed today’s world into the fictional alternative future currently occupying the Lyceum Space. Last night I watched the opening night performance with a fresh eye (bought by a few days off), and went to my sleep vibrating with images of a junked Earth, devastated by natural disasters. I woke up to the voice of Daniel Schorr:

“An act of God,” he said, ostensibly quoting the dictionary, “is a natural event outside of human control, such as a sudden flood or other natural disaster.” The NPR senior news analyst went on to cite a front page article in the Washington Post titled “Iowa Flooding Could be an Act of Man, Experts Say.”

Enshayan, director of an environmental center at the University of Northern Iowa, suspects that this natural disaster wasn’t really all that natural. He points out that the heavy rains fell on a landscape radically reengineered by humans. Plowed fields have replaced tallgrass prairies. Fields have been meticulously drained with underground pipes. Streams and creeks have been straightened. Most of the wetlands are gone. Flood plains have been filled and developed.

This isn’t the first time I’ve heard that. In fact, common sense suggests that the “cataclysmic flooding” in Iowa, this year and in 1993, is not entirely outside of human control. As one Washington Post commenter puts it:

You have your head in the mud if you don’t think land use affects the rate of runoff.

I don’t know anything about runoff. I’m not a farmer, or a land-use expert, or an environmental lawyer, and I wouldn’t recognize a flood plain if it bit me. This sort of information is usually filed in my brain among “Things You Don’t Know Anything About” or “To be Ignored Unless Conversing With Other Green-Minded Liberals.”

I find myself, this morning, still vibrating with those images of a future junked world, looking for a way to be truly accountable for my own corner of “land use.”

Amy Chini sent me an email blast from the Surfrider Foundation:

Did you know that an estimated 100 million tons of plastic debris have accumulated in two areas of the Pacific Ocean that together are larger than the continental United States?

Woah. Like a floating Junk City. Amy, this may be our next trash-art installation.

These areas are aptly called the Eastern and Western Garbage Patches. There is so much plastic, that it outnumbers the zooplankton six to one. Plastics, like diamonds are forever.

I’m forgiving myself for ignoring flood plain development. But I can’t excuse the disposable plastic water bottles. I’ve been thinking about my plastic water bottles since the trash facts post last week, and I’ve realized just how deeply I despise them. I hate how much space they take up. I hate the way they look in a trash can, capturing all that air in that unnatural shape. I hate that they’re so convenient, so available, so culturally acceptable, and that there isn’t any other way to have your own water supply on a cross-country airline flight. I’m taking a stab at life without them, and I’ll let you know how it goes.

If we stop the accumulation of plastic in our oceans, will that count as an act of God?

Zen and the Art of Shattering Laserdiscs

This is the fifth and final installment in our series of process posts on the Listener, by Liz Duffy Adams.  Official opening is Saturday, at which point I’ll have to think of something else to write about.  Yikes.

As I walked in the Lyceum the other day with Milo on one arm and his exer-saucer on the other, the San Diego REP artistic director asked me what I was doing there.  

“I’m helping Amy mosaic the last few feet of the Listener set.”  

He laughed.  I wasn’t sure why, since I wasn’t trying to be funny.  We had a few hundred square inches left of space that needed to become absolutely Amy-licious (that’s a Delicia term, can’t you tell?), and I was responsible for supplying the adhesive.

Remember these?

(Note, the child’s foot in the picture is clearly included to give you a proper sense of dimension.  Completely intentional.)

We’re turning them into these…

…via the following methods:

• Hammer
• Hammer over 2×4’s
• Sledgehammer
• Bare hands
• Bare hands over 2×4’s (karate chop)
• Bare hands and matte knife (score then break)
• Bare hands and matte knife and shoe
• Both shoes
• Both shoes and primal yell

It’s much harder than it sounds.  I dare you to try it, except that I don’t want you to damage your movie collection.  (Incidentally, the laserdiscs were easier to break than CD’s, which presents a reason why laserdiscs failed so miserably to capture the market.)

Here are Delicia and Liz Duffy Adams on what turned out to be the last day of the Junk City build.  If you don’t recognize that second name yet, she’s the playwright, who is here for the week from NYC.  We’re delighted to have her here, and we immediately put her to work.  

At this point Liz was painting, but she soon became the expert of the ‘hammer over two boards with primal yell’ method of shattering.  I preferred ‘bare hands through plastic’ myself.  Liz and I made a decent team, though, until this laserdisc stopped her in her tracks:

“That’s the original,” she pointed out.  ”The pilot.”

Indeed.  And we summarily saved it from the hammer.  The cardboard cover, at least, will receive its due respect for the duration of our run.  Laserdiscs may be lost to history, but Star Trek lives.

Credit to Liz for the post title.