November 10, 2007

Saturday morning. The water in the birdbath was liquid this morning, so it was a clement night, though why I care I don’t know, since everything is dead anyway.

The performance last night was pretty good, though I continue to wonder why we slip up in different places each night, as though the play were never going to allow us full mastery. It’s like a basket of kittens. Get one section settled in and another begins to break into chaos. Does the audience like it? Those who come backstage to talk do. Or say they do. I guess if you know all the rough spots and moments of panic, you assume they’re visible to everyone. Maybe we’re getting away with it. The cast makes this ordeal endurable. Belve said, “I don’t think I could do this play with any other group of people,” and I agreed.

Chall and Lucia were at the performance. They look happy. Jim, Phil, Kitty, Handsome John Highsmith, who reminded me that his fundraising efforts had built the theater. Other people were there, too, but the green room at the theater is lit so gloomily that it made me a little sad to see everybody in it, as though it were the lobby of a funeral home.

Evening. Today was supposed to be the studio stroll, and I tended my studio for a while, but I was too sad, too worried about tonight, too overcome by the probable futility of it all to stay the whole time. The good part was seeing Richmond. The good part was Mickey and Stan and Mickey’s mom and stepfather coming to the studio with four kittens for me to choose from. Though I’d wanted but one, I chose two who Mickey’s mom had said had become inseparable companions. That turned out to be well with Titus and Conrad, and may it be so again. They will be mine tonight after the performance, and may they turn my mind to kittenish things. And may they sleep very well on a night when I absolutely must.

Sadness today, difficult to pin down. Maybe just autumn.