Mockingbird Hill Cottage

Mockingbird Hill Cottage

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Childhood Reading

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The zinnias are blooming.

Always a sign that we’re entering late summer. Soon (hopefully) we’ll see the morning glories as well. Last year, one of the morning glories bloomed and the other didn’t. Fingers crossed. The moonflowers? Well, they’re growing very, very, very slowly. We’ll see.

Every year is a different story when you’re gardening. Very little is predictable.

It’s a gray day out there, with rain on the way this afternoon. In the meantime, we have to mow the front lawn, at the very least. It’s getting quite long.

I’m reading Bookworm  by Lucy Mangan, a memoir of childhood reading. It’s very entertaining. But I also have to choose a novel – maybe Transcription  by Kate Atkinson. When I’m traveling, I like to take a novel in which I can lose myself during the flight. Atkinson might be perfect. I briefly considered A Book of Ghosts  by John Connolly, but at 600 pages plus and a hardcover to boot, it’s not the most packable of books.

The next chapter in Bookworm  is about Dr. Seuss. Should be interesting. I have a confession to make about Dr. Seuss. I never liked those books. There, I’ve said it. I owned  The Cat in the Hat and If I Ran the Circus. They were read to me many times and when I could read, I would give them another try to see if my mind had been changed. Nope. I never liked them. I found the characters annoying. I didn’t particularly like the illustrations either.

Years later, when The Old Globe premiered the How the Grinch Stole Christmas (with the blessing of Audrey Geisel, Theodore Geisel’s widow – they lived in La Jolla) Don originated the role of Old Max. I briefly worked on the show. But I still didn’t care for the story and the thought of having to perform it throughout the Christmas season would have sent me over the edge. (That may be the reason that Don declined the offer to do it again the next year. Once was enough.)

I’m sure that I’m the rare exception and I’m fine with that. I also wasn’t a big fan of cartoons. I got bored by them pretty easily. Go figure.

Today, work on deductions. Mowing.

Exciting, right?

What books did you love as a child?

Happy Saturday.

Dreaded Chores, Flowers & Garden Life

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It’s time to add up our deductions and send them off to our tax preparer. We always file an extension and I can put the whole thing out of my mind until…da, da, DUM…August. And now we’re here. So that’s what I’ll be doing this afternoon and tomorrow. Of course the amount of deductions we as performing artists can take has shrunk to next to nothing, but New York State still allows them. So we still have to do the same amount of calculating.

Sigh.

A little bit lobelia has popped up in my geranium pot. There’s a big pot of lobelia nearby and it self-seeded here in the geraniums. I love those little garden surprises.

My yellow garden spider is still here.

I’ve never seen one stay in the same place for so long.

We had another one hanging on the siding next to our kitchen door, but it was particularly windy that day and the spider was constantly buffeted by the winds, so it moved on. Where, I don’t know.

So today, it’s deductions and other chores. We’re headed over to Rick and Doug’s for dinner, as three of our former students will be in town. Can’t wait to see them! They were members of the last class that I taught at The Old Globe/USD. Jim Parsons was one of their classmates. It will be fun.

As for Las Vegas, I plan to be indoors most of the time I’m there. I’ve never had the least desire to visit but my hand has been forced. Since I’ll be working much of the time, it should be fine.

Happy Thursday.

 

 

Insects, Former Students, & The Overstory

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I took a little walk around the gardens yesterday in between massive thunderstorms. We had two days of big, prolonged, and loud thunderstorms. Huge cracks of thunder which shook the house, torrential rain that seemed to go on and on – what I think of as summer storms.

Anyway, sometimes I wander around just to see if I can spy some insect life on the flowers.

Look at this guy! Miniscule!

I looked for the yellow garden spider. The web was still there, but no spider. When they leave, they usually dismantle the web, so I figured he was still around somewhere. Then I noticed him on top of one of the nearby coneflowers.

He was expanding his web. You can see part of it on the left. This guy is like a major property developer. If you could only see how large this three-sided complex is, you’d be astounded! By the way, one of my former students commented on IG that I should name him Edward.

So Edward it is.

I was chatting on Instagram with a former student, Brian Hutchison, who is currently out in Los Angeles filming The Boys in the Band, along with another former student, Jim Parsons. They were part of the cast of the Tony Award-winning Broadway production about a year ago and now it’s being recorded on film. Anyway, apparently Jim and Brian were talking about me the other day and that made me smile. I’m so proud of both of them – truly nice guys who have done well. Brian sent me a picture of the two of them on set. We’re all still friends and I’m so grateful for that.

It’s always nice to hear from former students – both from the Old Globe/USD and Boston University. My extended family, I suppose. Thankfully, most of them keep in touch via Facebook or Instagram or email. I can follow their careers, their marriages, babies – quite frankly, that’s the only reason I remain on Facebook. It connects me to hundreds of former students.

I finished the Kate Atkinson yesterday and dropped it off at the library. I’ve started The Overstory  by Richard Powers, which won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It’s rather extraordinary, unlike anything I’ve read before. I don’t have the words to describe it yet, so I’ll use the words from the publisher’s blurb on the back of the book.

“National Book Award winner Richard Powers’s twelfth novel is a sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of – and paean to – the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, The Overstory  unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. There is a world alongside ours – vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.”

So far, I’m completely enthralled and I expect to feel even more so as I delve further into the novel. He is a beautiful writer. I’ve had my eye on it for a while, but it just came out in paperback and that clinched the deal.

My back is getting much better. It’s still sore when I first wake up and begin to move around, but on the whole, I’ve turned a corner.

Happy Thursday.

Lambs Like to Party

Lambs Like to Party

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