Sunday. December 16, 2001

.

a real actor

"Without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable."

Carl Jung

I wake up late, consumed with sleep. I've been having a lot of dreams but they fly away.

I start bustling about, trying to get things looking like a party. Fewer newspapers and shoes strewn about, things like that. The day goes on, things take shape. I take out time to practice the piece that I've conceived for the salon. FFP goes out and buys flowers and ice.

I practice the piece again. I've written it out but bits keep ad-libbing themselves and I can't decide if the theme is: the commercialization of Christmas, gender-specific toys, the desire to create or the tyrany of possessions or just what. It gets overly long because it's trying to be all these things. I'll have to pick one before I perform it. Or maybe not. If I have the courage to do the piece at all.

I make coffee, set out glasses and cups.

I practice my piece for the salon some more. It keeps morphing. It wants to be a piece about possessions, being possessed by possessions, religion, holidays, gender-specific toys, gender-bias, the creative mind. It wants to be a novel, a triology even, a memoir of a hundred-year-old person, a series of fables set to music like Wagner's ring. It is only a five to seven minute monologue, though, with a script I won't follow printed on two sheets of paper, not quite full, and two props. A toy, an Erector set over forty years old and a Polaroid Land Camera 100 over thirty years old.

People from Johnson-Long Dance company start to arrive. I pass out drinks, give Darla and Kristen some bendable Santas to distribute around the house, watch Andrew cook up a shrimp and vegie with cous-cous dish. Other people arrive with food. Cheese, guacamole, lasagna, polenta, cake, cookies. We open bottles of wine, we eat and we eat and then the entertainment starts.

I go first. I refer to my script but I adlib, too. I get a laugh or two. I end with thunderous applause. Well, applause. After all, before you have heard real musicians, seen real actors, and if the performer is your hostess there is some incentive to applaud. Marie sings some Jewish prayers, explains about them. What a wonderful voice. She also sings 'Oh Holy Night' and some Puccini. Is it any wonder that I have gifted her with the nun punching puppet? No. There are dance pieces and monologues. A monologue with cereal eating. A very humorous reading of a letter to Martha Stewart. FFP ends the evening by talking about a dream he had on the night of September 10.

FFP thinks the dream story set gremlins in motion. I think it was just the usual chaos.

I was washing up plates and glasses. We were all buzzing around, trying to clean up the remains. Some people were singing Christmas songs while Rebecca played. The wine glass was this very sturdy one. Never had one break.

The stem separated from the bowl which I was washing with my right hand. The jagged edge was lethal but, fortunately it just sliced the flesh along the fore finger leading to the thumb, nicked the base of the thumb and fell away. Everyone examined the blood. Pressing a paper towel to it, I looked for butterfly bandages, knocking bandaids into the toilet. A bread board fell over and sent hot sauce flying to the floor. The guests pulled Chalow back. It was decided that I might need stiches. It looked deep but not bad and was just flesh. Some recommended ice to help stop the bleeding.

And so I found myself on an emergency room odyssey. First driven there by Anne. Then Forrest joined. Then Anne left. Sad people coming and going. Really. Sick. People. A boy and his mother, upbeat, she reads Harry Potter and they try to get a possibly broken finger xrayed in the middle of the night to avoid missing finals.

The triage nurse has recommended stiches. I think to just leave and band-aid it. (Yes, I have some that aren't in the toilet. FFP asks for and receives guaze and tape. I toss the paper towel and continue to chill the hand with my baggie of ice. And time just drags. FFP goes home, checks things, brings back coffee. Just as I'm trying to drink it, they call me in.

But still. I wait. I have an emergency bed but no doctor. Beyond the curtain a cancer patient with a fever and an infection that has the doctors worried pleads to not be admitted. I feel silly sitting there with a tiny cut. And oh so tired. I feel like lying back on the pillow and going to sleep. I'm honestly afraid that, if I do, I will wake there in the morning without attention. The nurse, a nice man, bustles back and forth to the woman behind the curtain, cheerful, not exactly ignoring me.

I ask when I'll be seen. Just to be sure I'm still in the system. I'm patient. Oh yeah. This injury is so nothing. But I'm so tired.

Finally the doctor looks at it, squeezes it, I swear it's started to close while I waited. He recommends just cleaning and closing with sterile strips. Yeah, I figured.

I don't know if I bled more than I realized. Or was just so tired. Wine, too. Some not a lot. FFP had come back. I was now waiting for the nurse to be free since the cleaning and sterile strips is a nurse job and the doc was off the hook. FFP is talking to me. And my blood pressure disappeared. I came back quickly, I think, but not before scaring FFP and a few staff members. I should have fainted hours ago. Suddenly there are three people asking if I know where I am. And I do. I'm back. This has only happened to me a couple of times. But if your top blood pressure descends to your bottom one then, well, you disappear. At night my blood pressure goes so low. If only I'd gotten that coffee in me. Anyway, they make me lie down but a couple of minutes later I'm capable of standing at the sink and cleaning my own wound with a soapy sterile disinfectant sponge under the watchful eye of FFP. Then the nurse tries to stop the bleeding and close the wound. He tapes it up and wraps a clumsy batch of gauze around it to hold it on. He takes my blood pressure. It's 85 over 60-something. He makes me lie down and a few minutes later we take bets on it. I think it will be 110 over 70 but FFP guesses 120 over something and he's close...the top number was 124. I really wanted to go home so I guess the biometric feedback on blood pressure elevation was very affective. Scary, losing consciousness, even for a moment. The hand, which never really hurt much is forgotten.

It's after 3AM when we get to bed. I have to meet someone and drive to Houston and handle a difficult meeting. I have to be at the office at 7:30.

JUST TYPING
Things happen.
Drift down.
Into.
Entropy.
We only think we are.
We are.
We are in control.