living in the fringes, part one (a long, patron-only post) (Patreon)

hallo my dear loves.

here's a (very) long and overdue ramble and a half for you. my life has been packed with activity and it's left little time to blog. the cycle is familiar. too much life leaves little room to blog. it's fine...i catch up, and i hope you don't mind reading a blog which is the length of a short novel.

i want to write a post about iceland, but i feel like it deserves it's own little moment with photos and links, so i'm going to be telling this story backwards. i hope you don't mind....

i also have a backlog of blogs that may never see the light of day. i still have a draft of my blog about TED. that was in fucking april. sometimes some things just slip down the drain.

i'm currently on martha's vinyard (at a private writer's/actor's retreat by invitation of the public theater) after flying here from boston after a single night off after landing from the UK. i left about 12 hours after my last show. i'm on my own for the next two weeks: no ash, no neil, no justine...just me and jason webley and steven bogart doing very deep and long-term building on the musical we are hoping to mount at the public theater sometime within the next millennium. i am tired as fuck but happy. 

i wrote the below text over ten days ago, but it felt too raw and unfinished and i didn't want to post it. but i'm posting it here, just to clear the decks before i write a longer post about my experience at the fringe.

which was long and beautiful and complicated, and i still have a moment to plug some shows. i'll try to get it written and out tonight or tomorrow morning.

meanwhile, here's my lost draft from last week.

i'm writing to you from a 9-year-old's room on the second floor of our edinburgh air bnb. there are celtic crosses and posters of mamma mia.

being back in edinburgh is wonderful and sharply painful. and exhausting. past traumas and the deeper past of my immigrant family are always here waiting to embrace me with a cold, cold, cold hug and a wizened stare.

today is another cold, refreshing, moist and misty - okay, okay, shitty - day in edinburgh. my scottish ancestors were mostly drunks, and carried on being drunks after they immigrated to new york (that was two generations ago). alcoholism is genetic; the science has told us. i’m doing my best, i am....but i can profoundly understand why hanging out in this weather day after day would convince you that drinking is excusable at any hour and for any reason. there's just that much more reason to lose hope. 

i joke...kind of. but being in iceland drove it all home. it was cold, yes....and so beautiful (blog still coming, i'm working on it). i felt the shock of light - the light which lasted until 11:30 pm - like a syringe of joy being shoved into my heart. are we really that simple? perhaps we aren't all. i certainly am. the cold and the damp gets into my shoes, then my socks, then my soul, then every corner of my mind....and it eats, with its small, grey, relentlessly gnawing teeth.

i think about my ancestors and what they had to deal with. i'm in an air bnb with heat and a fucking fridge and blankets. 

they had fuck all.

every time i come here to the UK i enjoy myself to some degree, and i also bow to the ground with gratitude that my family found the strength to emigrate to america: my grandmother from the isle of skye, and my grandfather from the bleary coastal town of deal, in kent in the south of england. 

they were both from very poor families.

my grandfather belonged to the british merchant marine and literally (if you believe the stories) jumped ship in new york harbor and swam to shore in the freezing water. i imagine the statue of liberty gazing down at his freezing, clammy, determined swimming body and statuesquely nodding her head in motionless pride and approval. 

come.

be welcome. 

give us your tired. 

your poor. 

your freezing. 

your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free. 

he made it. he became an ad man on madison avenue. a mad man, an original. and later in his life, after years of alcohol abuse, my grandfather finally managed to stop drinking. he went to AA. 

he always seemed incredibly unhappy to me. i’ll always remember him sitting at the table in my grandparents house in the carribean....legally blind, mostly deaf, with a giant set of headphones on his head, tuning into the BBC via some sort of satellite radio that took up the whole kitchen table. trying to swim home.

sometimes i think he stayed in the harbor and never really surfaced.

sometimes i see him at my side. he’s still treading water, with a leaking pen in his hand. lost, homesick, untethered.

the news rolls on.

the children at the border still aren't sure where their parents are.

who's swimming to shore. 

who's treading water.

and why.

i'm blessed right now to be in the middle of the artistic action...binge at fringe is good for that, and it's why i came, even though i feel like i'm missing about 90% of the action to get my own show and admin shit done, while making sure i clock enough time with my 2-year-old to feel like a Good Mother.

i'm around a group of freedom-fighting artists from countries all over the world who are swinging between cynicism and optimism with every breath and every song and every piece of avant garde puppetry. even just seeing the posters up around town is confronting. everybody knows something is wrong, nobody knows how to fix or even properly address it....and as for me....i keep digging harder and harder but i get the feeling i’m using the wrong shovel, or possibly digging in the wrong cemetery, exhuming the wrong bodies.

the last time i was here for any length of time i went through two (at the time) very novel kinds of challenging-life-hell: an abortion, and a marriage in the face of an abortion. i wrote about both in the art of asking. it was a rough ride, people.

i remember the particular hell of being stuck in a bed in edinburgh with a ransacked body and a very isolated heart; miles away from my best friends, surrounded with artistic acquaintances and a husband i'd barely met yet, i remember walking through these streets trying to find some kind of solace and feeling like there was none available. i'd love to quote a passage from the art of asking here....i was telling someone about this story the other night over dinner.

in the book, as in life, it takes place at edinburgh fringe right before i find out i'm pregnant with the probably-unviable-due-to-killer-antibiotics fetus:

the art of asking, p 229 (in the rough draft manuscript, at least)

The kidney infection cleared up within a few days, which was good: We’d rented a big place in Edinburgh to accommodate a ton of houseguests that month....plus Neil’s kids, plus my band. I had a string of shows booked, and a bunch of rehearsing to do with my band. We'd been looking forward to this month-long working vacation for a long time, anticipating a non-stop parade of dinner parties, theater adventures, and spontaneous fun. 

But I wasn't in the mood for fun. My body hurt, my soul hurt, my skin was breaking out, and I'd been listlessly staying in bed. I didn't even want to go out. I couldn't shake the crazy-feeling. One afternoon, while Neil was off doing press, I didn’t have rehearsal and decided to peel myself out of bed and go for a jog. It was a frigid, foggy day, the type you keep thinking just shouldn't happen in the month of August (no matter how many times you've been to Scotland). I stepped outside, bundled in running gear and a sweater and scarf, and started to run. I felt life slowly oozing back into me. I looked like shit, I felt like shit, but goddammit, I had left the house. 

Four blocks away, I slipped on a loose brick of the sidewalk and twisted my ankle. Badly. 

I lay there sprawled on the sidewalk, emitting a small moan, while ready to explode with laughter at the poetry of it all. Really? 

I was going to need to ask a passing stranger for help. I had nothing on me—no phone, no money, just my house keys. It was a quiet street, but a woman about my age wearing a smart raincoat saw me and stopped to help. Then another woman, an older one, stopped as well. My fellow humans were coming to my aid. 

You all right there? one of them asked. 

No—actually, I’m not, I said, trying to look amiable. I’ve twisted my ankle and I can’t really walk. 

Oh dear, said the older woman. 

A third woman wandered up behind them. 

Do you need an ambulance? the first woman asked. 

I tried to get up to a little weight on my ankle, but it shot lightening signals of agony. 

I don’t know, I said. I think it’s just twisted, I don’t think I need a hospital. But I can’t walk. 

How can we help? 

Yes, is there anything we can do? They huddled around me in a concerned triptych. 

I grimaced as a searing pain shot up my leg, but tried to express my gratitude. Well, thank you....yes. You're so kind. Can one of you just grab me a passing cab and hop in it with me? I don’t have any cash on me and my house is right around the corner. I’ll need someone to get me inside so I can pay the cab driver. 

The three women all looked at one another, then at me, then at one another. 

Um.... 

no, 

they said collectively. 

But is there anything else we can do to help? one of them asked. 

I was dumbstruck. And humiliated.  

Are you sure you wouldn't like us to call an ambulance? said one of the women. 

Did they think I was trying to....scam them? Trick them? I was a thirty-five year old woman in a jogging clothes with a twisted ankle on a quiet street in Scotland. We weren’t in a slum from a Charles Dickens novel. 

One of them was at least kind enough to help me hobble over to a passing cab, and I threw myself at the mercy of the driver, who drove me the five blocks, took my arm, and half-carried me up though our front door and into the kitchen, where I thanked him profusely and gave him a twenty-pound tip. 

Ya’right, love?  He asked, kindly. I knew I looked like hell. You’re sure? 

Yes, I’m fine, really. Fine. Thank you so, so very much. 

He left, closing the door behind him. 

Then I hopped over to the sink, ran some cold water over my leg, and started sobbing. In that moment, I couldn't tell which hurt more, my heart or my ankle. 

Brené Brown writes: 

In a 2011 study funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, researchers found that, as far as the brain is concerned, physical pain and intense experiences of social rejection hurt in the same way....Neuroscience advances confirm what we've known all along: emotions can hurt and cause pain. And just as we often struggle to define physical pain, describing emotional pain is difficult. 

Shame is particularly hard because it hates having words wrapped around it. It hates being spoken. 

###

.................

oof.

the art of asking relates to so much of what is going on right now - with the #MeToo movement, with the collapse of civility in media and in politics.

how we help each other. how we are allowed to ask for help.

the gargantuan fear that something like my experience will happen. 

forced entry. missed connections. flawed etiquette. 

lack of focus, lack of compassion, lack of clarity.

i told this story on stage.

and it still makes me so goddam sad, that story. i'll never forget the feeling.

give me your tired. 

your poor.

yearning to be free.

i didn't know at the time that i was also pregnant. there was definitely an extra helping of horror, i am sure, because i was probably also hormonal as hell. 

and i told this story to lady rizo, my housemate, the other night, and we mused about the british. and about certain americans. about cities and countries. and about fear. about who will actually help who, to what extent, in what circumstances. and i thought about how having children has planted a much deeper desire in me to be around the kinds of people who are more likely to help me in a bind. 

i also find myself thinking about my grandmother's family, who came to america on a boat having no fucking clue what sort of help would or wouldn't await them on the other side. they just knew that the risk was worth it. they lost a child on the ship, one of my grandmother's brothers, to pneumonia. i wonder how they felt about that.

was it worth it?

no wonder they drank.

meanwhile, i'm fumbling my own way to clarity on the stage.

one glass of wine, and i can do my show fine. if i stress-drink before or during the shows, my piano-playing suffers, even after a glass and a half. it's a fine balance. 

i see my grandmother standing there on the porch of their house in the carribean: with her scotch in one hand, her first drink at 3 or 4 pm. i imagine my grandfather in that kitchen, his head and soul back in kent. they were so separate.

last thursday and friday i set about trying to attack a new set list and format for the show. the set list isn't terribly different from the one i played in the UK in may...but it is. the addition of three songs (all of which are searingly sad) made me think i'd have to do some sort of jiu-jitsu with the audience in order to justify playing so much heavy material. i'm still figuring it out.

i've been talking more openly than i ever have about the dark things: deaths, cancers, abortions, miscarriages, the weight and light of it and how i use music to work my out of the shadows. 

i know you've all been following along the terribly dark-light super-literal super-personal material that's piling up to be this record: the ride, bigger on the inside, the thing about things, machete.

there are two new songs and, if you can believe it, they make the above list of songs look positively fucking cheerful. i'm holding on to them, i think, until the record comes out in the spring, so you can have something new to listen to, but also so that the album in itself can take you on a journey without you having a full set of expectations. you heard one of them if you came to certain UK shows. i'm still tweaking lyrics and chords and parts.

i like not being done. but it's almost time to wrap this bitch.

and i'll be honest with you: i don't feel inspired to do very much right now but just tell the direct truth. call it this phase of motherhood, call it trump, call it the twists of my own personal relationships right now, but it feels like the only antidote, the only escape. 

it's never easy; it's actually always a pain in my ass....

and it's always worth it in the end.

i'd rather die on the sword of truth than stew like a frog in the comfy simmering water of unexamined fear.

anyway.

................

my show is hurting me, in a good way. it's confusing me.

i feel like i'm trying to find the perfect balance between impossible things. 

is it entertainment? is it art? is it therapy? 

for me? for you? for who?

i'm not sure what it is.

i know i'm going to keep doing it, and i'm going to keep getting better at whatever it is, and i'm going to tour it around the world.

love eternal.

a

.......

and a note from present-day amanda...

bear with me while i write and think and blog things at you out of order.

my feelings about the show solidified (and got a lot better, a lot clearer) after nights #3 and #4.

life happens in real time.

but processing happens in messy piles.

i love you all so so much.

now to go work on a musical.

xx

a

p.s. i also forget sometimes that not everybody here knows i wrote a book. 

i wrote a book, as evidenced above. if you haven't actually read my book, here's a link to order it on amazon:

https://www.amazon.com/Art-Asking-Learned-Worrying-People/dp/1455581097

and there's also the audiobook, which has stayed in the bestseller charts longer than the book-book itself, and i'm really proud of that. i spend three days recording it myself, and it includes music.

here's the link to the audiobook....and i just noticed that audible is running a free 30-day trial, so you could technically listen to it for free, hoorah:

https://www.audible.com/ep/title/?asin=B00OQT8AG2&source_code=GO1GBSH09091690EI&device=d&cvosrc=ppc.google.the%20art%20of%20asking&cvo_campaign=250472289&cvo_crid=260176808560&Matchtype=e&gclid=EAIaIQobChMI4omzyaD-3AIVwR6GCh3ZZQFKEAAYASAAEgJBpPD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds

------THE NEVER-ENDING AS ALWAYS---------

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