step by step

"Looking back one step didn't really lead into another. I took one step, a miracle happened, then I started stepping somewhere else."

From Anna's post on the Blue Rose Girls' blog.

greetings from beyond

Letters my father wrote to his family in the 1950s.

I love stories of mysterious communication-- messages from the anonymous, letters from the departed. I've been running into a lot of them lately. The stories, and the messages.

As You Like It is being performed at both Wesleyan and Quinnipiac this month. That's the one where exiled Rosalind, disguised as a boy, finds poems written to her on the trees of the Forest of Arden. The image is so wonderful that I put poems on trees in some local forests myself, just because it should be done now and then.

Another is Eurydice, a play by Sarah Ruhl I saw recently at Yale Rep (thanks to Eliza B!). I fell so deeply into the performance that it's still haunting me a week later. It was unearthly beautiful- the story, of course, of Eurydice, who returns to Hades after her husband Orpheus looks back while rescuing her. But also, a gorgeous flooding set, a bath house tiled with paper letters, and the most poetic speech.

Before Eurydice dies the first time, her dead father writes letters of advice and love to her from the underworld, and sends them up into the world of the living, though she doesn't see them. Later Orpheus sends her letters of music of despair from above, stuffing them into the ground. "I'll give this letter to a worm. I hope he finds you." The letters in the play manifest in the world they were sent to on actual sheets of paper. But it got me thinking. What if all these synchronicities, these funny coincidences that feel so much like personal correspondence, were actually messages from my lost loves? My grandfathers? My grandmothers? My friends? My father?

My father died when I was too young to be upset about it, and probably due to some inventive adult telling me so, I grew up with the idea that I was a lucky girl because I had a parent in heaven, a kind of personal ambassador to God. A dad with maybe more influence and better connections then other kids had who was always looking out for me. What if I decided to believe that now as if it were a fact? What if every time I get a funny feeling when I overhear a conversation with my name spoken, I decide to believe that it's my father talking to me? What if I just decided to believe every time I hear a plane that it's my father saying hello? That would be a daring way to live, indeed.

With this in mind on Sunday I left yellow roses, the kind he liked to give my mother, in my favorite place in the city. As I did I heard a jet, invisible above the clouds.

O wonderful, wonderful, and most wonderful
wonderful! and yet again wonderful...

Orpheus

O Captain, my Captain!

It's 2 months away from our debut bout. My team looks beautiful. I've achieved the low skate stance I've been working for, which makes me harder to knock down, but it also makes me prone to getting elbowed in the face. I'm sore, battered, and worried about my nose.

And on Thursday I resigned as captain. Not easy, but the position had become so bureaucratic that I had no time to help my teammates or learn how to skate better. I'll be able do more for my team now without being tied up in paperwork and political bickering all the time. And that's what's important, no matter how cool it was to say "Captain Polly." I'm excited to be just a skater again.

But I'm even more excited about the league taking on domestic violence as one of its causes. A few months in to this I discovered that a high number of roller girls have a history of sexual violence or abuse, as I do. It turns out that the combination of girly-ness, sexuality, female camaraderie, and physical strength unique to roller derby makes it an extraordinarily empowering activity for us, like nothing else. It's remarkable how so many have been drawn to it for this reason, even if we didn't know it at first. I'd been looking for a way to support women like me, as soon as I figured it out I knew this is why I'd come.

Our first project is collecting a donation for the Life Haven women's shelter. I'm really looking forward to delivering it later this month, and seeing where this new turn takes me.

Photo: Wender, Nelly, Slim and I at the Providence vs New York bout.

paid in full

The second best piece of paper I've gotten from RISD. That's one down.







Me in my swan hat at the 1996 RISD Commencement, which I still wear from time to time.

Eurydice

coda

O! To belong to a thing
that will have none of you!
To be a fish that belongs
to the sky.
There's a copper key
on the ocean floor
that works a wind-up bird.
Its song could teach a fish
to fly.

puppet class

Second section of Intro to Puppetry at Quinnipiac U: rod puppets. This time we asked them to use a found object as a head. Electrical box, jars, cocktail umbrella, tampon.

battle scars

My skates after 7 months of roller derby. Holes in the toes, shot ankle straps, and the boot is so stretched out I break new laces every night trying to tighten them up. One replaced truck, and the third set of wheels and toe stops.

Thanks to Bob Johnson of WPKN who had me (or Polly rather) and Tony Baloney on his radio show today to promote Tony's NEST event, where I'll be serving hors d'oeuvres on skates with some of my teamates on November 11. Talking about how much we train reminded me how long it's been and how far I've come. I'm not just tougher, I can also speak on the radio now with some amount of intelligence and calm articulation. Pretty good for this farm girl.

My skates their first day out of the box back in March.

fortune cookie #3

"A routine task will turn into an enchanting adventure."

reunion

On Saturday I went on an extensive drift, a solitary wandering meditation guided by whatever falls on the path. I was looking for resonant symbols and hoping to find old friends despite anxiety from mild prosopagnosia. Luckily five of them found me and we spent the evening commiserating on the old problem of art vs security and taking advantage of the abundant free food and alcohol all over the RISD reunion weekend campus.

Providence revealed a hundred oddities and wonders. From mobile art, to the fruits of the strange garden of Wunderground; from the opening of the impossibly grand new library, to the haunted passages of WaterFire. Illuminated poems emerged from the water. Secret neon animals hid behind peepholes. I left my rollerskate necklace in an offering bowl as thanks.

hot and cool

Fuse8, that hot blog by the lucky fish who works at the Donnell Childrens Room of the NYC Library, pointed to this blog yesterday in a very cool post. I am so honored. I hurry to put on my Sunday best in case new visitors drop by.

relic #4

Fabric.

10 years

Tomorrow is my 10th year RISD reunion. Holy cow. I'll be enjoying the RISD by Design weekend festivities all day. See you there.

white pigeons

Another children's book blog, Fuse8, led me to this site, Overlooked New York, where I found some people I know: Lezly the Skate Guru of Central Park, and the Saw Lady of the subway. And some fascinating others, including Victor, a pigeon coop-er, who has raised only white pigeons for 26 years because of a promise to God in a comatose dream. People can be downright crazy-wonderful.

blogging

A non-blogger who is uncomfortable with my blogging asked me why I blog.

My doll club suggested we all get one to promote our doll work, but when I saw how easy it was to load images I turned it into a pictorial journal for my mom and myself, a place to gather all the strange ecclectic things I'd been doing so she and I could reflect on why I did them, and how the separate, conflicting parts of my life might work together as a harmonious whole. Hence the Latin name antinomia, "against law", giving root to the word antinomy: "an apparent contradiction between valid principles or conclusions that seem equally necessary and reasonable."

Then I showed it to a few friends who I'd featured in the posts, and a few more found it on their own. Then some total strangers came upon it and gave me advice, encouragement, and a few leads. And since I have a habit of always looking for guidance from whoever and whatever is around me, the blog took on that habit too.

When I blog I'm either stating an intention, or asking for suggestions, and always always looking for synchronicities and chance meetings with people who may be holding a piece of the puzzle I'm still looking for. And maybe provide a piece of someone else's puzzle too. And I'm also showing off sometimes. Yes, I do that. ;)

Now the blog is already over a year old. (Amazing.) I've gone back to look at all my adventures, work, complaints, joys, friends. It helps keep my scattered self on track somehow. I'm so grateful I have it.

ships and crabs

I was watching the sky and sea from my favorite spot on the rocky point of the West Haven beach yesterday, lost in a pitiful cynicism about the future, when I was surprised by the sudden appearance of a girl in pink, maybe 9 years old, her hands held cupped together. As if we were old friends she asked if I wanted to see a crab, which of course I did. She opened her palm and a dime sized white crab crawled sideways off her finger onto mine. I'd never seen a crab so small. She told me there were hundreds of them in the ditch nearby, and she led me there, down to the water, showing me how to step without slipping.

We returned the tiny crab to the puddle she had found it in and built a house of stones and shells to hide it from the seagulls. Then we overturned rocks to find all kinds of other crabs which scrambled out over our shoes, and she identified each one in scientific detail. I'd been in that ditch dozens of times and never noticed them before.

A man in a wheelchair above called to her. We climbed back out and I thanked her and said goodbye. She picked up a seagull feather on the ground and gave it to me, and said maybe we'd meet again in the ditch. I saw then that the man she was with had neither of his legs. He turned his wheelchair and she followed him away, looking back at me until we were out of sight of each other. She seemed more then a girl. She spoke like a 65 year old marine biology professor. She was kind and careful with me like a grandmother. I'm not really sure she wasn't a spirit, or a Bodhisattva maybe. In any case, I left feeling a pang of loss, but also great wonder, and a restored sense of peace.

I return to the ditch in hopes of finding her again. But so often we are ships that quickly pass.

everything must go

It has been a most amazing year. All the new, exhilarating, scary, wonderful things I've done, and all the very lovely people I've met have opened me, inspired me, and all together changed me for good. It's also made me a bit broke.

I've rarely been able to part with my originals. Though they live in a flat file and aren't often looked at, when I do take them out to study my work, it's like studying a book of my past. Sometimes paintings bring back detailed memories of my life at the time, what I was feeling, what I was wishing for, even what song I was listening to when I finally broke though and made a painting work.

But there's no point in holding onto the past if you're not looking to your future. I'm putting them up for sale, and will have a good amount up at the next New Haven City Wide Open Studio at the end of October.

Also soon to be ebayed: art and illustration books and periodicals, supplies, and other miscellaneous things.

dive team

The CT RollerGirls with Pablo (in the tank) of the CT State Police Dive Team who was riding an underwater stationary bike for a 2 hour shift to raise money for the CT Children's Medical Center.

Photo thanks to our ref Paul, who posted even more from the parade.