Sunday April 27th, 2025

We went to Governor's Island today, Zora, Maira and I, to meet Stephanie now executive director of The Field, a children's parentless playground made of found objects, in the tradition of junkyards. There has been a documentary as the concept has existed over time in Europe. We sat at a table overlooking a cruise ship docked at red hook, departing at 4PM for the Bahamas, the same time as the Yard closed. Was the playground called the Field or the Yard? It is enclosed by a solid brick building currently empty, blocking the view of the East River and Brooklyn across the way. We arrived back home and I could go see the last minutes of Cafe Resistance, a storied production. Lissa Moira, while directing it, discovered her larengitis was a sign of a serious condition, cancer of the lungs, and what can that mean? She never smoked. She was weakening with each rehearsal. It was a miracle to see everyone pull together as an ensemble. The content of the piece paralleled the Vichy occupation with today. A country under seige, under the guise of a government. The ladies of The Blue Parrot did their part in support of the resistance. The songs became an obsession for me because Lissa's choices were so familiar yet powerful and personally resonant. My sister would sing You Made Me Love You, I enjoyed discovering Mama Cass's voice in Dream a Little Dream, and for some reason I knew Love for Sale from the Fred Waring recording that I believed was an early self-financed production of Cole Porter himself. With Love for Sale I came to understand it was indeed introduced on stage by Fred and his singers in a play about New York Stories featuring Jimmy Durante who also wrote some of the songs. Cole Porter wrote the rest of them and Love for Sale is even more outrageous when we hear the Fred Waring record of it. Lissa hired me as music director of Cafe Resistance, while also hiring a spectacular and capable pianist actor Tristan Cano to follow that direction. I will see how well the musical numbers progressed when I see the recording Sam made of this last performance. They also did a version of Cole Porter's I've Got You Under My Skin. I also worked with the singers and they were all amazing. My thought at this time turn to Zora who becomes more communicative and interesting. I find myself deferring to her taste. She enjoys what I can get to her but I am still challenged to offer something new, or something directly assigned, like reminding her to practice her piano assignment from her friendly teacher, Ilhan. She seems to like him a lot, and sometimes I think she likes me, but I often make her upset. She still climbs on me and I am recently amazed that the few times I've had debilitating back pain have faded into a distant past. My perceptions of the past are usually reconstructions. I'm not sure when I last felt back pain. In general I've been aware of physical ailments, but they seem like they're in the past. We'll see how long this lasts. I tend to return to my productivity. The need for doing so is a drive for discovering my own work at a later time. I need other people's encouragement because of the underlying selfishness of producing it. It shouldn't be just for me, but I do enjoy it. There's more to say about Zora but I'm off on describing my own personal mental function, which is easily summarized by the remembrance, we are meaning makers. I believe the reference quote from my EST training experience is, we are meaning making machines. Therefore I make meaning out of what I wrote, and I'll write more. Any breakthrough will come through collaboration, but I'll create as much as I can and then let it transform.