Through North Carolina summers, our dog Lizzie became like a baboon.  A West Highland White Terrier, one flea could turn her inside out.  Bitten, Lizzie itched until flaming red streaks of agitated skin appeared on her butt where she ripped all her hair out.  Bless her, her fiery ass running in the yard was a sight gag. We got her at the pet store at South Square Mall when she was the size of a beanie baby.  I think Mom couldn’t bear the kennel she was in or the longing in her eyes so we took her home.  We all loved her but Mom especially did and Lizzie “hot spot” Ketch needed it.  

Last week, I met a man who used to make furniture.  After his oil rags spontaneously combusted and burned down his business,  he became a fulltime cowboy.  I marveled at his nonchalance.  Soothed by time and perspective, he told his story without a wrinkle of agitation and I wished his unconcern would rub off on me, an antidote to 2020’s upheaval....

I have soft teeth.  Root canals, an extraction, cavities; I've had everything done to my teeth.  When I was very young, I had dental surgery on the front tooth I knocked out.  In adulthood, I've spent a fortune at the dentist because being an artist in America often means terrible dental insurance or going without.  One painful memory involving my teeth happened in middle school.  The popular girls made me think they wanted to be my friend.  We passed notes, we had sleepovers and watched the same movies on repeat.  We had code words, inside jokes and sat together at lunch.  But when things went sour, I uncovered notes they’d written to each other about me in the classroom trashcan.  They made fun of my teeth, drawings included.  It’s been over twenty years since I was in middle school and I still worry about my teeth.  It’s extraordinary; the lasting pain that comes from being made fun for something intrinsic about you....

Today was my first time in Griffith Park in months.  It is – as ever – a monument to wildness in the city of angels.  Not one but two rabbits crossed our path.  Vincent felt only one was worth chasing and the other he observed.  We went the steep way, not the way we usually go.  Since there is no usual anymore, we broke with another pattern and I noticed my hunger for variation.  Lately, I have felt lost in the most familiar of places.  Like I need breadcrumbs for my breadcrumbs or better yet, a guide.  It’s getting harder to trust my experience in isolation and  I don’t want to be patient anymore.  I want to be sovereign again like the good old presumptive days.  

It’s not easy having the freedom to turn within, it is interrogation.  Ask my closets!  They feel violated, tidied to the point of irrelevance.  And no matter how many zoom meetings I have, the day manages to wrap it’s long arms aro...

My sister Katie says her daughter Lily has my hands.  I wish I had Lily’s features, which is to say,  I wish I had Katie’s.  Mother and daughter are naturally beautiful, gentle, fair and whole-hearted.  Lily’s 15th birthday party was among the tsunami of cancellations and she weathered it admirably, following the grace under fire example her mom models.  It’s not easy to keep soft hands around all this change.  All the washing is making my hands crack at the knuckles.

Those of you that know me well know I’m tactile.  I’m a toucher.  I reach out to strangers, to dogs, to children, to old folks, to the flowers, trees, lamp posts that tolerate my advances.  I come by it honestly.  My mom’s hugs cure people.  My dad pats backs.  They make it their business to stir a smile in others, especially in passing exchanges that might otherwise feel transactional, meaningless or separate.  It’s their ministry and I am their child.  I learned...

For everything you have missed,

You have gained something else

and for everything you gain,

you lose something else.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson 

I saw two geriatric pets in the span of a few hours; an ancient dog lurching through a hike and an old cat being helped onto a pee pad outside an apartment.  Both pets were accompanied by gentle humans who held them, cheered them on and smiled at them.  Owning their special needs with dignified embarrassment, the animals were busy living and dying. The ready compassion – the animals’ compassion for themselves, the humans’ compassion for their pets - slowed me down, made me breathe deeply and think about the cost of living. 

The new decade came sharply for me, like a scare in a haunted house. I turned the corner and there it was – 2020 – armed with a chainsaw.  To add insult, I bought the most confrontational calendar of my life; its cover art reads BEST YEAR EVER.  No pressure.  I bought it under the pretense that a new year can’t sca...

The manufacturing company that makes our trashcan is called Simple Human.  Isn’t that romantic?  We invented trash; the credit is ours.  Scientists found four new species of animal and plastic at the deepest point of the ocean. We’ve been completist in our waste inventions, romantic too.  But trash as human legacy?  I didn’t see that coming when I was a kid.  I didn’t see the plastic bag I threw away everyday after my peanut butter sandwich for lunch or the paper plates we used at breakfast every morning. It didn’t occur to me that cans of soda were wasteful or that the Aqua Net hairspray I brandished for prom night hair could erode the ozone that protects us.  It took seven shampoos to recover my hair’s natural texture after prom.  I knew the stuff was toxic, just not its cost. 

The notion of what is disposable came up in conversation Monday night but dressed up as letting go.  I Marie Kondo-...

I keep seeing feathers on the ground.  Am I molting? And a couple of weeks ago I saw a shimmery snake skin lying on the ground.  It glistened next to one of those red-brown husks from the big palm tree presiding over the hill.  It seems like everything is stripping off its layers in this heat but not me.  I keep buying more clothes.  The quest for the perfect pair of jeans – I hate to admit – continues. I find it easier to stare at racks at a thrift store than an empty page.  Do you buy in goodbyes?  I seem to. I’m even tempted to pick up all those feathers (bird flu be damned) and make dream catchers, anything to slow the tide of time and its advances.

And yes, we did just move house.  Our skin not shed but altered post-move with new ink.  Last Friday marks another trip around the sun for me and the overlapping of all this change is rather startling.  In boxing up what we own, every paperclip, bobby pin and...

Great-ing.  Grating.  I’m not sure what great means.  It’s a stock-character of language; someone you’ve met a bunch of times and still don’t know.  But as a response to leadership, to the climate crisis, to threat of war, to caged children, to mass incarceration, to a broken education and healthcare system or anything that matters, great isn’t good enough.  It isn’t anything.  It’s a dodge, an avoidance, a mockery of meaning. 

Here’s a screeching, possibly grating detour... I just spent two and a half months working on a new play in New York.  And even though I lived there for twelve years, went to school there and started my career there, it was a new New York for me.  A lot has happened since I left and this return, a chance to be on an Off-Broadway stage, felt auspicious.  Honestly, the whole experience made me feel a lot of everything.  Doing the play was kind of like riding a horse.  The horse’s dandru...

I woke up today with this question: “what do I hope for?”  And it is a serious question after years of living towards a goal.   At dinner Monday night, I expressed with some embarrassment that acting is the only idea I’ve ever had for my life.  I’ve dreamt too of having a family and of a chance to see the world, but individually and as long as I can remember, I have wanted and still want to act.  Alongside survival jobs, adapting and some innovating, acting iswhat I’ve done.  I ask myself often why I didn’t become a social worker or a teacher, run a non-profit or for political office.  There is good I might have furthered and time I can’t get back, yet in my wrestling for dignity and meaning, I still think the possibility for a better world is strengthened, not weakened, by a solitary dream.

Maybe it comes with the territory of being a performer, my worry that this pursuit is selfish or self-serving. But selflessness has i...

This is for creatives, so all of us.

What helps?  Logan tells me 50,000 people drove to Lake Elsinore over the weekend to see the super-bloom.  After the massacre in New Zealand last week, en masse Los Angelenos sought wild flowers.  Nature helps.  And helping helps.  A neighbor locked herself out of her house – Max and I could feel her frustration rising like steam, fogging up her thoughts.  We stopped, we stood with her and we listened. She came to a decision, we kept watch and waited until she returned from her next-door neighbor’s house with a spare key.  To her credit, she’d prepared for this and found the solution herself.  I think she just needed reassurance.  It’s easy to feel invisible when you’re in need. And anyway, needs aren’t sexy or impressive, just human.  Seeing someone else need something helped me tolerate my own needing.

Breathing helps. I meditate twice a day, twenty minutes a time – sometimes it’s glorified napping –...