From Russia with Love...

St Petersburg is kind of da bomb.

Boating along the Neva River with that boy I married.

And who goes boating without their knitting I ask you!?

We are in St. Pete because the lad is now a graduate student at a Southern California university for theatre set design (so super proud of him!) The professor who runs his program grew up in St Pete, defecting to the US in the 1980s. He still runs a theatre company in St. Pete that his father started, and a required study abroad course is having the students come to Russia and assist for a semester on whatever play they are working on at the moment. The company has been working on Maxim Gorki's play "Dachniki" (usually translated to "The Summer Folk" or "Cottagers") for four years, and we have been mounting the production, and now that the show is in production, we serve as technical staff.

Me chillin' with Maxim Gorki

Gorki is a bit of a controversial figure in modern Russian theatre. His writing is very clearly pro-communist at a time when people were still warming up to communism as a concept. He was touted as the theatrical voice of the Soviet Union by Stalin, and was a very popular playwright in the USSR. However, Stalin did that thing that he had a habit of doing when he claimed to think someone other than him was the best ever: he had Gorki assassinated. Yaaaayyyy.

As a result, a lot of post-USSR theaters have really shied away from performing his plays, given the strong Pro-Stalinist Bolshevik overtones and memories. This production has been really interesting to work on, and to see even how the company reacts to the material.

The company has been amazingly warm and welcoming, helping us navigate the city, Russian drinking, and how to use the metro. In spite of limited English (and less than limited Russian for the Americans), everyone is relatively understood, and everyone gets along.

Some of the amazing things we have gotten to explore: Mushroom picking in the woods around Pavlosk Palace, exploring Peterhof (the fabulous gilded palace of Peter the Great), going to the Hermitage in the Winter Palace (for free with student IDs!) every week (or even a few times a week), going to the Russian Museum (where amazing paintings by Russian artists that Americans have never heard of are stored by the score), and several shows at the Alexandrinsky Theatre with mindblowing sets and costumes. All funded by the Russian Government.

Nothing make me want to be an artist more than being in Russia. I hear that people also feel this way going to Paris, but it smacks you in the face here. Constantly. I have seen more people who actually make their living by painting and acting here than I ever did in New York. 

On Monday (after the husband's birthday), we will be heading to Moscow to visit for a few days. Can't wait!

That's it.

I suck at blogging. But to be frank, a lot has been going on.

May: Got married.

June: Designed lights for and helped mount an off-off Broadway show.

July: Turned a quarter of a century.

August: Packed up apartment, put everything in storage, and got on a plane to Berlin. Amazing, mindblowing theatre.

September: MOVED TO RUSSIA. (until December, but still!)

So. Starting this up again.

Mother's Day, and Banana Nut Muffins.

I had a crazy night last night, and I will go into further detail about it tomorrow.

Tonight I want to talk about Mother's Day.

My mom and I are really two peas in a pod. The same things make us angry, and we push people's buttons in the same way. This means that though we love each other to pieces, we drive each other up a wall on a fairly frequent basis. (It also means that we feel horrible in the same way about making each other insane, and have long periods of butting heads to fix said instances of turning each other nutso.)

However, tonight I want to talk about a really interesting thing that happened to me recently.

As you know if you've been reading, I have committed to writing on this blog every day. What I have not said before is that I have a separate (and also difficult) writing challenge for myself of keeping a daybook/journal/braindumpster/whathaveyou in paper form as well, with the commitment to write in it every day. The original intent was to use it for something like a planning book for this blog, to develop ideas and make them stronger for self publishing on this public forum. However, as is usually the case with me, I was having a hard time getting started.

So I wrote about my pen.

I have a strong love of office supplies that borders on obsessive-compulsive. (I am pretty sure that I also acquired this from my mother as well.) I required the paper surface for my notebook to be smooth and creamy in texture, thick but not too thick, and pens that glide, with ink that looks amazingly black and rich before it dries.

For this notebook I had treated myself to new pens, medium point black gel, that I had recognized in the store as a tool I had used before and enjoyed. I don't think I remembered where I had originally used it, but I knew it would serve in the meantime.

It was not until I wrote in the date that I remembered that this was not just a good pen. This was an AWESOME pen. Ink flowed out beautifully, with no globs in sight, giving me just the right blacker-than-black sheen before drying enough not to smudge. It made my horrible chicken scratch handwriting look nice (or if not nice, charmingly artistic.)

It came back like a punch in the stomach where I had used this pen first.

In 2008, my family went to visit my older brother in Morocco, where he was living and working at the time. I was a miserable little snot on this trip for a variety of reasons, mainly that I was not willing to admit to myself that I was already dealing with major depression. I was determined to be unhappy on this voyage, and so far was living up to my goal rather well.

On the particular day in question, we were making a jaunt to Berber territory, where there was a waterfall. We learned upon arriving that the trip to the waterfall required a significant hike up a very steep mountain. I am pretty sure that hiking is one of my private circles of hell, especially when it is 90 degrees outside. Living up to my goals once again re:miserable snottyness, I baulked and told my family that I would be staying at the bottom, thankyouverymuch. I did not desire more blisters than I had already gotten on our few days in Morocco.

My mother, bless her, decided that she would stay at the bottom of the mountain with me, where we found shade in a tiny Berber cafe. I had planned on knitting on a shawl that I was working on, but quickly got bored. My mother is an avid travel journaler, and had bought a pack of assorted gel pens for the trip. She handed me a burgundy pen, and suggested that if I was bored, I could write in my journal, or maybe get a head start on postcards.

I wrote more in that journal than I had on any trip up to that point. It was an amazing afternoon that I would not trade for anything. For several hours, I was able to forget my horrible attitude, and have a genuinely amazing time with the woman who is almost too much like me to handle.

I hope she remembers that day as fondly as I do, and I hope she knows how amazing I think she is every day, even when one of us is driving the other crazy.

I love you Mom. Happy Mother's Day.

The following clip (just to lighten the mood) is from Adaptation. I saw this clip tonight in the excellent screenwriting documentary Tales From the Script, and it illustrates the primary issue I have when writing. Take it away, Nick Cage: