PAINTING CITIES

My paintings live in odd places. The doctor who saved JD's life when he was born has one. My trainer in Malibu has one. My mother had two, but after she left the world, her nurse sent them back to me. A psychotherapist whom I consulted when I was crippled has one. I gave one I love to Bethy, who handles our accounts. One is propped against my light, which hangs over this desk, and lights up my keyboard.

Acrylics, layered on like oils, blues, reds, pinks, purples. a swirl of stars like tiny flowers, my vision of a galaxy -- it's leaning against the desk lamp like a bulletin board. I've clipped onto it a typed list of the posts on my blog, Fran/ Sue/JD phone and fax numbers, passwords, set up data, and Earthlink case numbers.

I keep thinking it's time to buy a clipboard, or an easel, but I just clip on more papers. Continue ignoring out-of-date notes taped here and there, on my large, curved, beige Exxon desk, into which my green velvet desk chair (on wheels) is pulled. So I sit a proper distance from my 24 inch monitor and keyboard. With the computer diagonally to my right like a bird's wing, hovering above the surge protector into which everything is plugged. Except the router, which sits on an old mahogany desk (like the desk chair) that JC scrounged, carried upstairs from the street, along with shelves and wastebaskets, that once upon a time belonged to an office of someone who's gone out of business.

Get the picture? I was going to describe my paintings, not my office, but like the paintings, it's like a stage set, every piece, every part expressing, representing a thought, a choice.

Similarly, the hallways. They're the gallery for my paintings -- large, medium, and small New York cityscapes. I enjoy details, daubing in, layering on, doing fine lines, doing with painting what I do when I'm on the phone with a pencil in my hand. I draw intricate flowers, stems, branching into more stems, dividing into thinner ones that turn into twigs, each with a leaf or two, each leaf, with a spine from which capillaries extend to its scalloped edges. The cityscapes were inspired by a photo of the city that I saw in a magazine -- an infinity of buildings above which other buildings hover, behind which smaller buildings peep, all of them with windows. My goodness, sometime I ought to count how many windows. Squares, rectangles, some with oval arches are minutely, delicately calligraphed in the largest cityscape in the hall outside our theater -- it's the city in shades of orange, reds, and gold leaf lacquer, a 3 foot by 5 foot canvas.

Meticulous, ridiculous ! There goes the rhymer in me, rhyming words for the fun of it as I sidle up to describing my clowns. The doorway of JD's room has a door-size girl clown, a portrait of me done in oils; with felt, montage style giving me a moo-cow's fake eyelashes. Next to the front door there's an 8 x 4 foot clown on it (JC) -- oils, colored glass buttons, and sequins from an old costume. I did the clowns when JD was a toddler, so that when we were in and out of town, the life-size clowns were Mommy and Daddy, always present.

Once, when I was painting a lot, because I was between tours (had no new choreography projects in mind, and writing was daily logs about what to do), a friend brought a gallery owner over from Boston. He studied them, all of them, and said, after hemming and hawing ... "Uh well, they might um ... sell ... but ... "

But he never explained more. Want to buy a fascinating painting? JC in the other room was given, by Paramount pictures, a Canon camera and color printer. (He did a big part "Charlotte's Web" from which he was completely cut.) I told JC that it would be nice to have a picture of my galaxy clipboard ... maybe, one of these days we'll do a blog exhibit.

OUCH! WHY AM I STRETCHING?

I sigh, and look down at my motionless hands on the keyboard, not wanting to explain why I'm stretching too much. Dr. Em is telling me, "C'mon, the pain in your knee, the pain in your back means STOP. But I'm not going to stop.

We've been sold the idea, from the pain killer purveyors (manufacturers, as well as drug stores), and doctors (who are, themselves, out of shape and aging), that we're older, stiffer, less capable in hundreds of small ways, but it's natural/normal, and okay to feel better with a pill or two. Thanks but no thanks! Pills are a temporary solution.

About a year-and-a-half ago, I was frantically finishing a version of my big book about Cordelia (with its chameleon titles), and agent A. who "loved" it, suddenly wanted an e-mail version of the 800 page manuscript.

I use Word Perfect, not Microsoft Word. The processes are different. It meant I had to fix 22 elements, fonts, line spacing, margins, headers (and proof read the manuscript again). Did it in three days, during which I ate snacks in my office, didn't do any of my exercise routines, took naps on the cot in the studio. Agent A got the e-mail manuscript; and I got -- well, I resumed my usual warm ups, and tried to do my dance -- the aches I got were incapacitating.

Since then, inch by inch, stretch by stretch, I've been pushing myself back to where I was. What happened? Three days off hurt me? Burning the candle at both ends hurt me? I don't know what did it. But same as the 22 elements that had to be fixed in word processing, there's a whole lot of fixing I've had to do.

No, I didn't go to the Doc. I know more about my muscles, ligaments, bones than any doctor I'd consult; I've seen the X-rays. I knew from the symptoms, and a recent blood test that there was nothing to be learned from more X-rays or a blood test. When rotators (turn-out muscles), feet, knees, spine at my waist hurt (the L1, L2 area that's been fused), I work "away" from the pain. Continue dancing, working out, but use other muscles.

Want to know more? Look up "dancing" in the list of labels on the right. I've described various aches and pains and how I cure them. It's not boring to read, but boring do. It's taken months to get back strengths that I lost. Instead of straining, struggling, I change my warm-ups, and change the choreography of the daily dance I do to Ralph Vaughn William's "Fantasia."

Here's where I'm at: Whether it is the slipperiness of the floor, or my lessening technique, no longer can I do double pirouettes reliably. Privately deciding to hell with it, sometimes I do a double; sometimes l don't. Dr. Em has told me, and I'm obeying. I've restored a sequence of "second position" plie stretches, am doing four split stretches on the mat -- am once again doing the grim, painful, turn-out stretches I did when I first began studying dance. Masochistic beginner stretches I eliminated because they're too damn painful, and I could do splits.

Not anymore. Not since those three days.

Yes, yes -- I am pushing myself. And every day I feel it more in the groin, knees, hips. But I'm stretching to see if I can get back to what I was doing a year and a half ago. I won't keep doing it forever. If it isn't possible, I'll adjust. I have to. Yes, ouch! I'm fighting age -- aren't we all -- but I'm doing it, very -- ouch -- realistically!

WHAT STAYS WITH ME. . .

Seeing "Farrah's Story" on television ... her fight, her struggle ... we were, for a while ... waiting, hoping she'd be cured.

We cheered her, enjoyed the Peeping Tom aspects of the camera work, and peeped at visions of her home, her habits, the glossing over of cancer of the anus. Was it mentioned, or wasn't it? We were hearing so much about a grim cancer of the liver.

Her hair do, famous hair, was the tousled look of it now just the current style, or was it, wasn't it less abundant? Watching the hair, remembering it in a previous scene as we saw the next scene, next phase of her treatment, it was a relief when she bravely shaved it. On tenterhooks we needed that glimpse of her hair, the cap, the blond strands on her forehead. Our eyes, our emotions were focused on that for the next few minutes, next frames, next shots, till we saw blond hair, longer, more of it coming out from her cap.

Indefatigable efforts ... the cost ... All the things she tried, she did, she endured trying to beat the liver cancer. Were you wondering, (I was wondering), cringing a little, waiting to hear if her anal cancer was treated. Or was it cured?.

Her son... A story unto itself, untold except for a few sentences about probation. Wasn't there a reference to him wearing leg chains? Was Ryan O'Neal his father? When did they dissolve their relationship, and why -- from what over-indulgence has handsome Ryan O'Neal become almost unrecognizably puffy, dissolute?

The glimpses of the three "Charlie's Angels" One of them untouched by time. The other older, wiser, somehow damaged by the way her life is unfolding ... It distracted from the question building in our minds -- why insist on returning HOME when trusted doctors say the plane trip endangered her and the healing process?

We did, do admire her for fighting, finding humor... but ...

As doctors gave her bad news -- not cured, cancer cells developing elsewhere -- caught in the theater of the suspenseful plot unfolding, I wanted it to be over. The show ... her life ... My mind was talking to me, interrupting the scene ... "When was this made?" "Is she still alive?" "How will this show end?"

At 10: 44 checking the clock during the commercial, knowing there would be at least two more scenes, I yearned for the story to be over.

Did you sleep well, last night? I didn't. I thought wryly of all the phone calls doctors were going to get, questions they couldn't answer, and would need to avoid.

The show left me feeling sad for Farrah, sad for me, sad for any and all of who know that the elements that create energy, zest, powerful decisive actions are strengthened by NOT dealing with death as a destiny.

Lack of sleep makes me wonder if my logic is slipping. I think, based on my experience with illness, when you're fighting to feel better, trying to heal, you close the door on the fears of failure. Isn't that what Farrah's story was saying?

No. It showed her fighting while she's dying. The dying was stronger, the winner, at the end of the drama. I was left with dying.

GREEN GREEN VINE

JC's family is a vine -- that's what I said to myself, the day I met them.

(I was nervous, wanting them to like me, wanting to like them, and have like become love. But I was divorced, and from an agnostic Jewish family, who didn't bring me up with any religion. That's a story to tell when you know me better, when you're used to the way I think-talk-write.)

I felt his family was a vine many times. Like yesterday. His niece called when JC was at the theater performing. She told me what she was planning to tell "Uncle Johnny." The way she says his name ... lovingly, reverently ... She sings it, knowing he's there for her, even if she's called when she couldn't reach him.

The vine, the Uncle Johnny part of it, rambles this way and that way, weaves around the other cousins, nieces, nephews, grandchildren, spouses. Attaches itself to other families, who by marriage have annexed themselves and grown into another twist, another curving tendril climbing, winding, intertwining with other vines in the state of Tennessee, the Carolinas, creeping along, sending offshoots to the Virginas, and the deep south.

My dictionary says -- "vine: inert vegetation whose stem requires support, which climbs by tendril or twining, or creeps along the ground." The image stays with me as the vine, over the years, has gotten denser, tangled, sprawling, surrounding JC. Not me. Just JC. Not JD. It's a pang, remembering JD as a teenager, trying to become part of the family, realizing he couldn't, discovering he couldn't be himself if he let himself be overgrown by them.

I've heard young members in the family talking about seeing the world, and becoming a different person in a different place. Seen them not go. Just settle into the whorl, their place on the vine. Yes. I've seen new leaves, new tendrils dormant, unable to escape or separate or move away from the roots. And yes, JC did escape, and separate. He's the only one in the family that I know of who has. (JC says there are few others who have , but I never met them.)

It's a powerful moralistic ideal JC has in him, bred into him. He's a part of the family that has never been dormant, quiescent or caught by the twirls and whirls of this ever larger green growing vine.

Why does make me glad to be a tree on separate ground, with roots twining off in other directions ? Despite the cousins and their offspring who can't get away, the vine is still a marvelous thing, especially because something so green and strong and powerful as JC is a part of it. Maybe that's all the vine needs, a JC growing toward the sun.