I had a dusk-to-dawn porch light installed because she is not here to light the candle in the window. I had a motion detector light installed under the garage eave because it gets dark at night. I am surrounded by light. I am also immersing myself in noise to staunch the quiet. I would say (write) music, rather than noise, but I don’t hear it yet. I hear dry, but connected, tones that do not move me. Music used to move me… lying on the living room floor with my eyes closed, Really listening to “Hotel California”… Playing the grooves out of “Rumours”… Rerunning my “Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)” 8-track tape.

I wrote a play with music in January. I’ve titled it “Bender”. I wrote original lyrics and convinced playwright Karen Fix Curry to write the (lovely) music. The play started as an experiment in dialect. I determined to write three connected one-acts but they blossomed into a full-length instead. It’s about three women who discover their individual, unique voices once they finally accept each other’s friendship and themselves for who they are. It was selected by OCPA Studios for a reading on April 27, 2013 at Stage Door Repertory Theatre in Anaheim. But she won’t be there to experience it. So I’ll dedicate it and the day to her. And the next day I’ll rest, meditate and pray for the strength to get out of bed.

I mean, can you have this much stuff? Surrounded I was. Walls coming down on me. The smells of her and dust and filth. Uncluttered I am now after disposing of… so much. Yes, it’s freeing. I’m pondering, releasing, transitioning more every day. Write a play, some say. It’s too soon… feels hinky. Or is it? I do feel the stuff zooming, hiding when I turn to peer around at it, skirting my subconscious. God dammit. I know there will come a day when I sit down in the freshly laundered purple pjs she bought me from Bloomies, my first, but where she spent her young professional years shopping. Sitting in a newly painted room with slide guitar playing in the bg to cut the unnatural silence of me not yelling because she was hard of hearing. It feels usury to think about it now. The wound is too deep. It’s too soon. But i know, someday, I’ll write. And it pains me now because it means I am that much farther away, removed, which makes me madder — even as I know I’ll be cherishing, paying homage to her… It’ll be from a distance.

Charlotte, as she preferred to be called, died peacefully on March 18th at the tender age of 84. It is not my intention to be flippant in the use of “tender age” rather than “ripe old age”. My dearest friend didn’t want anything to do with old people and became as if five-years-old again in her later years. In fact, I was wont to call her Baby Charlotte, a nickname she had when she was a much younger woman, before I knew her.

Charlotte said, “I’m not going to die tonight” and I’m guessing through the sheer force of her indomitable spirit, she did survive until 12:35am on the 18th. I am devastated. Once the shock wore off that first day, I felt as if a rocket launcher sent a missile through my chest. The wound was both gaping and terrible.

She got mad at me when I got fat and grew my hair out, as I was no longer “chic”. But, in general, to her, I moved the sun and the stars. I was the smartest kid on the block. Who is going to ever think that of me again, I wonder… Who am I, if not seen through Charlotte’s eyes?

We joined households seven years ago and she was the first person I spoke to in the morning and the last person I said “sleep well” to every night. Charlotte was my best friend. She was also the person to whom I read scenes and dialogue and talked about conflict and action and plays and life and politics and animals and controversial issues in the news.

Charlotte studied at the Pasadena Playhouse back in the day, did summer stock, and moved to New York where she wore a mink hat with a black ribbon, high heels, red lipstick, gloves, and worked for an esteemed theatrical producer. Later, in Los Angeles, she worked as a casting assistant on many recognizable films and television shows.

While I mourn my friend and find myself surrounded by silence, I wonder, now who is going to read my work? Who is going to be my sounding board, my confidant, my champion, my best friend, my muse? I wonder if I’m strong enough to stand alone. I am certain she was prepping me for this day. God, I miss her.

I just had something fabulous and easy transpire. Back in January I saw that Laura Shamas was having a staged reading of a play directed by someone whom I met years ago at Actors Theatre of Louisville. That director is quite good at comedy… and I have a comedy… so I got the director’s email address from Laura and contacted him about reading my script.

He graciously agreed to read it… and then did so in just a few days. We met a few days after that, seemed to be on the same page – he gave me just a handful of easy-to-execute notes that I agreed with… and then he sent the rewrite out to a couple three theatres to see if they were interested, with him attached to direct.

He heard back a short time later from an artistic manager at one of the theatres. He liked the play and has now passed it on to his board for consideration in their upcoming season.

Wow, that was easy!

Why can’t finding a director for my screenplay be as easy? (I’ve been through three of them – two dropped out and one I just let go last Friday.)

Oh, hold on. Maybe I should tell you the full story behind the stage play launch. I finished it two years ago this month and had a couple of readings of it that were hysterically funny. I thought it was ready to submit.

I diligently sent the script out, using contact names so the submissions wouldn’t be “cold” and so my script wouldn’t land in the slush pile. A year and a half went by… and radio silence. Nothing. Even with follow-up emails from me. Then Fierce Backbone (my writers’ and actors’ group) gave the script a thumbs up for production. We’re low on funds at the moment, so it was going to have to be a co-production at another theatre. Our managing director sent my script out to some theatres… no nibbles.

But once the director got involved and had his name attached, people were interested – including a theatre where our managing director had sent the script (gosh, they didn’t remember getting the script the first time – even though they had a conversation with our managing director about it!).

I’m sure this is a great lesson in perseverance. It’s also a lesson in feeling equal to the energy of the well-known stage director. It’s a lesson in trusting my intuition when I had a gut feeling to contact him.  It’s a lesson in letting someone else help shepherd my project.

Now I’m telling the universe that I WANT THE SAME THING TO HAPPEN WITH MY FILM SCRIPT TO GET A GOOD DIRECTOR AND LAUNCH THIS PUPPY.

Just read an article by Randy Lewis in the L.A. Times today about how he and some friends made a commitment to sing Mozart’s choral piece “Ave Verum Corpus.” As a daily ritual. And they’re in different cities.

I said in my letter to Randy just now, I don’t know the piece and I don’t know many of Mozart’s compositions (a few of the “greatest hits,” sure), but Randy’s article gave me goosebumps and tears. Here’s the link to it:

The Power to Lift and Heal

1. Aaron Swartz.  He was a social justice activist who lead in the defeat of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).  Had SOPA not been defeated, then the operation of the internet would have granted giant corporations boundless censorship powers.  He was the creator of RSS (Really Simple Syndication”) which changed how people get online content and allowed for accessing different sources of information.  As an example, RSS enables how millions of people get their podcasts.  He committed suicide in January  11th at the age of 26, under the extreme pressures of the prosecution of the government – charging him with 13 felony charges under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA).
2. Jacob Appelbaum – A computer security researcher who is a developer and advocate for the TOR project, a system that enables users to communicate anonymously on the internet.  He and two other individuals, has been the target of government in its investigation by secret efforts to gather private information for the purpose of its investigation into Wikileaks.  The federal appeals court had granted the government a warrant to subpoena and acquire the Twitter records of the subjects of their investigation.
3. Julian Assange (the recent recipient of  the Yoko Ono Lennon Courage Award for the Arts in absentia)

Yoko Ono: “This 2013 Courage Award for the Arts is presented to Julian Assange.  With your courage, the truth was revealed to us – thank you – and gave wisdom and power to heal the world.  On behalf of the suffering world, I thank you.  Yoko Ono Lennon.  Thank you.

“As people we have to realize that we’re all people, somebody is somebody’s son, somebody is somebody’s daugher.  And I try to picture it that way.  Would you want somebody doing that to your son?  Would you want somebody doing that to your daughter?  If not, why do it?  Through this whole experience I’ve learned that.”

Iris (not verbadim, but from what I remember from the play):  “I’ve been thinking about God.  Not God in the person sense, but God in how we are to each other.”

The view from my office window looks down on a house with a flag on the front lawn.  It’s a consulate’s house, and today there are two painters working on the French patio door.  They are brushing the cross bars in grey, carefully lining the paint on the wood.  Their heads tilt to the sway of the brush.  Watching them is a good break from the pop-up letters and numbers on my computer screen.  I can imagine their faces, like children, focused on the lines and texture of their brushes on the medium.  It must be rewarding work, I think, from the relaxed poses of their bodies.   The painters are beautifying and preserving something of value.  Their tools and material of paper sand, brushes, buckets, scrapers, spackling paste, tapes, rollers, drop cloths – are for the intent of construction and not destruction.

 I usually start my day with reading the news.  Yesterday marked the anniversary of the war on Iraq over their presumed Weapons of Mass Destruction.  I digest the short paragraph which is general.  It stirs an inexplicable emotion, except for a wish.  I wish I had the guts to express how I truly feel about war, and specifically about that war.  I feel inadequate and invalidated to be specific about my opinions and feelings about any big issue, because I know it is not as black and white as reported to me, who lives thousands of miles from the source of the news.  The big issues are those that affect everyone.  But we don’t all want to be affected.  For me I don’t want to be affected, because that war seems unreal and hard to accept.  Maybe that’s why I can’t be specific, and bold to express my feelings and thoughts about war.   I can only describe my feelings as grief over a loss.  I don’t know yet what that loss is.  Perhaps it is one of these or all:  loss of innocence, loss of humanity, loss of sanity. 

 One of the topics about the Iraq war recently is the mass displacement and epidemic birth defects and cancer found among the population, and the cause is suspected to be the “US military’s extensive use of depleted uranium and white phosphorus”.  That is specific.  What is more specific is to see a picture of a newly born baby with more than 2 sets of arms and 2 sets of legs, and its internal organs formed outside of its internal cavity.

I remember during one of the lessons in a writing class.  The teacher talked about specificity and he presented it like looking at the multitude of faces of a cut crystal.  One face is described as “Metaphor is a tool to bring an experience of universality to the specifics of our story.”  I sat quietly, working.  Then my mind wandered away from the intensity.  The eyes shifted from the page to the view.  I spotted the painters, and I’m reminded of the headlines I read.  My subconscious has been quietly knitting at the images and words to make sense of the juxtaposition of construction to destruction.

 The brush paints up and down and side to side of the wooden frames.  Straight, neat lines contrasts the spider baby with its medusa appendages sprawling out of its torso.

 “Working with metaphor allows us to say a lot with few words.  It is a way of helping the reader to understand the underlying themes.  It can also be a way of making challenging issues accessible.”                 –  Al Watt (LA Writer’s Tribe)

I’ve recently picked up my physical activities by going back to the YMCA.  I’ve been taking spinning classes alternating that with swimming and some workouts on my own.  I had a bad case of the flu in February, and I’d forgotten the feeling of good health during my sick time.  After a lengthy and tenuous recuperation period, I began to appreciate what it feels like to be healthy.

It’s so humbling to do the simple things that keep life going smoothly.  With me, I found that I have a strong resistance to doing the simple things.  To do the simple things means:

1. “showing up”
2. “having the intention to work”
3. “having the intention to push beyond my boundaries”
4. “having gratitude to be able to do it”

 My good friend puts it this way (regarding working out), he said, “It’s a privilege to be able to work out”.  It is what he reminds himself when he does not feel the motivation to exercise.  Health is a privilege.  Creativity is a privilege.  Life is a privilege.

 Privilege defined:

  “a right or immunity granted as an advantage or favor esp. to some and not others.”    The Merriam-Webster Dictionary

 “a special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group of people”      Oxford Dictionary

 Without getting into a political debate or philosophical debate, I just want to explore the depth of having the privilege to health, creativity and life.  I think it is becoming more of a privilege to have these things than a right.  Most people in our affluent society are born with good health, creativity, and naturally being born is life itself.  There are circumstances that occur that deprive some of us of these basic things.  The immediate circumstance that comes to mind is having the  financial ability to afford education, nutritious food, clean and safe habitation.  When I consider the hazards of living in Afghanistan or Syria, or anywhere else where to make a living is a hard struggle, then it is indeed, a privilege to be healthful, to be creative and to live as I am only able to imagine and will myself to be. 

Last week I was driving to work from my “annual” physical and it was busy in Beverly Hills, and people were driving like lunatics.  But I was relaxed.  Being over 40, I am now belong tothe group of women that needs to have a mammogram as part of my physical.  I put “annual” in quotes because this is my conversation with my doctor:

 Doctor:  “Hi Miss Revilla.” (He shook my hand while his other hand held my chart.) “It’s been a long time.”

Me:  “Not really.  2 years?”

Doctor looks down on the chart.

Doctor:  “Your last physical was in 2006. You came in 2009 for a cough, but you haven’t been back.”

Me (feeling sheepish):  “Wow, how time flies.”

 I have insurance coverage from work, but I have not gone for my annual physical, because I am of two minds on this:  One is, I wonder if there’s an insurance scam about the process, two, I really don’t like getting bad news. 

 Doctor:  “You didn’t go for your follow up mammogram in 2007.”

Me:  “I think I was out of the country.”

Doctor:  “Promise to go this time.  Otherwise my office gets these yellow cards that remind us it’s my responsibility to ensure my patients go for their checkups.”

Okay.  I promised to do so.  

A few days later, I showed up for my appointment at the Beverly Tower Women’s Center.  After the examination with its tricky maneuvers, holding poses and breaths, and squeezing my mammary glands between two cold plates of plastic, I told the technician, “Now I know why I didn’t go for my follow up.”  She laughed.  She told me to wait in a private lounge while the radiologist reviews the x-ray images.

 The last time I sat in that room was in 2006.  I had to to come back for follow up tests after the initial screening.  They explained after their intense diagnostics that the density of the tissues in my breast made it hard for them to see if something is abnormal.  This time around I thought, I’m sure everything is okay like the last time.  The technician returned.  “Analyn, the doctor wants to do an ultrasound.  Can you wait here please?”

 Of course I smiled, and nodded yes, but I thought, “Do I have a choice?”  Then I began to worry.  It’s been 7 years since my last examination, and I wonder if that little thing they found has turned into something not so little anymore.  The next minutes turned into agonizing moments.  “What if it’s bad news?”  Now, I reflect back on my thought process then, and how my mind prioritized what’s important to me.  I confess, I asked for the chance to spend time with my fiancé so I can make him happy. 

 After the appointment, as I drove back to the office I felt a sense of freedom, hence my relaxed state when there were people driving with little courtesy for others.  But I didn’t mind if someone changes lanes without using their turn signals, or if someone blocks the intersection during a change of lights.  The ease (lack of “dis”-ease, came from the freedom of knowing what truly matters in life to me.

Another female mentor spoke it well, when I described to her my experience at the doctor’s office.  My mentor is a survivor of cancer.  She said to me, “You definitely learn to pick your battles.”

The battle for me is working on the simple things:

1. “showing up”
2. “having the intention to work”
3. “having the intention to push beyond my boundaries”
4. “having gratitude to be able to do it”

 My simple things are to maintain health, to write, to play guitar, ride the motorcycle and to serve with love.

 I recently finished the book, “Tuesdays With Morrie”, by Mitch Albom.  I want to share some good quotes from it:

 “The truth is, once you learn how to die, you learn how to live.” – Morrie Schwartz

 “So many people walk around with a meaningless life. They seem half-asleep, even when they’re busy doing things they think are important. This is because they’re chasing the wrong things. The way you get meaning into your life is to devote yourself to loving others, devote yourself to your community around you, and devote yourself to creating something that gives you purpose and meaning.” – Morrie Schwartz

Between 2006 and now I’ve changed in my attitude about the annual physical.  Even if I belived that the physical examination could be an insurance scam (and I don’t know the machinery behind all that), I choose not to mind being a tool for it, for the reason that my eyes were opened during those minutes in that waiting room to the gift of health, creativity and life.

Laura Shamas suggested that this week’s blogger write something about International Women’s Day.  I didn’t know that there was one and went to Wikipedia (where else) to find out something about it.

The entry is complicated and long and not very well written and I’ll have to take more  time to understand the history of the Day, which started in the Soviet Union, and then spread to Eastern European countries and the rest of the world.

In dozens of countries, some of which observe the day as a holiday, women have used IWD to agitate for equal rights in every aspect of a woman’s life –  the right to vote, to hold public office, to end sexual exploitation and employment sex discrimination.  In the Soviet Union, it was also a day in which to thank women for their heroism and selflessness in World War II.

In 1977, the United Nations formally proclaimed March the 8th as International Women’s Day –  a day for women’s rights and world peace.

Shockingly, human trafficking is the second most profitable business enterprise in the world, just behind the Drug Trade and ahead of Arms Sales.  The U.N., which has given each year a slogan, perhaps acknowledging that, calls 2013 a year in which “A Promise is a Promise:  Time for Action to End Violence Against Women.”

Today, the day before IWD, is a good day for women in the U.S..  President Obama just signed a renewal of the Violence Against Women Act, which has been extended to cover Native Americans, Immigrants, and Gays.  The renewed law makes it easier to prosecute crimes against women in federal court, and provides such services as domestic abuse hotlines and shelters for battered women.

“All women deserve the right to live free from fear,” Obama said during a signing ceremony at the Interior Department. “That’s what today is about.”

A day for hope.

What if there was an International Men’s Day, I thought to myself?  Would that mean that we had achieved parity?  Turns out there is one.  Founded in Trinidad and Tobago in 1999, to encourage good role models, gender equality, and men’s health, it has now spread to 60 countries.

And that’s a good sign, too.