children & art

Just about one month until the amazing Tigerlily (TL) is born. I’m getting really excited. I’ve gotten her some of the cutest things ever from Mountain Aven Baby—check it! http://www.mountainavenbaby.etsy.com

And in the midst of that excitement, I get the news from Erin (I called it completely, about a week ago, before she mentioned anything) that she, too, is going to have a baby!

I do get genuinely more excited about my friends’ children than I used to. Although, it’s matched by my sense of feeling left behind. Which is certainly not a feeling I feel towards my friends, but towards myself. Or perhaps, just about my life.

I think about my choices all the time. I wonder, even, if it’s wise to leave New York at this stage. I’m so eager to be somewhere else, but already, the things I’m going to miss out on by not being in New York are starting to stack up. Productions I want to see, concerts, opportunities. Does leaving now mean the end of me writing for theatre? If I wanted to come back, would it be the same?

But I just feel, that if I don’t get out right now, at least for a little while, that I’ll never devote enough time to writing to get anywhere. And I’ll keep running on a wheel trying to scrape some kind of life by on an arts salary. And worst of all, that if I stay in New York, I will never get married or have a family.

I saw RED on Tuesday, a play about the painter Mark Rothko and I keep thinking about it. Painting is the one art form that I don’t seem to get. I don’t have the kind of visceral reaction to paintings that some do. Indeed, the idea of spending $50,000 or whathaveyou on a painting is downright ludicrous to me. Maybe it’s because I’m not so much a visual person. A painting could never make me feel what a song does or a poem does. The way old books feel in your hands or smell. (I just got a 1899 copy of the full poems and letters of Keats and I’m in heaven with the thing.)

The only way I’ve ever really gotten a window into the emotions of it all is as a metaphor for something else, or—as is the case with RED or Sunday in the Park With George—as the topic of something philosophical through words and music. I see the point with the permanence of a painting. That you make something that wasn’t there before. It’s a fixed image, whereas live events, even songs have a beginning and an end.

I  guess it’s just one more way to view that I live my life with my mind and not my body or even my eyes. And I might have a hard time having a family all in my mind.