Tag Archives: the good-ish old-ish days

I’m the city I love, my home away from home, one that I’ve missed for a couple years, prepping to speak at BlogHer. (Please do come say hello if you’re here for the conference. I’m on a great panel - an intro to new social media platforms if you’re looking to know more. End shameless plug.)

Got in and immediately ran in the rain to The Strand, which I MUST do. Even on a trip this short there is soul food that must be had.

Time spent in NY always make me nostalgic for what might have been, what has been, what the future may bring, right here in this very city that always makes me feel so centered and at ease. The calm in the chaos.

And so, a revisit, below, because NY always makes me sentimental. I pass my old school, I think of what has come and gone. I think of what is yet to be, knowing that this life is an awfully big adventure.

I realize with bittersweet irony that the post below, written many months ago, began with my favorite Nora Ephron quote. Not a line of dialogue - of those I have my favorites, too. But her words from her life. A life that was still lived in this city when I wrote the post below. A life no longer here on earth, and yet, still so very much alive amidst the comings and goings of New York. As it should be.

Possibly wiser. Definitely Older. Redux.

Oh, how I regret not having worn a bikini the entire time I was twenty-six. If anyone young is reading this, go right this minute, put on a bikini, and don’t take it off until you’re thirty-four. – Nora Ephron

My friend Peter wrote a wonderful essay for CINEASTE magazine about Richard Linklater’s film Me and Orson Welles (it’s really good - check it out, here). He opens with a scene from another Linklater film, Before Sunset, in which Julie Delpy’s character is speaking to Ethan Hawke:

“I was having this awful nightmare that I was thirty-two. And then I woke up and I was twenty-three, so relieved. And then I woke up for real and I was thirty-two.”

It got me thinking about that twilight period in our very early twenties when we’re no longer children and not quite grown up, but life seems so full of possibility and the belief that things will be so much easier now that the drama of youth is over - only we haven’t yet realized that being an adult is just like high school with the added bonus of having to prepare our own taxes.

Now I don’t want to say that a decade later I’ve lost all that Auntie Mame-ish “Life’s a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death” passion, but I think I’m a bit more pragmatic. (I hope pragmatic isn’t a nice way of saying jaded.)

But I do sometimes wonder what 20-year-old me would think if she could jump in Doc Brown’s Deloreon and crank it to 2011.

On the one hand, I think she (aka me in this weird third-person hypothetical) might be a bit disappointed – wasn’t I supposed to meet the man I’d marry in college and have a few Greenwich Village babies by now? Wasn’t I supposed to be writing novels, which began as short stories in The New Yorker, that I would now be adapting into screenplays?

At twenty, that all seemed completely reasonable and, with hard work, attainable.

Although younger me might have expected the path to go differently, I don’t think that I would totally embarrass her in the way adolescents are mortified by all they consider uncool. But I know she’d be totally pissed to learn that things don’t get simpler the further you move away from adolescence.

(And, speaking of paths and kinda sorta related, The Road Not Taken is one of the most misunderstood poems EVER. There is no better path. Frost’s irony was lost in translation. )

Look, I could easily sit down and write a list of everything I wish I could have accomplished over the last decade and hadn’t and throw quite the pity party. But I could tear out another piece of paper and make a list of all the things I have done, and realize I am pretty damn lucky. The New Yorker isn’t on that list, but I’m a working writer, and I have a life filled with some pretty incredible people. People I can call up at 4 a.m. if need be.

Life, people, humanity – it can be pretty disappointing sometimes. But it can also be awesome.

So, when you wake up and you’re thirty-two or forty-two, or maybe a relieved twenty-three, I guess it’s all really a matter of which list you choose to write. Which list you choose to live by.

Which one do you choose?

xo a.

alexandra wrote tutu ©alexashersearsI have this Great Uncle who, from as early as I can remember, was always seated at the piano. He recently told a story of me at age three, this little girl belting out “Tomorrow” from Annie beside him at the keys, remarking at my perfect pitch. He’s takes music seriously, so the story surprised me when I first heard it. I was no Judy Garland, but I could sing.

My earliest memories are of Annie and Singing in the Rain. Of Oklahoma, Grease, South Pacific and Gypsy. And anything Gershwin. Lots of Gershwin. And The Beatles, too. I loved to sing. Preferably in full costume and maybe a pair of tap shoes. My sister and I, standing by the hearth in the living room, which always made for a good stage. Always singing. Sometimes fighting. Always singing.

And yet, somewhere along the line, sometime after years of children’s theatre and Shakespeare Camp and drama club - somewhere between once upon and time and not so long ago - I stopped singing. Almost completely. And I can’t anymore. Not like I could. Lately, slowly, I’ve found myself singing again. It’s not the same. I don’t breathe correctly, I can’t belt it out like I once did AT ALL and I certainly am far from pitch perfect.

I’m trying to pinpoint the moment I stopped singing along and simply began to listen to the music. I blame the opera singers.

Of all the places I’ve lived, my favorite was a great little building from the early forties (practically ancient by LA standards) with an ice box in the kitchen and French doors that opened upon a little patio - just enough space for a couple of bistro chairs and room for my English bully to lounge in the sun. Above me lived a sweet couple, older than my parents but not quite my grandparents’ age. They were retired opera singers. And many a morning, afternoon or evening as I sat writing on my little patio, I’d hear them singing upstairs. I loved to listen to them. It was magical. Aware of being able to hear them singing, I began to sing out loud far less when my patio doors or windows were open. Which was most of the time.

I sang. And then I didn’t. But now, once again, I do. A bit self-consciously. Minus the tap shoes.

I’ll never be that pitch perfect kid again. That’s OK. Maybe one day I’ll have daughters who will be. Who’ll sit beside my great uncle at the piano singing about orphans and millionaires, of burlesque stars and stage mothers. And Gershwin. Lots of Gershwin.

And now, five great things someone else said about the how music shapes our lives:

People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands - literally thousands - of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss. - Nick Hornby, High Fidelity

Music is the universal language of mankind. - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent. - Victor Hugo

If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn. - Charlie Parker

Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and life to everything. - Plato