Mother's Day at Storm King

We had the most beautiful Mother's Day!   

Have you been to Storm King?  It's an open-air museum full of mostly-but-not-only large-scale modern sculptures, situated beautifully on a large campus about an hour outside of NYC.  You can bring a picninc.  You can rent bikes to toodle around.  It's gorgeous AND it's a great place to go with young kids who can run and make noise and explore and enjoy nature as well as taking in the art.  Here are some photos to give you a sense:

The open space, the woods at the borders, the sun, the smell of the air all combined to evoke so many happy memories of my back yard, summer camp at Cornell, time in England, time at Vassar, biking in France with my husband.  The biggest gift was how it all combined to make me (allow me?) to feel more expansive, happy and optimistic than I have in a really long time.

I don't imagine that Storm King will provide such a profoundly joyful experience for everyone as it does for me, but I do encourage you to go for a visit if you have the chance. 

Calico Easter Eggs

For Christmas, Santa brought my son a doll house.  It was the only thing he wanted. 

The doll house was very popular right around Christmas, then it had a long-ish break with intermitent play, but lately it's been getting a lot more attention again.  These days, though, my son is NOT into having the doll house in any kind of order.  In fact, he used the word "ransacked" to describe how it looked which was accurate.  Why he wants his poor Koala family to live like that is beyond me, but it prompted me go get a little bin to put the tiny accessories in so they don't get vaccummed up during this disarray phase.  And looking at all of the delightful little doll house things, reminded me of this amazing Easter Egg the makers hid in the newspapers that came with the living room furniture.

There are two newspapers.  Sunday, April 1 and Monday, April 2.  Here they are:

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I mean, come on.  He discovered a treasure!  But then: he was so disappointed because "Treasure was just a broken box!"  I find this endlessly hilarious.  And I want to thank whoever behind the scenes at Epoch or Tomy designed these amazing tiny newspapers. 

Mickey, Gillian and Me

I worked with Mickey Rooney, who died this past week, when I was a little girl.  I remember doing not-much-at-all in one scene of something-or-other and being totally confused about which guy Mickey Rooney even was for most of the time, but I remember that it was a BIG deal to the adults in my family.  Mickey Rooney was a big deal and rightly so.  He was also the rare individual who managed to start acting as a kid and sustain that career into (and, in his case, through) his adulthood.

 

A couple of months ago, Gillian Jacobs (who you probably know from the TV show Community) was interviewed in Backstage and had this to say about her own transition from being a child actor to an adult one:

“I had a very difficult time at school. I think when you have some success as a kid, your notion of being a good actor is pleasing the director, doing exactly what they tell you to do,” she says. “Juilliard wanted me to realize I had agency in my role as an actor: It was important for me to make decisions and have opinions and not just do what they told me to do to the best of my ability. I think that’s a big paradigm shift.”

I've been thinking about this passage ever since I read it because it is such an excellent and succinct articulation of one of (THE?) biggest difference between going to auditions as a kid and going as an adult and why it can be so hard to find success as an adult after a childhood career.  I remember when I was re-embarking on an acting career after college, the adults around me - my parents, my childhood manager and agent - all said "you know what you're doing."  And, in retrospect, I'm not at all convinced that I did.  I've spent the intervening years trying to make sure I do know what I'm doing and discovering that I not only can but SHOULD have my own point of view as an artist - even as an actor saying someone else's words - is a more exciting opportunity on any given day than pleasing someone else.

Still, going in with that need to please - equating pleasing others with "success" - is a difficult habit to break, particularly when one has received so many positive strokes for that very thing growing up.  It's something I continue to work against - with mindfulness and practice - in the interest of being a truly excellent artist.  Even more, though, I don't think that this people-pleasing as an undermining factor in living a fully self-actualized life is limited to former young performers.  It seems to me that we get stuck in lots of roles we played as people growing up and that determining who we really are (and who we really want to be) is a huge part of becoming an adult and finding personal success for all of us.

Mickey Rooney had his share of ups and downs.  In his NY Times obit, Aljean Harmetz writes:

Although his career was one of the longest in show business history — almost 90 years separated his first movie from his last — it was crammed with detours and dead ends. (“There have been crevices, fissures, pits, and I’ve fallen into a lot of them,” he told The Times in 1979.)

It would be facile (not to mention presumptuous) to assume that those ups and downs all stemmed from a people-pleasing need, but hard not to suspect that that impulse wasn't at least one of the challenges in Mr. Rooney's mix.

What outdated aspect of your identity are you still carrying around or wrestling with?  How have you moved beyond that limitation and what has that meant for you?  Tell us all in the comments!

The Female of the Species

Yesterday morning, W (15 months) and I were headed to the park. I was pushing his empty stroller and he was walking alongside me, holding my hand. He gets a lot of looks when we do this - it's that funny little kid walk that's funny and cute. It doesn't hurt that he likes to wave and say Hi to random people. Anyway, we were walking along, and we were overtaken by a bigger kid - maybe three or four years old - a little girl walking along with her mom (I assume) and another lady. If the adults noticed W, I didn't see, but the little girl sure did. She locked her eyes onto him and did not stop staring 'till she was too far ahead of us to comfortably look that far behind her. She started with what seemed like a "serious" look, and as she (and we and it) progressed, her look got meaner and meaner. She was staring daggers at W.

I wondered what she was thinking - because he's too little to be anything but oblivious - and I flashed back to an incomplete memory of girls acting a lot meaner than they actually were. Unfairly, I only clearly remember being the victim of those "mean" girls - trying on extra meanness learned from TV or bigger kids or who-knows-what for effect. It's just a funny thing that seems to happen - like some kind of junior-social-darwinism - like puppies or bears play-fighting, I suppose.

The girls I remember practicing meanness on me, the ones with whom I'm still in touch, have all (as far as I can tell) grown up to be lovely women. I assume - I hope - this little girl will do the same. I still can't quite figure what's being worked out in the exercise, though. What are the little girls learning through the process and what would be lost if they stopped? And are the boys doing this too? (My sense is that, whatever boys are doing, it's different.)

Maybe someone science-y will leave a comment with the answer.