Taking (Pass) Over

We are pretty good guests. We bring a dish, we offer to help serve and clear, and most important, we hugely appreciate being guests. Despite having cabinets and closets full of daily plates and glasses and barely used formal dishes, we have rarely hosted any dinner party.
 
Passover can be a huge dinner party. A Seder, the special Passover meal, involving both ceremonial and traditional foods, is a giant undertaking, and one for which I have been a guest pretty much my whole life. Not this year.
 
A few weeks ago, we found out that our usual Seder spot was not to be. Relatives would be traveling, meaning that we would be on our own. Would we try to be guests somewhere else? We are good guests, after all. Or would we go it alone, perhaps even become full-fledged hosts?
 
After several weeks of pondering it all (or not really dealing with it, depending on your point of view), I settled on the answer this weekend, and tonight (yes, I know, a night early), I hosted Passover for the very first time.
 
The guests? Just us, plus one. A day early? Well, at least I'd be home to cook, and set the table, and have the brainpower to figure out what was needed. The readings? From a single Haggadah that has been on my bookshelf for as long as I can remember.
 
It was an evening of improv, really. Improvising how much of anything to make. Improvising who would read what. Improvising the exact order in which we'd eat the foods I'd managed to assemble and prepare. But in the end, not only were we stuffed, as if we had been to someone else's home for the Seder, we had (if briefly) told the Passover story, complete with questions and plagues and opening doors and mispronunciations of unfamiliar words. It might not have been our normal holiday tradition, but it was an evening that I will remember for a long time. We took a holiday during which we normally just show up as guests, and we made it our own. We cooked and we ate and we learned a little something about freedom along the way.
 
Whether by choice or out of necessity, we are sometimes called upon to take over. To do more than just show up. To make the decisions, and, in doing so, to make our own new traditions.

And sometimes that can be the most freeing experience of all.

My Big Gay Italian Wedding

Tonight, I took my daughters and a few of their friends to see My Big Gay Italian Wedding, an incredibly funny--and touching--play written by and starring a longtime One Life to Live friend of mine. I had seen it in its infancy more than ten years ago, but I was excited to share it with some other people.
 
The fact that both the playwright/star and the director are my friends gave us the lovely perk of post-show pictures with the cast. I wasn't surprised that the group of girls, many of them huge theater fans, were excited about that. What did surprise--and impress--me, however, was how completely into the show the girls were. They laughed heartily at the loud over-the-top family members, they clapped along with the music, and they were genuinely moved by the vulnerability of the lead character. It didn't matter that many of the characters might be outside of their daily experience. Their reactions were lovely and human. And I was glad to know that, at least in one little corner of my world, we are raising our kids with the compassion to understand choices and families other than their own, and to feel for people other than themselves.
 
And I am glad to know that My Big Gay Italian Wedding is here every weekend (and now, in other places too!) to remind us how important those choices--and our big, crazy families--are.

Marketable Skills

Many, many years ago, I had lunch with one of my producers. I don't remember how the lunch came about, but I do remember, to this day, the main piece of advice this producer gave to me, advice that I think about and share everywhere I go.
 
While it was important, she said, to focus on doing a good job each day, it was equally as important to focus on the marketable skills I could learn along the way. At the time, I was probably considering training as a booth PA, a job that, at that point, I barely even understood. But since, at least at that time, people knew what a booth PA was, my training to do that job would give me a marketable skill wherever I went. If I liked it (it happened that I did), all the better, but either way, I would walk away with a skill set that could be transferred to other places. When I became an AD on OLTL, it turned out that the AD skills were also marketable--I used them to transition to prime time work as well. And the editing that I learned as part of my AD job has turned out to be perhaps the most marketable skill of all.
 
Obviously, you want to do as good a job as possible in the place where you are. Having people like you there doesn't hurt either--that will provide you with networking and references that you will undoubtedly need. But, as that producer told me all those years ago, the skills that you learn and add to your bag of tricks are sometimes the key to staying alive in a job market that is even more constantly changing now than when she gave me the advice.
 
Whether you are just starting out or deep into your career, it is never too late to start pocketing (and keeping track of) those marketable skills. You never know when they'll come in handy.

Fighting Through

I am lucky enough currently to be within walking distance of where I am working. (I suppose that technically, even when I was at ABC, it was walking distance--just a very long walk!)
 
Most days, I do walk, almost on auto-pilot. It is exercise, it saves the money of bus fare, and it gives me time to process things--home issues on my way to work, work issues on my way home, the quirks of people on the street at any time.
 
There are days, however, when even the short walk feels as though it will be exhausting. On those days, I find myself drifting toward a bus stop. While the bus won't get me all the way, it will do most of the hard work, and that is tempting. Sometimes, I do take the assist. But most days, I find myself walking past the bus stop--fighting through whatever foot pain or tiredness got me there in the first place. And I get to work, just the same, a bit of exercise under my belt, and a feeling of accomplishment along the way.
 
Now, walking fifteen minutes to work is not a huge accomplishment. I am not infirm, and many days, that is all the exercise I get (unless you count cleaning up after kids and boiling water for dinner). The accomplishment, as I see it, is the fighting through on those days when I really don't think I'll survive the fifteen minute walk. Fighting through that is generally just the beginning of the fighting through that I (and we all) do all day. Days are full of things we don't want to do, or don't think we can do. How we handle those things is what really determines our days. Do we look for the easy out--like the bus? Or do we fight through situations and find out that we really can handle them without any assist at all? Tests of our fight-through ability happen every day--how often do we find that when we do fight through, we actually reach our goals and feel better for it? 

I can't say that I will never take advantage of public transportation on the days when I just don't have it in me to fight through. But most days, I'll keep fighting. I know from experience that it makes me feel better--and stronger--at the end of my path.

On A Wednesday

If I remember correctly, I had a co-worker at One Life to Live who swore that every significant thing there happened on a Wednesday. Not plot points on the show, of course--any soap person could tell you that the important days, at least back then, were Mondays and Fridays. But behind the scenes, things happened on Wednesdays. Or so she said. Firings, edicts, big meetings, new policies. Perhaps even the announcement of the soaps' cancellation. Back then, if it was a Wednesday, you would do well to watch your back.
 
Honestly, I haven't thought too much about that Wednesday thing these past few years. I've been concentrating on Mondays (when I was unemployed, and that was my day to claim benefits and to start a new round of job letters), and on Fridays (when another week is done--for me and my kids--and I shift into weekend mode).
 
Today, however, so much seemed to happen that I actually asked, out loud, "What day is it?" While the Wednesday thing has not been consciously with me for years, clearly, it has been kicking around my subconscious. It was a feel-good moment, actually--that moment of connecting the present with the past. I guess that's the nice thing about having had a long history somewhere. That history is always somehow with you, even when you think you have moved far away from it.
 
Obviously, not everything really happens on Wednesdays. If we had done a scientific study back then, I'm sure we would have realized that. It was just interesting to feel as though we could see a pattern, even if we tended to see it in retrospect, rather than in real time. And, of course, if you're always worried that something will happen--on Wednesday or on any day--you tend to give up just living that day. And with a finite number of days in each week, who among us can really afford to give one up to worrying?
 
This Wednesday came and went, and I have hope that tomorrow, being Thursday, will be somewhat less eventful.
 
And if Friday brings a cliffhanger, I'll know that my history is still very much a part of me.

Predictable

Sounds like a bad thing, doesn't it? And yet, in a world where it seems that everything changes constantly, it occurred to me that "predictable" is a little comforting--at least sometimes.
 
What is predictable?
 
That if I sit in a certain corner of my couch, I will, despite my best intentions, fall asleep. (This is now SO predictable that my children interrogate me every time I choose to sit there!)
 
That my kids will stay up too late and be hard to wake up in the morning. I'm not quite sure how they can't see the craziness of this predictable pattern, but at least I know what I'm dealing with every day!
 
That there will be pasta made for at least one meal a day in my house. The kids lobby for it, and it's easy to make--even on auto-pilot on those days when the kids are hard to wake in the morning. Which is (predictably!) every day.
 
That there will be a talk about the week's logistics every Sunday and many talks about summer camp every spring. It doesn't mean that the decisions all get made or that the weeks and summers run without a hitch, but at least I can count on having the conversations!
 
That work will end early on the days I don't need it to and late on the days I do.
 
It would be easy to think of "predictable" as negative--boring, uninspired, unoriginal. What I am learning, however, is how very comforting it is to have a handful of things that I can predict. Whether it's work (after a time when whether I'd even HAVE work was unpredictable), or home dynamics (because in a household of five, things tend to change CONSTANTLY), "predictable" means that I can plan, at least a little. "Predictable" means that, at least some of the time, life is not a complete guessing game. "Predictable" means that I know what to expect (good and bad). I may not always like the outcomes, but at least I know enough about how things will work that I have a chance to influence those outcomes.
 
For me, "predictable" is not a dirty word. Rather, it is like the pillow that I sleep on every night or the breakfast I eat each morning. A little "predictable" gives a lot of much needed shape to my days and much needed comfort in a chaotic life. 

So, the next time you're accused of being predictable, say "thank you." You just might be doing yourself and others a huge favor.

Cutting Room Floor

So--for those of you who were anxiously awaiting my makeover reveal on network--well, online--television tomorrow, you'll have to stay a-waiting. My segment, you see, has ended up on the cutting room floor.
 
Now, as an editor, I know how often even the things you think are working don't end up working. Whether it's minutes or seconds or whole scenes that need to be cut, you do the cutting because it makes the product better. Or shorter. Or more suited to the needs of the audience, or the producers, or the network. That's what we editors do, and if things are left on the cutting room floor, they weren't meant to be--at least not in the project at hand. One of the hardest things about editing (or any type of creative work, really) is letting things go. Even if our work isn't always brilliant, it is our work, and we get attached. But in order to do better work, we need to keep honing, keep adjusting--keep letting go and moving forward.
 
This time around, my makeover and my appearance in front of the camera weren't meant to be. Perhaps there'll be another time. Meanwhile, I'll just keep editing, in work and in life--leaving plenty of things, I'm sure, on the cutting room floor.