Day 265…
I knew where I was this morning when I woke up.
It wasn’t until I was in the kitchen that I realized how odd that is. For the last decade and a half, I have often woken up without the slightest clue where in the world I happened to be.
Lying in a strange bed, I’d try to figure out which direction the bathroom was. OK, it’s on the right, I am in Detroit. What am I doing today? Oh, right, rehearsal at 1pm so before that I can go to the art institute and see the Diego Rivera murals.
Over the course of my working years, I have woken up in some extremely strange places.
Some of them have been bland hotels alongside freeways in the most unremarkable places imaginable.
There have been times, however, when I’ve woken up in some spectacular places; the Peninsula Hotel in Hong Kong, the Raffles Hotel and Marina Bay Sands in Singapore, a lodge in the middle of the bush in South Africa.
In northwest Australia, in Kakadu National Park, I woke up one morning in a rather ordinary-looking room in a hotel that you could see, from the air, was shaped like a crocodile.
When we were putting the show up in the Netherlands, I lived in an apartment for many weeks in Amsterdam just off one of the canals. It was right around the corner from the Anne Frank House. Every day, on my way to rehearsal, I rode past it on my bike.
In Tokyo, Michael and I lived for some months in a completely ordinary apartment in a residential district of the city that was completely unvisited by tourists. For us, though, there was nothing ordinary about it at all.
In my apartment in Singapore, the entire bathroom was also a clothes dryer.
I’ve had great extended experiences living in Johannesburg, La Jolla, and Auckland. There are places like London, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Sydney, Melbourne, Chicago and Toronto that almost feel like second homes to me because I have spent so much time there. Given what a major undertaking it is to get to Australia, I know that I have flown there and back 19 times. I couldn’t begin to count how many times I’ve been to the other places.
With all the traveling, I have even had times where I have woken up in my own bed at home and not been able to figure out where I was for a good minute or two.
These days, as I come to, I know exactly where I am. I don’t even need to think about it. I know where I am, and there is no anxiety about what I might have to do that day because there is almost always nothing that I’m going to have to do.
While I certainly miss the traveling, this experience of being home for all of these months has its own pleasures.
Our apartment is slowly being made more efficient.
Michael rearranged the kitchen drawers last week so that they make sense in terms of cooking. He has always cooked but never with the regularity that he is doing it these days. I was gone sometimes as much as 175 nights a year, so he often didn’t cook a whole meal for himself. Now, he cooks two meals for the two of us almost every single day. He moved the spices out of a cabinet that he couldn’t see into, to a drawer opposite the stove. Now, he can easily see and get at them.
As the person who does the washing and putting away, it’s taken me a while to get used to the new set-up. The way he’s set things up now makes perfect sense intellectually, but my body hasn’t figure it out yet. I keep opening the wrong drawer.
We gave away an antique factory stool that looked great in the corner of the kitchen but didn’t actually do anything except attract extra stuff. It’s been replaced by a new small simple white cabinet, bought online two weeks ago, that has changed our lives. All the stuff like dishtowels and extra dishwasher pods that were left stacked around the apartment and on the old stool are now put neatly away in our new piece of furniture.
All throughout our living space, we have started adjusting where things go to make them easier to use. The things that are just taking up space are being gotten rid of. I can’t believe it’s taken us so long to make the changes, but before this we never really had to. After all of these years, our apartment is starting to function as a home.
At the moment, there are plastic bins of family stuff all over the place. The bins with Christmas decorations have been brought up from our storage space. It’s kind of a mess. It really looks bad in here this morning, but it is actually much closer to being put in order than Michael thinks. It’s always darkest before the dawn.
We bought our Christmas tree last night at a stand a few blocks away. It is a seven-foot tall Fraser fir. The smell coming off of it is glorious.
In the past, we’ve almost always gotten a tree, but we have just never been able to really enjoy it. By the time Michael and I would finally get a bit of a break, Christmas would be over. This year, the tree is going to be like a member of the family.
We stood it up in the stand before we went to bed and it has opened up perfectly.
We will get the lights on over the course of the day and I will clear away everything else that I am working on. A bunch of stuff needs to be listed on eBay and then it can all go into storage before it’s eventually sold.
All of the important battleground states have now officially certified their election results. Of the forty lawsuits brought by the President and his associates, thirty-nine of them have been thrown out. The one that wasn’t has had no effect at all on the result.
Watching the President flailing around these days is certainly worrisome. I cannot imagine, however, what these days would be like had he actually won. Four years ago, when he was elected, we knew that the four years ahead were going to be bad. I don’t think that any of us had the slightest idea how truly bad it would be.
Our standing on the global stage is compromised. We have cozied up to dictators and oppressive regimes and alienated our allies. We have withdrawn from long standing international treaties. We have seen environmental regulations dismantled and discarded. Clean air, clean water, and pristine wilderness areas have all been threatened. Offices in our State Department remain vacant and unused as we’ve shunned global diplomacy.
We have seen immigrant children taken away from their parents at the border with little hope of reuniting them. Ever.
While those children languish in cages, the First Lady walks the halls of the White House somberly showing off the cold, elegant Christmas decorations. The official released video tour of them is barely a minute long. That’s clearly all the time FLOTUS could spare for it. As she famously was recorded saying, “Who gives a f%$k about Christmas stuff?”
Among the first things that our new government has to do is to reunite all those kids with their families. There are going to need to be people on the ground doing detective work as well as DNA testing galore. All of those kids deserve a chance.
As President-elect Biden’s Cabinet and staffing choices are announced, we are beginning to see an Administration that looks far more like America than anything in the last four years has done.
His entire communications team is made up of women. They are experienced, qualified and able. Janet Yellin is his pick for Treasury Secretary which, if confirmed, will make her the first woman in that role. The rest of her team are equally as qualified and diverse in terms of race and gender.
We are all starting to see how this country might start being able to work again.
It’s cleaning up.
I can already see the new State Department employees going into the long-deserted rooms and hallways and dusting off desks and picking up overturned chairs.
Attorney General Barr, still smarting I am sure from the President turning against him this past week, announced this morning that there is no evidence of any fraud that would overturn the election. Another crony abandoning the sinking ship.
It is going to take a long time to clean up the mess that these last four years have left. If the Democrats win the Senate runoff elections in Georgia next month then the clean-up will be quicker and more efficient. If the Republicans win, then we are going to see nothing but obstruction from the Republican Senate Majority Leader. The President-elect will then need to resort to Executive actions to legislate. Everything will take longer.
Our holiday decorations may not be as fancy or as elegant as the ones in the White House, but they are certainly much warmer. A star mobile that our nephew made when he was nine is one of my favorites. It’s on an old wooden hanger with silver stars on it that we put on the hall mirror every year.
Thinking about it, I can’t help but be reminded again of all of those terrified children at the Federal detention facilities along the border.
After the First Lady visited them, she said, “The kids, they say, ‘Wow I will have my own bed? I will sleep on the bed? I will have a cabinet for my clothes.’ It’s so sad to hear, but they didn’t have that in their own countries. They sleep on the floor. They are taken care of nicely there. But you know, yeah, they are not with parents. It’s sad.”
A bed and a cabinet are not a home.
Nor is an Executive Mansion filled to the brim with perfectly cut trees bedecked in steely holiday ornaments a home.
The lights are not going to get on our tree by themselves, so it’s time to just knuckle down and do it. It’s the only part that can be difficult and frustration.
After that, it’s fun. Then we can hang up everything from the little cats we got in Japan last year to the strangely misshapen gingerbread men that a friend of Michael’s made him in college.
May we all be lucky enough this year to spend these holidays in our messy and very human homes.
❤️as I imagine all the rats scurrying off the sinking ship... I think of the mouse king from the story of The Nutcracker
I envision also your Christmas Tree filling your apartment with light....
I am beginning to fall asleep with sugar plum faries dancing in my head..
yes, people call me a dreamer
❤️