Fascinating history

Dear family and friends,

Yesterday, I was submerged in the puzzle of the Rylands Measure for Measure. First, it had more than one incarnation, a version with an all-male cast and a version with females for all of the women except Madam Overdone, the bawd. The former came to St. Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn in Dec. 2005. I got hooked on the Globe Measure after seeing it the other day with Laury, a version the BBC captured at London's Globe Theatre in 2004. Second, TFANA's publicity material for reviewers mentions its connection to the Rylands version. Jeffrey Horowitz, the founder and artistic director of TFANA, definitely has a Globe association: TFANA was the first American company invited to present a production there. Third, the director of TFANA's Measure obviously adopted some ploys of the Globe version while rejecting others. The puzzle of the interconnectedness among these versions energizes me, but unfortunately I seem to have lost (misplaced, given away) the copies of the Shakespeare Bulletin that might have clarified the puzzles of sometimes conflicting information in published newspaper reviews.

I also continued my freezer work and discovered many items that could be used immediately and others that could be thrown away. I decided to broil the chicken legs, making a marinade for them of fresh lemon juice, finely-minced garlic, a little dark sesame oil, a very little low-salt soy sauce, and a good amount of honey. Of course the latter element, so welcome to Merwin who loves his bit of sweet, caused quite a bit of burnt sugar on the broiler pan. I must remember to use aluminum foil pans in such instances. They are more energy efficient than the aluminum pan, which could take an hour to soak and scrub. Besides the chicken, the freezer yielded cooked pasta shells and peas, which, combined, made a nice side dish. I will be poking my head in the freezer again today.

Yesterday I looked at some notebooks with such things as records of parties and menus and guests, freewriting for OA and ME, captures of dreams, and the like. I discarded all of these. One notebook I will keep: it has the notes I wrote while and shortly after attending, with my sister, my mother's bedside when she was dying. It was the best kind of death, I think. She had had a heart attack and remained cogent and conscious for three days. This was in 1980, when she was 86, beginning to be a little shaky mentally, and she was ready to die. The notes of our conversations are lovely. “I had a good life,” she said at one point. “I hope my children have such a good life.” Later, “They have to make a good life. I made a good life.” Indeed she did. The girl whose father had died when she was 4 years old, who went to work in a home-factory in Ukraine when she was six, who began her schooling in night school in the USA, where she came when she was 17, leading her older sister who depended on my mother's savvy, who worked in a cap factory here, who fell in love with my father and was determined to be with him in any way he chose for as long as he chose, who became a business-woman and a balabusta, who was ever cheerful, loving a joke, enjoying a polka above all dances. We had our share of difficulties, we two. I am a believer in Freud's Oedipal theory because I know that my mother and I lived it. But by the end of her life, I had made up for my antagonisms. I hope so. We each thought my father loved us best (my sister too), a special gift my loving father had.

At her bedside when she died were two nurses and her doctor—all there to see her out with me and my sister. One of the nurses, I learned later was Dee, who became part of the Sunday runners I joined, who remembered my mother well, and who, I had noticed, was crying as much as my sister and I were, perhaps more because we were still trying to communicate with her. She was in a lot of pain, and for some reason that bewilders me it was considered wrong to give morphine enough to quell the pain. Thus she was completely lucid right up to the last moment, But why did she have to suffer that way? fear that this dying woman would become addicted?

These notes of the last two or three days are a treasure I will share with my children and grandchildren. The notebook also has the voluminous notes I wrote when I was an extra in Ragtime, the movie, on its last day of production. Much waiting around is the modus operandi, so I had plenty of time to observe and write.

Bill, the P.T., came for his penultimate visit, and in spite of pain, I walked for a half hour with him up and down the block, using the cane of course. He says I can start trying to drive a little, perhaps just around the block, to test how my right leg, the bad one, will function. I am a little fearful of driving: fast moves are sometimes required. I am going to take that very slowly. I had done 20 minutes on my stationary bicycle and hope to add a few minutes every day. Have to build up to SPIN levels.

Looking forward to a busy day today.
Love to all,
Bernice