Today I am going to work on STARAMA - a revision is happening and it's really demanding and it has to be done, with discipline.

But it's snowing, and I was smoking a cigarette, and thinking.  So I'm blogging until I can get myself out the door to the cafe because that's where I decided I'll do revision work.  Oh man.

But just now out back I was thinking about my mother.  The link is coffee.

Now I'm really back, I am not going to the cafe.  It really snowed!  I thought it was a lot of hype but no.  So I have been drinking coffee and smoking and listening to Aretha.  I ate some raisin toast and drank two pots of coffee, and moved a houseplant inside to save its life.  It's dripping melted snow in the kitchen now. Facebook.

I went home for a night a few months ago for dinner at my mom's house with all of us and my mom's baby sister and her husband and two of their four daughters and my grandmother.  Grammy was about to leave for Florida, now to be her permanent residence, having been helped by my aunt with a General's precision to empty her house in Philadelphia. Grammy had been staying at my mom's for some matter of weeks and the story goes (per Ben) - three nights before leaving, she freaked out at my mother, upset these two sisters didn't even want to see eachother - around the corner from each other all summer.  It is confusing to me too.  It's troubling that Grammy doesn't seem to know what it is either.  Families can be mad it appears.  Anyway, my aunt is hyper intelligent and psychosexually a little - ha! funny.  One wonders what runs in one's family when it seems like a mystery to the matriarch too. I know Grammy acts grand and that's just how she describes Nanny as acting too.  We've got that quality running through us- we teach it down to the first daughter.  Around the women of the family, I think I probably get a bit hyper-analytical - frightened of the family thing... but also thrilled!  Who else can you actually tell family stories with where you, ha, tell the truth, drink a glass of wine, cry laughing that you people were allowed out in public - That is what it was like, fairly often, growing up with my mom and her, my, family.  I know there are other loud insane families out there but mine was really quite show stealing there for a while. In Boston Markets in Pennsylvania, in Malls in New Jersey, at Earnest Hemingway's historic home in Key West, in a town called Odell... Indiana?   Ridiculous scenes.

My favorite story is remembered by Amy and is called "WHERES MY COIN?!"  That's the Boston Market one. Ridiculous. 

My point is I have a great time as long as there's wine.  I do it for the kids I tell you... and myself.  If you're going to have an absurdly dysfunctional family that can't even reasonably leave the house much less go on vacation from when you're nine to seventeen, the reward is wine when you're older and your grandmother freaking out and insisting on seeing her progeny.  With all the bedbugs this summer, Grammy and I didn't even have martinis and steak, our big plan.  I'll do that for Christmas though.

So the point of this is not actually WHERES MY COIN... I told WHERES MY COIN when Ben was outside and I kept it down. I'm not a bitch.   My point was going to be something about else... I have been writing this with the loose idea of telling how when I was real little  my mother told me drinking coffee like I always wanted to do - would only drink milk with coffee in it- would stunt my growth. And took the opportunity walking in the city past a little person to tell me that's what she meant - if I kept drinking coffee, I'd would be a little person.  I told everyone that memory and my aunt, who I haven't seen in six years, since my Grandfather's funeral, turned to her daughters and said "Don't turn against me like that girls."  I just laughed.  I think that's a funny story about my mom!  

I took another break, you missed it. I'm waiting for Indian food.  The point was my mother being a weirdo and how when I tell nice stories about her, they're still weird. :-)

I watched Into the Woods last night on Netflix and that is he most psychodynamic musical ever made.  The Witch.  When she self immolates. You're all liars and thieves like his father like his son will be too oh why bother you'll just do what you do.  And the chords are ascending in some diminished seventh or do I know?  That is probably the best part of the best show.  

Oh sigh.  I have not revised my script, still today. I am listening to Into the Woods. I am considering buying a ticket to California for next weekend.  Just a hotel in Santa Barbera maybe. It's January weather in October.  Can you imagine? Stephen Sondheim. Stephen Sondheim.