"...where is the schoolgirl who used to be me?"

The title is a quote from Joan Didion's 1967 essay, "Goodbye to All That" about her moving from California to New York, and back again after 8 years here. Apart from having gone to her reading- the circumstances surrounding which I will unload upon you in a bit- the quote also speaks to how I've been feeling working at Sesame Street these last 2 days. I lost count of how many of the clips I watched that were the very same ones I saw when I was still in primary school, when Sesame Street only came on at 1pm on Saturday afternoons because we didn't have early morning cartoons then yet. So many of the newer ones continue to capture my wonder, making me smile whimsically at how clever they are for the sake of parents who are watching with their kids, but also sweet and lovable in ways that have endeared Sesame Street to countless of children for generations. There was Patrick Stewart as Hamlet doing the "To B(e) or not to B(e)" soliloquy in order to teach children about the letter "B", R.E.M. singing "Furry Happy Monsters" in the clip on emotions (Michael Stipe's just having a whale of a time!!), and a mock school pageant with the entire muppet cast of Sesame Street depicting the changing of the seasons that made me clap out loud at the end from sheer delight. I want to believe that the schoolgirl who used to be me is still firmly anchored in there somewhere, that I'll never get too jaded by grown-up shenanigans to appreciate the simple, happy things in life, that I will never become too cynical to sing along with Ernie everytime he sings about his rubber duckie, and that in 20 years, I'll be just as enthralled by the talking typewriter as I was when I was seven.

If you carry your childhood with you, you never become older.
-Tom Stoppard

Ok, so about the Joan Didion reading: the reading itself was wonderful- frightfully sad though. I don't think it was as hard for her to read from "The Year of Magical Thinking" as it was for the audience to hear it, the grief so stridently stark that it hurt to listen to it expressed out loud. There was nothing overwrought or elaborate about the way she wrote and read about her husband's death- their earlier visit to their daughter at the ICU, the dinner she was preparing, the scotch he was drinking, the moment he stopped talking, the way her apartment was transformed into an emergency room, and the mental notes she was taking through it all- everything was described directly, plainly, austerely. And painfully.

People sat reverently silent throughout the reading, no one left even when it started to rain (I hid in futility under my waterproof map...). But I decided to leave after the reading, missing the interview portion of the evening coz I wanted to get out of the park before it turned dark and before the rain got any heavier. Knowing my luck, it was not to be of course; not only did the rain get heavier, there was lightning, I got lost twice (once from finding myself on the wrong side of the park, and the other from taking a wrong turn into a parking lot instead...), the sky was fast turning dark from the rain clouds, and as adequate as my map was in navigating me through the city, it made a lousy brolly. [Note to self: denim gets very heavy when wet, as my legs found out as they were encased in my increasingly drenched jeans.] I finally got myself out of the park onto Central Park West, walked 5 more blocks in the rain, reached my hotel room only to spend the next hour drying out my shoes and suede leather satchel... Nerve-wrecking, to say the least, but I survived :)

Will be off to a couple of street fairs tomorrow in the day before I go home. I missed them the last time we were here coz I was at the Met with Billie while Jude & Yong hung out in SoHo. I'm not expecting to buy anything, but it'll be fun to browse the markets instead of going into another store that looks like every other one anyway... I'll be glad to be home actually- after a very discombobulating foray through a very loud, very boisterous, very neon Times Square the other day, I'm looking forward to returning to the quiet green of Ann Arbor. I think I've been so spoiled by the open expanse of what we have there that the city has become just a tad suffocating. I just want to go back to where I can freely walk to the grocery store in my flannel PJs at two in the morning and no one would bat an eyelid coz they're in theirs too...