As I mentioned yesterday, we’re staying at this beautiful hotel right on the beach. What I chose not to tell you is that we are staying on a floor that is undergoing construction. In fact, our suite is the only one not under construction on this floor. The door to the right is our room.

The stairs and elevator are on the part of the floor that is closed off and covered with tarps and equipment. Yesterday, when the lovely hostess brought us up here, she led us through many long halls and then through a door that said “Staff Only.” She asked us how our trip was and made other polite small talk, but never explained why we had passed the lobby and elevators and were now walking in a dark hall lined with towering boxes of hotel shampoo.

We walked through a linen closet, through another storage area and then found the gigantic service elevator that took us to our room. The hostess finally explained about the construction and said it should all be finished by today. It clearly won’t be, but we’re actually glad because we have seen the inner workings, the very bowels of this hotel, and have made great friends with many of the workers here. I decided to photograph our journey out of the hotel early this morning, when Denis and I went to play tennis. We left our room and our beautifully carpeted hall, and entered this hallway:

Then we entered this room to wait for the elevator:

In order to get off on the lobby floor, we have to walk through the kitchen:

The staff is really nice, but it’s a hectic place to be in the morning, so we have learned to take the elevator down one flight and then we just have to walk through this room…

up one flight, and we’re back among the paying guests, who swagger around braying into their cellphones about deals. It’s really much nicer in the back hallways with all the polite, friendly people who seemed to get a kick out of the fact that we were wedged in the freight elevator with them and their room service carts all day.

We rode bikes to the tennis courts. Denis made me ride the pink one:

He carried the racquets:

And he won (as usual).

These are the public courts in Santa Monica. The beach is on the other side of those palms:

It was so fragrant and beautiful this morning, there was the aroma of salt air, eucalyptus, suntan lotion. It was 70 degrees, no humidity. No wonder all the other tennis players are so good, Denis and I kept telling each other, as we stomped around the court and swatted clumsily at our balls. A gorgeous pair that looked like they could take on the Williams sisters played a fierce game on the court next to ours. We’d be great too if we lived in a place where you can play outdoors all year around, we kept assuring each other. Then we pedaled back to the hotel, toward the majestic Malibu hills, with the sand and the sea sparkling all around and beautiful people (on skates, bikes, skateboards) gliding alongside us, and we seemed to sail along in procession with them, as if we had always been a part of this graceful sidewalk regatta. Then we parked our bikes, and followed a giant towel cart up to our room.

Here’s somebody I encountered at Moses Pendleton’s house yesterday:

Here’s Moses himself, tending to one of his sunflowers.

Denis and I got to watch MOMIX, Moses’s dance company, rehearsing for their upcoming show, “Botanica,” yesterday. There was a piece called Nightcrawlers in which the dancers used black ductwork tubing (stuff you would find at Home Depot) as extensions of their bodies and they became strangely erotic earthworms that pulsed and undulated and intertwined themselves with each other in a most beautiful and entrancing way. I’ve already ordered our tickets for the debut show of “Botanica” at the Warner Theater in January. Meanwhile, their company will be touring in London and throughout the US during October. Click here for details.

Today we’re in sunny California. As we were flying in, I recalled the first time Denis and I ever came to LA. We were young. Denis was a comic, I, a waitress. Denis won a stand-up comedy contest sponsored by Budweiser, and we got to stay at the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood. It was winter and even though it was only about fifty degrees, we splashed around in the pool like kids and then took a city bus all the way to the beach in Santa Monica, which took all day. We were so excited! Denis was going to perform at the Improv! In LA!
This time we’ve flown in for the Emmys, older, wiser, but still dazzled, as we always are, by this bright city with its colorful architecture, friendly people and impossibly clean streets.

This time it’s HBO, not Budweiser footing the bill, so we’re staying in Santa Monica. Here’s the view from our window:

There’s the Santa Monica pier:

Here’s Denis reading a script, poolside. I just had to say it, it’s so Lucy Ricardo. “There’s my dear husband, reading a motion picture script, poolside!”

We’re going to the Emmys this weekend. Here’s the thing: I want to conceal a small digital video recorder somewhere on my body and record the scene on the red carpet. Because you really can’t get a sense of it if you’re not there, walking along amidst the shoving publicists and the screaming fans. One minute somebody’s stepping on your dress, and the next minute you’re face to face with the most distorted and inflated pair of lips you have ever seen.

And people are just grabbing attention from the air like it’s money. I’ve said it before – I think I said it in an interview – it’s like a narcissists convention, and, being slightly narcissistic myself, I am fascinated by the energy on these red carpets and want to find a way to share it with you, my blog readers. So, I just need to figure out how to carry the thing without anyone knowing. Am open to suggestions.

I just have to figure out how to do it without Denis knowing I’m doing it, because he has warned me that if get kicked out of the Emmys, I have to walk back to the hotel.

Here we are at the last three Emmys. Last year:

The year before:

And the year before that:

I always think I look a little like a transvestite when I wear all that makeup. This year, I’m less blonde. And less young.

This was our morning’s sunrise.

Last night we had a full moon. These late summer/fall moons always create havoc within our household because the windows are still open, and our dogs can hear our resident coyotes taking advantage of the light by loudly hunting and singing and screaming and partying. Our dogs want to join in, and bark and howl and beg to be let out until I close all the windows and turn on a fan to drown out the noise.

I hate having to shut out the coyotes because they sound so primitive and they’re so haunting. At times they screech like witches, at others, they take turns with thin, lilting howl solos that rise up in the night air and then stop abruptly, and when they stop, you have a sense of a desperate, lonely silence. It seems like nothing has ever been so silent before. Then another one starts its own mournful song.

They make the dogs howl. They have been known to fill even our chihuahua mix, Coco, with wild delusions that she’s a real canine, rather than some sort of elf, and she will trill her own version of a howl from the pillow beside my head. She’s a tone-deaf soprano. Last night, I had visions of feeding her to the coyotes, so annoyed was I with her caterwauling.

Tonight, after having risen before dawn to trailer my daughter and her friend to a horse show, (where, upon arriving the brakes on my truck failed, but there were no casualties, thank God), I am tired. So I have taken to my bed with the Sunday paper and my laptop.

I can’t stop looking at Phil Holland’s YouTube poems. The man has written a series of “cantos” called “The Dancer’s Craft.” Basically, he has set to verse, the everyday comings and goings of the dancer/choreographer Moses Pendleton and has been doing this since the early 1980s. Read a few, you’ll want to read them all, they’re great. But reading them made me realize that YouTube isn’t just for watching funny bits from “Family Guy” or “The Daily Show.” People are actually reciting poetry on YouTube.

Then, I came across this:

This guy Jim Clark has this site called poetryanimations on YouTube and he animates old photos of great poets to recordings of them reading their work! Here’s Sylvia Plath:

I warn you not to go to this site unless you have a few hours to spare.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, despite the dangerous journey there, the girls did very well at the show:

As many of you know, our beloved Pongo died last month. Yesterday my friend Leah picked up his ashes from the vet where we had him put to sleep. The ashes came in a small tin canister. The canister was in a bag from the pet cemetery that cremated Pongo and our other pets who have grown old and died. They always include a plaster imprint of the dog’s paw, with the dog’s name stamped in it, along with a small heart.

This pet cemetery was brought up on fraud charges years ago because they were cremating all the pets together and just filling the little canisters with anyone’s ashes. This upset many people, but I don’t really see the crime in it. We have our pets cremated because we are usually so sad and bereft, we don’t really know what else to do. Plus, we have dogs at home and I’m always afraid that no matter how deep we bury their packmate, they might dig him back up. But I never really know what to do with the ashes, so they get put up on a shelf, or in a drawer and years later, I open what looks like a cookie tin, and find the fine ash of an old friend (or at least somebody’s old friend.

But this time, included in the bag with the ashes and the paw print, there was a “Certificate of Cremation” This was a very official looking certificate, printed out on some kind of antique-looking parchment paper. On the certificate was an ominous poem that began with these lines:

“Farewell, Master, yet not farewell
Where I go, ye too shall dwell.”

I read this aloud to Denis and we wondered if it was possible that Pongo was issuing some sort of threat from beyond. The next lines were even more puzzling:

“I am gone, before your face,
A moment’s time, a little space.”

Could it be possible that Pongo’s intelligence would be so diminished by death that he would come up with that lame face/space rhyme? This was a dog who would hide food all over the house so that he could snack whenever he pleased. He was a SMART dog.

He was a terrier!

It concluded with:

“when ye come where I have stepped
ye will wonder why ye wept.”

The poem left us a little spooked and we hastily stashed the ashes in a cupboard and tried not to think of that creepy pet cemetary.

If you’re in or near the Sharon, CT area, this afternoon at 2:00, tune into 91.9FM, WHDD, to listen to my IN HOUSE interview with Playwright A.R. Gurney. If you don’t live in the area, you may still hear it as it’s broadcast, by going to robinhoodradio.com, and clicking on the “Listen Live” link. If you miss it, I’ll have it downloaded here on my site, sometime later today.

A.R “Pete” Gurney has written the critically acclaimed plays, Scenes From American Life, Children, The Middle Ages, The Dining Room, Love Letters, Sylvia, and many others. His most recent play, Buffalo Gal has just completed its very successful Off-Broadway run, and I saw the show and loved it and recently had the wonderful opportunity to interview Pete in the place he wrote it—his Roxbury, Connecticut home.

Pete Gurney is not a tortured playwright. He is one of the most gracious, charming, cheerful and intelligent men I have ever met. It’s hard to be in his presence without smiling. He smiles all the time. We discussed his years at the Yale Drama School, the shows he wrote and produced while he was a Naval Officer during the Korean war (his audience was literally captive – they were on an aircraft carrier), and why he has always preferered to work at home, with his dog and family around him, when he writes. Tune in to hear one of our great American playwrights discuss what is happening to the theater in the electronic age; and the huge sacrifices actors, directors and writers often make to be able to do live theater.

I just received an email from Phil Holland, who went to Bennington with me, though somehow I didn’t know him. Phil is a good friend of Moses Pendleton. He saw my previous post and sent me the photo above, The photo was taken from the roof of the house. Those are large Adirondack chairs in the center of the circle so that will give you an idea of the scale of the garden. The sunflowers are in the foreground. From this perspective it looks like something from Chariots of the Gods.

Yesterday Moses read me a poem written by Mr. Holland about a storm on September 11, 2002. I recalled the storm vividly when Moses read it. It was a beautiful, clear day, the first anniversary of the attacks, and in the middle of the memorial service in NY, this storm blew in out of nowhere. Up here in CT, the wind was so intense that trees were uprooted. Anyway, Moses said he told Phil Holland about the storm and then Phil whipped up this poem, but the poem was so beautiful and the imagery was so detailed and evocative that I actually suspected that perhaps Moses had written it himself and that he used the name Phil Holland when he wrote stuff! So now I know that Phil Holland lives! He lives in Greece, not in Moses’s mind!

For twelve years now, I have been driving past the house belonging to choreographers Moses Pendleton and Cynthia Quinn. It’s a rather aged white Victorian set slightly back from the road. Across the street is an old carriage barn. I’ve known that Moses and Cynthia use the property as the headquarters for MOMIX, his world-famous dance company, but when you drive by, it just looks like any great old New England house that hasn’t been “done.” There are usually a few cars parked in the driveway. There’s a bit of lawn out front. Yesterday, I entered the Pendleton house, because I had scheduled an interview with Moses for my NPR show, IN HOUSE, and I don’t think I’ll ever be quite the same again.

Entering the home of Moses Pendleton is like entering another dimension. I walked into that house under the delusion that I’m a rather creative free-spirit, but when I walked out, four hours later, I felt like a prim school marm with a dull mind, an austere sense of style and a death-grip adherence to social norms.

Moses’s house is filled with beauty and decay, He gives shabby chic a whole new meaning. In the living room, decades-old wallpaper is peeling from the walls, but the color of the paper has aged and now it looks like the whole room is draped in a sort of heavenly gauze. Dried sunflower stalks ten feet tall hang above the beautiful winding staircase and now, drained of color, they look like they could be made of porcelain. Sunflowers, fresh and in varying states of decay, are everywhere because Moses is a gardener, an avid lover of nature and plants – especially flowers. And most especially sunflowers. This is their dining room:

I wish I had taken photos of every inch of that house but I wasn’t sure if it was okay, and it was so dreamlike, I wasn’t sure I could even capture the feeling of the place with my camera.

Moses is currently choreographing a show called “Botanica” which is about ….well, I have four hours of audio tape of what it’s about, but basically it’s about what Moses calls his “garden of earthly delights.” The dancers were all rehearsing in the barn and I got to see a few of the pieces, and they were astonishingly beautiful. The dancers were trees, and pods and blossoming plants and through their movements, the whole barn seemed actually to be alive with the elements of wind and light and sexual energy and birth. And I got a tour of Moses’s garden, which is his inspiration. The centerpiece of the garden is a giant sunburst of Marigolds – “Mary’s Gold” – as Moses described them. Here you can catch a glimpse through the arbor of Morning Glories:

My photo doesn’t do it justice. Moses is also a photographer, so maybe he will let me put some of his photos of his garden on my blog. Moses sees hues of yellow and gold and amber as energizing sources of life. He loves the ritual of the New England garden with it’s cycles of fertility and growth and decline and eventually decay and then rebirth. We watched the sun lower over the marigolds and then it was time to go and when I left the Pendleton-Quinn house, it felt like I was going indoors after being out on a bright lake or on a snowy, sunlit mountainside. Everything seemed dull and dark. It was like being snowblind, but I was flowerblind – completely dazzled by the brilliant energy of Moses Pendleton.

Last night I attended a meeting of a book group that meets at the Book Nook, a lovely bookstore in New Milford, Connecticut.

As I approached the shop I saw this sign on the sidewalk in front of it:

I asked Janet Ryan, the very charming owner of the Book Nook if they put my book, Outtakes From a Marriage at the top just because I was coming and she said that it had been at the top for some time because they had sold so many!

So the members of the Book Nook book club arrived and we had such a great conversation, not only about my book, but also about motherhood, work, marriage, loneliness, happiness, celebrity, hair, kids. Because these women are so smart, the conversation eventually evolved into politics, but because they are also so wonderfully civil and sensible, nobody got upset or charged up, but instead we just talked about what an exciting time it is for our country with such fascinating candidates on both sides.

Thank you Janet and the rest of the Book Nook book club, for a wonderful evening!