I miss my Christmas lights. Although it’s been less than 24 hours, when you wake up to howling wind, snowy sleet and overall bleak gloom, you want bright dangling lights framing that windowscape. Today looks a little wet and miserable for Chicago. Still, I can’t complain. I’m basking in a weekend robust in good conversations over coffee and a pumpkin bar. And there’s nowhere I have to be until 2pm.
I’ve mixed in with a variety of folks all weekend. At a dinner party on Friday, I enjoyed a spirited discussion on Viet Nam; the country, the war, the hospitality industry. I also was approached by three different friends at three different times about my writing future. It wasn’t a huge dinner party but it was the kind of people collective that bodes well for cluster conversations. The house was buzzing with chat. Despite the less-than-a-dozen-in-attendance intimacy, I still didn’t get a chance to have meaningful dialogue with everyone.
Saturday, I woke up and had a sweaty gabfest with Josh. Being friends with your trainer has the added benefit of real communication. Our exchanges in between sets isn’t about the weather or polite chitchat. I often seek his honest counsel on work matters, writing feedback and life goals. We talk theatre about what we’ve seen and what’s coming up. And in an unpredictable twist in our relationship, we swap recipe stories from GOURMET NUTRITION. I’m recently made the baked chicken strips and pumpkin bars. I like to text Josh pictures and my assessment of the results.
In the afternoon, I hosted the Roaring 20s book club. We read THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ALICE B. TOKLAS by Gertrude Stein. Alice was Stein’s life partner for decades. The book is this long winded description of their life in Paris. What we continue to re-learn about these trust fund writers (Stein, Hemingway) is they were self-absorbed. They partied and wrote long streams of consciousness about their interactions with each other. Stein describes her routine of receiving artist guests all evening and then writing until dawn. In present day, she might have been notorious for the 3am drunken Facebook post about the reality of life.
Her ALICE prose is especially indigestible in a twitter world. Stein was arrogant. She’s pretending to be her lover’s voice and often refers to herself in third person as a genius. “The three geniuses of whom I wish to speak are Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso and Alfred Whitehead.” Her self-assumed level of superiority is fairly unsettling as she describes Alice as being simpler. Still, our book club always uses the book as a springboard into other topics of interest. And we filled the afternoon by sharing insight on our reading, raking Gertrude Stein over the coals and discussing any other connectible subject.
Post book club, Bill and I met Abby and her bestie Taylor for a drink and an appetizer. The 20somethings were headed out for a birthday clubbing extravaganza. Bill and I were headed to the opera, TOSCA. It was a light-hearted conversation peppered for me with nostalgia. I remember the bar hopping excitement of my younger days. Now, I’m looking for a seat, a glass of hearty red and a noise-level conducive to conversation.
This morning is the quiet aftermath of a plethora of satisfying interactions over the last 36 hours. Maybe that’s one of the many differences between me and Gertrude Stein as a writer. I love stories, people’s stories. I don’t limit myself to talking to the people I deem genius. And I practice not talking nonstop about myself. I think everybody has an interesting story to share. And I want to hear it! Or better yet, I want to find out where a person is in his/her story. I don’t have the patience or desire to listen to the same chapter over and over. The people I like to surround myself with are the people who keep driving their story forward. So, the question I like to ask isn’t “what’s your story?”, it’s “where are you in your story?”