Tag Archives: kittens

Same Question, Answers Galore

June 9, 2019 marilyn jaye lewis Leave a comment

Life does indeed go on, as proved by the fact that I yet again woke up this morning and here I am, blogging.

I’m happy about that, and all. But one of those situations that began rearing its little head on Friday remains. But it does not flower and bloom into niceness. Rather, it looks increasingly like it goes down that dark alley that leads to a door with a lawyer’s name on it.

And I hate having to do that.

However, it did give me a great reason to call Gus Van Sant, Sr. on the telephone last evening, and since he is one of the nicest men on planet Earth, it changed the energy of my whole evening.

It was actually late at night (my time, anyway; he’s on the West Coast) and I was outside, under the stars, leaning against my car while I spoke to him on the phone.

I think that’s the best way to speak on the phone to men who are amazing and great. It brings together all sorts of elements that are hard to define but that are nonetheless breathtaking. Meaning: stars, the universe, nights in summer, a voice on the telephone.

It creates an indelible memory; captures a person in your mind for all time.

And when we were done talking business stuff, he told me about a friend of his who was killed the other day. And then he said, “I don’t know why I’m telling you about all this, Marilyn. But life flies by; it goes so fast.”

I loved, loved, loved working for that man. I worked for him for 5 years, until his wife died and he moved back to the West Coast to be near his daughter and his son (the filmmaker, Gus Van Sant, Jr). (He was his son’s business manager.) I learned a lot about the back end of making movies by working for him at the production company, which was a good thing to learn, but the thing I remember most is that we always listened to the old Big Band music while we worked. In particular, he loved Ella Fitzgerald.

I love that kind of music anyway, and I love Ella Fitzgerald too, but it broke my heart when he moved away and now one song that I had always loved before became completely saturated with his personality – “Skylark.” Because of the stories he used to tell me about his life, I hear this song and think that those memories of his are actually mine now, too. In a way.

Another thing that happened yesterday is that I was looking for an old CD – the 5th Dimensions Age of Aquarius. I really wanted to hear their version of the song, “Blowin’ Away.” A song written by that amazing & sort of underrated songwriter, Laura Nyro.

I never did find the CD, but while I was down on the floor, looking at the very bottom row of the CD rack, my attention was of course drawn to the bottom row of the bookshelf that was right next to it because I have some Nick Cave-related books down there (collected interviews with him & such) and so why wouldn’t my attention be magnetically drawn there?

But then my eye was drawn to a slim volume of poetry, The Beautifully Worthless, from 2005 by Ali Liebegott. She has since become a well-known writer. But the book won a Lambda Award for Best Lesbian Debut Fiction, back when my friends at Suspect Thoughts Press had published it. (Even though I think it’s still really more poetry than fiction.) (It has long-since been re-issued with City Lights Press, fyi.)

And I thought, man, that was such a good book. And I pulled it out and started flipping through it, and then became so immersed in its beautiful, plaintive voice again that I went back and I started from the beginning, while still sitting there on the floor.

And I read books like this, and I’ve been in the LGBTQA community my entire professional life, so I know the answers to my own question, and I understand the answers to my own question, but my own question still remains and that is: Why do we have to call it “Lesbian” poetry?

Why can’t it just be POETRY? (Yes, I know the “marketing” answer, and the political answer and it has become cultural.) But it still sort of bothers me – these constant, never-ending pigeonholes. This endless drive toward “diversity” that fractures the unity of Spirit.

I don’t read a book like The Beautifully Worthless and think to myself, Wow, these are such great lesbian poems. No, what I think is: Wow, this book is so good.

I understand that if you placed me against some sort of scale, I would perhaps be way closer to the “lesbian” side of things than maybe you are (I don’t actually know you, so I don’t know for sure); but still. You know? Can’t an amazing book about an experience of life just be an amazing book about an experience of life?

(When my agent was trying to shop my novel Twilight of the Immortal, publisher after publisher bridled at how many lesbians were in the novel – and these were actual historical figures, known to be lesbians, who surrounded the public & private life of the movie star, Rudolph Valentino. And the publishers said, “How are we gonna market a book that has all these lesbians in it?” It was dumbfounding. And it wound up on the smallest press imaginable because of that, and I eventually pulled it from that publisher and published it myself. It was crazy. Most readers who’ve read that book, loved it. The few who didn’t love it, took issue with my view on Valentino’s private sex life. But none of them ever said they had trouble reading it because lesbians were in the book.)

Well, whatever. I sure know that you can’t even attempt to fight City Hall unless you want to be gunned down on the steps of it. So on we go with our labels and our pigeonholes.

In fact, when I had to write a recent press release re: Tell My Bones, I was told to focus on the “diversity” aspect of all of it because of Sandra Caldwell’s transgender stuff, which just feels so foreign to me.

I’ve been friends with Sandra since 1992 and now I have to speak about her as a “transgender actor” instead of as, you know, my friend Sandra, who’s been in a ton of films & TV shows & plays.

Plus, I had to speak of myself as a “bisexual playwright.” To me, that is so weird. To label myself as specifically “bisexual” anything. If you’ve read anything I’ve ever written, you can come to that understanding pretty quickly. Or if you date me, or marry me, or whatever. I guess, if you just have a simple conversation with me, it might never come up. But the idea that it’s part of the approach to press materials now is so strange to me. If I’m bisexual, does it make you want to see a play I’ve written more, or less?

I would hope it doesn’t matter at all.

However, I do live in reality and I also live in the middle of fucking nowhere because people nowadays make me a little nuts…

Anyway, The Beautifully Worthless is a really beautiful book. (I’m not sure, but I think a lesbian wrote it.)

(Wild Animals I Have Known : Polk Street Diaries is also a really good book, that is also in my bookcase, on the same shelf – and has also recently been reissued. But it’s written by a gay guy – Kevin Bentley. And it’s all about life and sex and amazing men and the human heart. But you know…it’s written by a gay guy.)

Okay. I’m gonna scoot and get my Sunday morning started!

And I leave you, oddly enough, with a song called “Thursday” by Morphine. It was my curious choice for breakfast-listening music today! But anyway. Isn’t everything just a little bit curious? Okay. Thanks for visiting, gang. I love you guys. See ya.

“Thursday”

We used to meet every Thursday
Thursday
Thursday in the afternoon
For a couple a beers
And a game of pool

We used to go to a motel
A motel
A motel across the street
And the name of the motel
Was the “Wagon Wheel”

OH!

One day she said
C’mon C’mon
She said why don’t you come back to my house
She said my husbands out of town
You know he’s gone till the end of the month

Well I was just so nervous, so nervous
You know I couldn’t really quite relax
‘Cause I was really never quite sure
When her husband was coming back

It turned out it was one of the neighbours
One of the neighbours, one of the neighbours that saw my car
And they told her, yeah they told her
They think they know who you are

Well her husband is a violent man
A very violent and jealous man
Now I have to leave this town
I gotta leave while I still can

We should have kept it every Thursday
Thursday
Thursday in the afternoon
For a couple of beers
And a game of pool

She was pretty cool too!

c – 1993 Mark Sandman

A mish-mash of heartache

October 21, 2017 marilyn jaye lewis Leave a comment

I know, it’s been forever since I’ve been able to get to this blog. This month has just barreled along. Every project imaginable seeming to intersect with one another, so that I have had way too much to do and am getting not a whole lot completed. Yet.

Still no official word on how much my mortgage has been pre-approved for, so this limbo I’ve been living in for one whole year now is really getting tiresome. [Read: Depressing.] Now that I know for sure that I have to move again, I really, really, REALLY want to just move and unpack my boxes, take a look at all my cool STUFF once again, and start living my life. Books, movies, music, furniture — there’s so much of my stuff that I’d like to have access to! And, yes, photo albums.

This weekend marks not only what would have been Tom Petty’s 67th birthday — (if you live in a cave, perhaps you don’t know that Tom Petty suddenly died a couple weeks ago) —

Tom Petty, as he looked a zillion years ago, on his first album cover; an album I bought when I was a wee bonny lass; an album I still have somewhere in deep storage and can’t get at…

But also, this weekend marks the anniversary of the death of my very best friend in all of life and the world as we knew it. Paul died 18 years ago tomorrow, and I am astounded that 18 years can disappear in the wink of eye. What went by even more quickly, gentle readers, were the 22 years that he and I were best friends.

I cannot imagine that I am old enough to have a best friend who has been dead for 18 years. And, no insults intended for any folks I know who are still alive, however, life has simply been pretty empty without him in it.

I knew it would be that way the day he died. That everything would be a little less beautiful from then on. He was so funny, so talented, so adventurous, so compassionate, kind, caring. And he always had my back. He was the living definition of a best friend. (We met in the high school drama department. He built our high school theater sets. He went on to work in the movies as a set designer/set builder.)

Anyway. I was hoping to find a digital photo of him to post here today, but alas, I could not find one. And ALL of my tons of non-digital photos of him are packed away in boxes that are in deep storage, too. So frustrating. I want my life back.

However, while searching through tons of flash drives for possible JPEGS of Paul, I found a ton of other photos that broke my heart. So it’s been a rough morning. But cathartic, too, I suppose.

Earlier this month would have been John Lennon’s 77th birthday, had he not been murdered, 37 years ago, only a handful of weeks after I had moved to New York City. John Lennon was my very first hero, from the time I was 10 years old. I found this lovely photo of him on a flash drive:

I also found 2 rather different photos of myself taken by my dear, departed friend Paul:

Me, on the porch of Paul’s beach house in North Carolina, when he was working on the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie.

Me, in the bedroom of my East Village apartment, in 1984, when Paul was visiting from DC for Thanksgiving. I’m a spry 24-year-old here.

I also found a digital photo of a photo from my long-ago wedding. Hard to remember that I used to not have a ton of silver hair…

And hard to believe we’ve been divorced now for 14 years, after having been together for 11 years before that. But we’ve managed to stay friends…

And a few years before one of my alleged “friends” turned out to be the most awesome b*tch, EVER, I used to have fond memories of Paris. I no longer have fond memories of Paris, so it was startling to discover these photos on a flash drive and to recall that I once loved Paris. From my first trip to Paris, when I was so happy:

Looking down at the street from my friend’s apartment on the Left Bank, late at night. I can still hear the laughter and the clanking dishes coming up from that cafe.

Her cottage in the country was right on the river. here’s a shot of her boat…

And — if you can believe how lovely this is!– the weeping willows at the edge of her yard, right on the river.

It was a strange feeling, to recall that I had once loved Paris. I guess it’s time to reclaim parts of my life from people who totally suck. What do you think, gang?

And then I also found this photo. This was the beginning of the feral cat madness! Here are Tom, Huckleberry, and Becky, on the swing in the backyard of my old house. This was when the 3 were stray kittens, abandoned by a neighbor who moved away and simply left them. The kittens began living in my backyard. In this photo, I hadn’t been able to trap them yet. This was before they had a truckload of un-adoptable feral kittens in my basement. Yes, before my life was overtaken by the lovely 8 cats who now allow me to live with them (actually, I love them dearly):

Tom, Huckleberry, and Becky enjoying the great outdoors, as wild, untamed kittens! I think was in early fall of 2012.

I also found quite a big bunch of digital photos from the old house, back when the house & yard were beautiful, before the developers contracted to buy it (and never did, after dragging it on for 3 1/2 years) and then the house fell to pieces. Such a sad, sad thing for me. But here, again — I never allow myself to think of the old house, because it became such a nightmare of heartache for me. To suddenly see these photos of how lovely it was before it all fell to ruin. It awoke all those feelings I had buried away of how much I had loved that house.

Of course the saddest part was, that Bunny died the day after we moved from the old house and moved into the current rental that I’m in.

And that was exactly one year ago.

So this weekend also marks the first anniversary of Bunny’s death. I miss her so much.

A selfie of me and Bunny at the old house. I can’t remember which one of us snapped the candid shot! Probably me, since Bunny almost never had her phone with her.

Oh gosh. Well, all right. Life goes on, regardless of how happy I am, or often am not, about that idea.

However. On the happy front, a long-time friend of mine in NYC, Iris N. Schwartz, has a new book out! Keep glued to this blog for a great Q & A that I did with her earlier this month, in support of her new book.

Have a great weekend, wherever you are and whatever you’re doing, gang. And keep in mind that time freakin’ FLIES, so love the heck out of whatever and whoever you love while it’s all still vibrantly alive in front of you. A word to the wise is sufficient, as the saying goes.

Thanks for visiting. See ya.

R.I.P. Cleo & Charlie

February 10, 2017 marilyn jaye lewis Leave a comment

Loyal readers of this lofty blog will no doubt recall that I have written here many times over the years of my good friend Val in Brooklyn, who pens the Paws for Thought Comic strip.

She & I have been great friends since 1982, and we are collaborating on an illustrated mystery book series, The Miracle Cats. The first installment will be titled The Miracle Cats and the Case of the Purloined Passport. We started working on the book well over a year ago. It was going quite well until all sorts of tragedies and extreme challenges began popping up in both our lives, including numerous deaths, and so the writing/illustrating of the book went down to slower than a snail’s pace.

Well, earlier this week, another tragedy struck! 2 of Val’s cats died in the same afternoon. Charlie had been diagnosed with cancer about one year ago. In fact, my cat, Fluffy, was diagnosed with cancer a month or so after Charlie had been, but Charlie outlived Fluffy by 5 months.

Val and I have a long history of adopting and/or rescuing cats. In fact, way back in 1983, Val rescued a little black & white kitten who lived around the train tracks in Long Island City, out in Queens, NY, where Val lived back then. Val brought the kitten to live with me in my apartment in Manhattan. I named her Kitty, and she was a sickly kitty, but she lived to be 18 years old! And a very dear companion to me. She passed on December 13th, 2001.

Anyway. I digress. Val rescued Charlie as a teeny kitten. In fact, she rescued his whole family! Cleo, the mom, had 2 tiny kittens (Charlie and Pickles) and I believe they were all sort of sickly, barely surviving under a freeway overpass in Brooklyn. This was 15 years ago. And, although Charlie was expected to die at any moment because of the cancer, his mom, Cleo, who seemed fine and healthy, wound up dying suddenly on the same afternoon as Charlie did. Completely unexpected and so very sad. Losing 2 furry friends in one day, and of course, leaving a 3rd cat, Charlie’s sibling, Pickles, to mourn the sudden loss of a whole family.

Val has several other cats, as well as a rescued dog, and many ferals that come and go in her backyard sanctuary in Brooklyn, yet it is still so sad to lose any members of our families, regardless of how many critters there are! My heart goes out to all of them.

One of these days, things will finally calm down. The clouds will pass, the sun will shine, and we’ll finally finish creating The Miracle Cats! But in the meantime, we ponder the loss and the very meaning of life, even as life goes on. Thanks for visiting, gang.

So much stuff going on!

May 21, 2015 marilyn jaye lewis Leave a comment

Holy Moly. What a terrifically jam-packed couple of weeks it’s been, and I don’t mean that in the best way. Although, overall, everything is great.

First off — so what did you think of the Mad Men finale? I wasn’t completely sure how I felt, so I watched it twice. I came to the conclusion that each of the characters resolved in ways that were realistic to the characters overall, and that everyone, except Betty, of course, has a reasonably happy ending. More importantly, it felt as if the characters’ lives were going on into a palpable future that we as TV-viewers can only dream about… So even though I felt deflated after watching the final episode, I think that was only because I was sad to see it end.

Although kudos for closing with that killer Coke commercial! I vividly recall sitting in my family room one evening when I was 11 years old and seeing that Coke commercial on TV for the first time. I was blown away by it, as was most of America…

Hands down, the most stressful part of these past couple weeks was when my beloved cat, Doris (photo above) went missing for 8 long days!! She was one of the semi-feral kittens born in my basement 2 years ago and had never been outside in her life. Somehow, she got out and I couldn’t find her and it was beyond stressful and heartbreaking and exhausting.

Through the help of many kind cat rescuers online, I learned how to find and catch a terrified, extremely timid semi-feral cat. I tell you, they hide right under our noses, but indeed, as I was emphatically guaranteed by the professional lost-cat trappers, we can’t see them but they are there! They’re watching us, but are too terrified to come out of hiding until the wee small hours of the morning. The whole adventure was maddening. I was out in my dark backyard, in my red Wellies and my cotton nightgown, at 4 a.m. for several incredibly humid days running, catching glimpses of her but to no avail!!

But I finally trapped her at 5:09 a.m. this past Monday morning — in a humane trap — and brought her back into the fold.

Other more upbeat things: School is going incredibly great. I still don’t know if I can keep up this notion of being back in school with homework to do every single day, but so far, I am loving it. There’s honestly no reason for me to still be in school, I’m already an ordained minister with a degree in Pastoral Ministry. However, for now, it keeps my mind off this never-ending limbo of “when will I move back to NY?”

Appropriately enough, though, through some “miracle,” I am on vacation from school this week. Just in time to take on a new web content client who needed help with new content “yesterday” (it required a ton of research & writing immediately). That was turned in this morning, and now I have to draft two killer 500-word essays for a writer’s lab I seriously want to get into, and the deadline is June 1st.

The staged reading in NYC of my screenplay Tell My Bones: The Helen LaFrance Story is still moving ahead. It is going to happen SOON, gang. As in “the next few weeks.” And — I’ve been asked to be the Narrator, so I will be on stage with the actors, instead of lounging around stress-free in the audience. But I am super excited and I hope all of you can get to NYC and attend!! Yay!!

Okay, well, I guess that’s my update for right now. I gotta get crackin’ on those 500-word essays. I hope you’re having a wonderful month of May, wherever you are and whatever’s been going on in your world. Thanks for visiting, folks. See ya!!

Such a Wonderful Morning

September 20, 2014 marilyn jaye lewis Leave a comment

Before my Skype session with Kevin, I decided to go out and take a walk. It was a really beautiful morning and I had actually slept a full 8 hours during the night.

It was one of those mornings where I awoke feeling full of energy and happy and singing to the cats. I don’t know if they prefer when I wake-up that way, but I sure do. It beats being awake at 2 AM and not being able to get back to sleep — a thing I did twice last week.

I took my walk down to the creek and brought some bread along with me in order to feed the ducks. It was only about 7:30, so I was the only person there. I took some photos for you with my iPhone:

Long shot of the waterfall on the creek. The creek is filled with ducks.

Those white dots beyond the waterfall are white ducks

All in all, if you would like to actually see the many ducks I was feeding, you should probably just go to the creek yourselves because my ability to take good photos is not that great!

But what a peaceful morning. I walked about 3 miles, then came back home in time to call Kevin in New York and to wake him and tell him it was time to Skype!

Now I am finishing up my final paper for the Church Administration class in school. I am not sorry to see this class end, gang. It has not been my favorite, by any stretch. And after this, I only have two more courses and I graduate. That equals 10 weeks left of school, with two week-long breaks thrown in. I will graduate right before Christmas, most likely Magna Cum Laude.

I had the best phone conference last evening with the actress in NYC — the one I am doing 2, and possibly 3, theater productions with in the coming year(s). Wow, what a great conversation. I cannot wait for this show to be edited and ready for production, because I want all of you to go to New York City and see it!! It is going to be such a great show!

Okay. Back to the final paper for class, then the 2-hour telecourse on screenplay rewrites , then hopefully the rest of the weekend off. We shall see how that pans out.

Hope you are having a terrific Saturday, gang, wherever you are and whatever you’re doing. Get out there and feed some ducks, all right? Thanks for visiting! See ya.

Hot town, summer in the city!

August 12, 2014 marilyn jaye lewis Leave a comment

Or so the saying goes about New York. I bring it up for a reason!

The same actress that I am writing the Pearl Bailey play for (or “for whom I am writing the Pearl Bailey play”) has hired me to do some extensive editing on another play that she is involved in — another one-woman musical. And part of the arrangement is that she will need me to attend rehearsals in New York City no less than three times between now and a nano-second from now!

Well, now until “the end of September,” which feels like a nano-second because I am still in school full-time, still working various part-time jobs, working at the church now, too, and beginning that two-month course on pastoral care for the terminally ill and the bereaved, etc., on Monday.

Oh, yeah, and revising the TV pilot — I’m kind of, sort of hoping I can get most of that done this week and next. I plan to accomplish that by way of a process that’s called: believing in miracles!!!

Anyway, I am so excited. My airfare and hotel bills are paid for. So I just sort of show up and help them make magic, then fly back home. I can’t imagine anything I will enjoy more. (Oh, perhaps the opportunity to see that guy I was in love with light years ago because he lives in the vicinity…)

Life just gets better and better and better, gang. It makes me want to regale you with — tah dah!! — a photo of a cat!! Oh —here’s one!!

Skipperdee was one of only two kittens who actually got adopted last summer. He was just a born “people cat” from day one. Luckily he was adopted by a friend here in town so I still get to visit him. He is such a wonderful cat!

He was named after one of the characters in the Eloise books, btw. Here he is under my friend’s coffee table a few weeks ago.

Oh man, this was cool!

July 20, 2014 marilyn jaye lewis Leave a comment

Some of you know that I am working on a one-woman musical play about Pearl Bailey for an actress in New York City, and I am sort of at an impasse with the script.

I’m not totally worried because every script, or novel, or short story, or memoir I’ve ever written has been full of impasses that I eventually worked through. Yet while one is happening, it sometimes seems oddly permanent. There will never be anything more than these few pages, etc., etc.

I’ve been a professional writer now for 33 years already, so on some level I know that no block is permanent unless I decide it’s permanent, but this little 12 minute audio on youtube, from an Abraham Hicks workshop, really did something fantastic to my psyche just now.

If you’re blocking anything, or just need inspiration for a terrific energy flow, give it a listen. 12 fun minutes that will be wisely spent!

Have a great Sunday, wherever you are. (I have been to church already, and later today, a friend is taking me to see the final performance of the Monty Python reunion being broadcast live from London today as an early birthday present! So while I’m sitting here waiting for the festivities to unfold, I’m staring at some rather empty pages of the soon-to-be manifested play…)

Okay, onward, gang!! Thanks for visiting today! See ya.

[Tommy and her 3 babes, this time, last summer.]