MARTHA AVENUE-Day 89
Spent the day testing recipes and taking photos of the menu for next week's collaboration with OASIS for Meals on Heels. Everything was so yummy and looks great too. I will attach a few photos here for you to drool over. If you want to be part of this event and get to enjoy this amazing menu that
Willi and I have created, you can check it out at their website sfoasis.com!
Had a wonderful note today from a friend who was hoping to send a gift of our food to another friend here in the community. I love that folks are reaching out to take care of each other, reaching out across the country to put dinner on the table of a friend. Even if we cannot visit or gather for a meal, this feels like a way to nurture and celebrate and support each other. I feel honored to facilitate and collaborate with this kind of scheme. We got the gift voucher set up and sorted, and two little families will have dinner compliments of a friend from out of town. Perfect community.
Tonight I got to do a reading of The Living, by Anthony Clarvoe with an amazing group of actors. Just hanging around our living rooms, making art together virtually. What a prescient play! It's about the plague, but sooooo many things resonated as if it was written expressly to address the times we are living in. Really wonderful, devastating, eloquent play. With heartbreaking passages like:
"So as you walk, if you spot another living person, any other person in the world, your heart stands up, and dances. You want to run to that person, hold your heart against theirs, so your hearts can dance together. But you mustn't, you mustn't touch them, you mustn't come close to them. So you wave wildly and call out, as if you were two little boats on the high sea of the plague, unable to approach for fear the waves would crash the two of you together and you would crush each other. And this is London now: a dry sea, laced with narrow channels, hemmed in by wooden rocks full of poisoned air, where you row the little boat of your body. And now and then you see a sail on the horizon, and you wave, and it waves back, and then you take up your oars again, rowing and rowing through the ashes."
We need art to process and understand and remember. We need writers and directors and actors and designers to interpret. We (theatre) needs to survive. For now, however, we will keep the little flames burning in the dark...the ghost lights on in a dark house, the candle burning in the window...by gathering on zoom calls to read great plays, to feel like ourselves for an hour or so. To share the overwhelming beauty and grief and hope and pain and power of this moment in history.
Take care of yourselves. Reach out to a friend who might need cheering. Wear your masks. Wash your hands. Speak out. Read and learn and adjust your thinking to be more compassionate, more inclusive, more welcoming, more equitable. Keep your heart soft but your health strong. The last line in The Living, is:"We learned what holds the world together, in the plague."
Sleep well. Hug yourself for me. xoxo