disappearing act

Well, I guess this is how it is when one is a slash (writer slash dancer slash world traveler); long periods of near-complete lethargy followed by bursts of frantic activity. Such is the case for me right now. The troupe--excuse me, the company--is throwing a big fundraiser next month, and I got shanghaied into handling the press stuff. Which, up until now, has mostly consisted of plaintively poking at people and asking what's going on so I can write about it, and getting few if any responses. And then, bang, suddenly we've got to go to press RIGHT NOW and the two days a week I usually spend picking at my paying writing, I just spent ignoring the phone so I could field emails (why do people send 3 meg photo attachments? Why?), arranging and re-arranging guest performers, and experimenting with how many different ways I could say "hot."

It's been good, though. Oddly, I do my best when everyone else seems to be panicking. It's like my system secretes special anti-panic hormones to try to compensate. Now, if everyone else is calm I might very well go around the bend. But today, I've just spent thinking, let it go, let it go. The trickiest part is accepting someone affiliated with the company as an editor; I feel like I'm being patronized when this person makes suggestions, and I have to bite back on the impulse to point out that I am, after all, a professional writer--with a big new check from a glossy local mag sitting in my bank account now to prove it--and willya back off already. But this is my problem, not theirs. Writers and their egos, jesus. Which reminds me that I still need to tell the bedroom slippers story.

Anyway. So there's that (as well as the three rehearsals a week for the dancing part, oh yeah, I'm getting to do that part too, and it's really, really cool), and there's still modeling and catering to be done, and suddenly I realized that I have two readings next week and I need to pick the best three minutes of my essay because Pooja will shoot us if we read our essays in their entirety (not to mention what the audience will do), and oh yeah, I'm spending May in Eastern Europe and should probably be pulling all that shit together. Like, visas. Hotels (last night I discovered that Ukraine's leading marriage agency also rents out apartments to travelers by the week; do you think they come, um, fully equipped?) Trains. Shots. And it's impossible to fly to Berlin without stopping half a dozen times because everything has to be routed around Heathrow, what with Charles finally marrying Camilla (and you should have heard the American Airlines rep I talked to last night complain about that).

I had a moment tonight, after I announced the readings to the artists for whom I was about to disrobe, where I realized that I have sort of an interesting life. I didn't know you wrote, said one, a woman I've worked for occasionally over the past three or four years. I do a lot of things, I said ruefully.

And they don't all consist of generating dirty dishes and wadded-up Kleenex, which is how it sometimes feels.

So if I'm a little quiet for the next few weeks, you know what's going on.