Missy | March 31, 2005

I may be the only person in the world who became emotionally attached to a white board. I will miss you, white board.

Today was my last day at work. I’m starting to have a little separation anxiety, even though I’m thrilled for my impending move. I reluctantly ceased meddling in projects at around 10:30 this morning, knowing that the time had come to walk away and pass things off to capable hands. Still, I was thinking about various work projects on my way home. I’ll miss the rapport I’ve built with my colleagues; I can say with certainty that my confidence in my own abilities has only increased over time because of this job and the people there, and I’m proud of the work I’ve been able to do over the past six and a half years.

My going-away lunch was very nice–my boss gave a really thoughtful speech, which I followed up with something I can no longer recall because I was simply jabbering with whatever thoughts came to my head. Note to self: prepare when you know you’re going to be the center of attention. (This is the second time I’ve been at a going-away lunch at AV Restaurante Italiano where Supreme Court Justice Scalia was dining as well, which, if you’ve read the recent New Yorker piece on him, is a common occurrence.) Happy hour tomorrow! I built in an extra day for packing & cleaning in case I should find myself hungover & immobile come Saturday.

Looking out my window now at the view of the city, I know I’m leaving DC with fondness.

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Missy | March 27, 2005

A couple of weeks ago I went to the Whitney to see the Tim Hawkinson exhibition. If you’re in the NYC area before it closes at the end of May, you should see it. It’s massive, amusing, clever, very nerdy, and often a little disturbing. Most pieces looks as if they are painstakingly constructed; it’s a wonder that Hawkinson has been as prolific as he has. Here is a site with some video interviews and clips of the work, though it can’t really do the pieces any justice. I’m fond of the signature machine. I also liked–although I can’t possibly explain why because I have no idea why, outside of “Who would ever have thought to do *that*?–a pair of shorts made out of an orange extension cord.

Now here is a real treat: a BBC televised broadcast of John Cage’s 4′33″. Download it and be patient–it’s worth it for the commentary. I do say, that wacky Cage! (Link found courtesy of lightningfield.)

Where have I been? It was only today that I found out that one of my favorite movies, The Bad News Bears, is being remade with Billy Bob Thornton as Coach Buttermaker and Richard Linklater directing. Watch a trailer here. I also recently discovered that a Listen Missy fav, Liev Schreiber, has directed his first feature, an adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated. I already liked Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close enough to want to read his first book, and now I most definitely will. (No trailer; online info for the film is lacking at this point.)

I am totally procrastinating the packing.

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Missy | March 26, 2005

Last night I went to bed at 8 p.m and woke up at 7 a.m. I haven’t had a solid night’s sleep in awhile, and all of the running around, dance, housework & work-work has left me a little drained.

The good news is I had just enough paint primer to finish covering my walls (since I had painted them different colors several years ago), which I completed this morning. No additional trip to the hardware store necessary. Check. Luckily I was smart enough to start that job a couple of weeks ago and do it a little bit at a time. Packing has progressed, but as with any person moving (I imagine), there never seem to be enough boxes. Those, too, I brought home little by little from the office, along with the numerous econ & stats textbooks loaded into my overstuffed backpack that I had there sitting on a shelf and mostly collecting dust. Why do I have to have so many books? Anyway, the goal is to get everything in order, mostly packed except necessities, and mostly cleaned by the end of Monday night so I can (mostly) relax, finish up my work-related work, and enjoy my last week here in DC. (I am not a wait-to-the-last minute kind of person. Thank you, Mom, for those genes. Also, happy birthday!)

The bad news is I’m having issues with my bank, which is partly my fault (apparent misunderstandings on my end) but partly not. I was under the impression that I could transfer my accounts online (or rather, set up new ones in NY and then close out my local accounts when I am ready to do so)–customer service indicated that I could, and there’s even a “Moving” section on my bank’s website allowing one to do so. That transition is proving to be not so smooth. Right now I’ve got multiple accounts set up, all in DC. Argh.

FreecycleDC has, once again, proven to be very helpful in getting rid of stuff. Apartment’s a wreck, but that’s expected. Blogging will be light over the next couple of weeks, though I hope to do some kind of “Ode to DC”, with pictures if I am ambitious enough, before I leave. I’ve got one last local dance performance to attend tonight–Helanius is performing wiht a bunch of different choreographers at Dance Place. This makes me happy because I’ll miss his other performances this spring. (And I’m going with another dancer from my workshop who will be moving to New York in the coming months. It’ll be nice to have another dancer friend there.)

Forgive the moving rambling. Right now, I’ve no other stories to tell. And now I have to go wash the primer off my body. My arms are covered and I have flecks of it around my eye–and probably in my eyes, hair, mouth, nose, whathaveyou–and a big smudge down face.

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Missy | March 20, 2005

Tonight’s dance performances (as mentioned in the post immediately below) went well, in general. I woke up today feeling unfocused and under-rehearsed, but after taking-class-as-warm-up, I felt my game being more or less on, until some technical run-throughs got a little confused. It came together in performance, but I would be bad blogger if I didn’t mention my Embarrassing Moment. First, I must describe the stage: two adjacent studios have a break-away wall, with one side having pull-out risers for seating, and the other side being the stage, which is floor level with black curtains around the perimeter covering the mirrored walls. What this means is that there are no wings; “off stage” is standing on the sides among the lighting stands. The first part of the piece involves people constantly running into and out of the space and, as I was making my first exit, I caught ankles with another dancer, tripped in a most ungraceful manner, and went flying. Thankfully it wasn’t into a light, but I barreled into the curtain and my hands hit the mirror behind it with a resounding, “boom”. It wasn’t that I was hurt (I wasn’t) or that I broke the mirror (miraculously, I didn’t), or even that I was embarrassed (I was, very much, but these things happen). I completely lost my concentration and my first instinct was to cry, right there “off stage” where the audience could see me desperately trying to regain my composure. All I could think was “Hold. It. Together.” Somehow I did and finished the piece without any additional problems. The second performance went much, much better for everyone involved, even though I could feel my energy level waver and I blanked on choreography for a split second but pulled myself back into the piece a split second after that. Whew. Bed now, please.

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Missy | March 11, 2005

You may recall that I recently had an interview in New York. I am happy to say that an offer was made and I accepted. I’m moving! I’ve been spending the past few days telling a small set of people and assuring the ones who are local that it’s not because I hate them. It will be hard to leave. I am relieved to find that instead of being faced with the terror of, in a matter of weeks, moving to a new city and starting a new job both for the first time in over six years, I am energized and happier than I have been in a very long time. And so far I have multitasked my ever-growing to-do list like it’s going out of style. I am nothing if not efficient.

UPDATE: I would like to put in a kind word for the local Freecycle organization. Not only was it almost too easy to get rid of some things that I had no use for and that would have been inconvenient for me to dispose of otherwise, but the recipients were truly thrilled to have my stuff (table and chairs that went to poor recent graduates, and tennis racquets going to a woman whose child wanted to learn to play). And I didn’t have to transport anything anywhere except downstairs to my building’s lobby!

UPDATE 3/17/05: I found an apartment in Cobble Hill within a few hours of arriving in Brooklyn–I couldn’t have dreamed it would be that easy. Granted, I used a broker and consequently paid a broker’s fee. How do you price relief?

Today promises a visit with Cy Twombly and Tim Hawkinson at the Whitney. I’ll be back in DC in time to finish up my current dance commitments: I’m performing two shows on Sunday at Joy of Motion. The first one is already sold out.

UPDATE 3/18/05: I promise this will be the last tack-on to this post, but I found it terribly amusing that I should arrive home to find a summons for DC jury duty.

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Missy | March 11, 2005

You may recall that I recently had an interview in New York. I am happy to say that an offer was made and I accepted. I’m moving! I’ve been spending the past few days telling a small set of people and assuring the ones who are local that it’s not because I hate them. It will be hard to leave. I am relieved to find that instead of being faced with the terror of, in a matter of weeks, moving to a new city and starting a new job both for the first time in over six years, I am energized and happier than I have been in a very long time. And so far I have multitasked my ever-growing to-do list like it’s going out of style. I am nothing if not efficient.

UPDATE: I would like to put in a kind word for the local Freecycle organization. Not only was it almost too easy to get rid of some things that I had no use for and that would have been inconvenient for me to dispose of otherwise, but the recipients were truly thrilled to have my stuff (table and chairs that went to poor recent graduates, and tennis racquets going to a woman whose child wanted to learn to play). And I didn’t have to transport anything anywhere except downstairs to my building’s lobby!

UPDATE 3/17/05: I found an apartment in Cobble Hill within a few hours of arriving in Brooklyn–I couldn’t have dreamed it would be that easy. Granted, I used a broker and consequently paid a broker’s fee. How do you price relief?

Today promises a visit with Cy Twombly and Tim Hawkinson at the Whitney. I’ll be back in DC in time to finish up my current dance commitments: I’m performing two shows on Sunday at Joy of Motion. The first one is already sold out.

UPDATE 3/18/05: I promise this will be the last tack-on to this post, but I found it terribly amusing that I should arrive home to find a summons for DC jury duty.

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Missy | March 5, 2005

File this one under “Life in the City (Without a Car)”.

Today I went out to take care of two, incongruent activities: got my nails done and then walked to the tiny neighborhood hardware store. The former is self-explanatory, but the latter was for a lamp harp (that’s the thing that attaches to a floor- or table-lamp base to hold a lampshade. I know this now because the hardware store people told me. They are also the people who introduced me to the word “ballcock” several years back. The harp is for a nice lamp shade that I recently splurged on from Anthropologie.com but that, when it arrived, I discovered would not attach to the cool base I bought years ago at Goodwill because the base was missing a harp.) I picked the smaller of two available harp sizes thinking, what the heck, it’s only a couple bucks.

I got home and found one of my toes smudged and a too-large harp. Nothing I can do about the toe, but I ended up ordering two more harps of different sizes online and threw in a crystal finial (that’s the decorative attachment that screws onto the harp to hold the shade in place and which pokes out over the top) since I knew the shipping costs would be more than the order amount.

That’s the end of my story. Not much happens in the life of Missy on a Saturday.

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Missy | March 3, 2005

It seems that I cannot maintain any kind of blogging consistency. If I write at all, I dry-heave for awhile with half-written things that never get published or that get folded into something else later, or I do rapid piles-on of unrelated posts (my creative energy comes in quick, sporadic bursts–and whether “creative” is the right word is an argument for another day). My near-term goal is, if I’m not writing here, to leave comments on other people’s sites. This week, I’ve been doing okay in that regard.

I did see the New York City Ballet last night. I know I sang the praises of Jerome Robbins awhile back, but his “I’m Old Fashioned” as the evening’s final installment nearly sent me into an early slumber. But I did get to see “Theme and Variations” and, for the third time, “The Four Temperaments”, which I absolutely adore. It’s one of Balanchine’s abstract “leotard ballets”, a creative force dating back to the 1940’s that pushed the boundaries (even today) of the ballet vocabulary. And, I love the Hindemith score. I mention that this is the third time I’ve seen it, the previous two times with the Washington Ballet (more on them in a minute). Believe it or not, this is the first time I’ve actually seen NYCB live. Their lower-body precision blew my mind. Their ballerinas may not be as lovely (in terms of overall quality) as those of American Ballet Theatre, but their articulation is among the best in the world (it has to be–that’s what Balanchine demanded of his dancers). And I got to see Peter Boal before he retires this year. (There’s an absolutely stunning exit at the end of the male solo in the middle of the piece that requires walking off, backwards, with one’s back completely arched parallel to the floor, arms outstretched and pointing to the wing. I imagine that takes a toll on Boal’s back–it takes a toll on mine just to watch it–thus explaining why he placed himself so closely to the wing prior to the exit; when WB’s Jason Hartley performed it, it seemed like he had about 1/3 of the stage to cover before he was out of sight of the audience.)

I saw the WB last week, a last-minute decision so I could see not Trey McIntyre’s “Rite of Spring” (which I didn’t care for, music & costumes aside) but rather, Christopher Wheeldon’s “There Where She Loved”. (Wheeldon is the NYCB resident choreographer). The company wasn’t settled into the piece, but it was very nice. I considered seeing NYCB again on Friday to see another Wheeldon piece, “Polyphonia”, featuring the strong & angular Wendy Whelan. But, I decided against it; tickets were a little too costly. Anyway, I’ve seen the WB perform “The Four Temperaments” twice in the past, but strangely, I have little recollection of it outside of a few key moments. The WB is the little-ballet-company-that-could, but I’m afraid they try to do too much. I avoid their story ballet productions, and their shorter pieces are hit-or-miss, their dancers have very mixed qualities. I understand that the artistic director has to satisfy the Washington audience–I think he wants to do more contemporary work (which tends to be technically challenging to the dancers but not always interesting to the audience) but he has to appease his subscribers with full-length ballets.

I also saw the Martha Graham Dance Company two weeks ago. They were terrific. The end.

Oh wait: go see the films Head On and Nobody Knows.

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