The calendar Marches on, see what I did there

Dear Friends of the Newsletter,

I’m getting in a March newsletter just under the wire, to satisfy the clamoring of my many subscribers. (Not you, personally. But everyone else was clamoring, trust me.)

“Trust me” and “believe me” are antennae-raising phrases, signaling the opposite. Stephen Sondheim, a master of his craft, knew this. But in “No One Is Alone,” the near-finale of Into the Woods, those phrases echo. “No one is alone… believe me… truly… No one is alone.” Which makes me wonder if the song is intentionally subversive. No one is alone. (But are we?)

Our normally porch-dwelling Cow starring as Milky White in a recent high school production of Into the Woods, which also featured the large child as Prince #2.

Speaking of bygone masters of craft, the small child has a Peanuts day-by-day calendar. We’re in the middle of a twenty-strip series where Snoopy reads War and Peace, a single word at a time. Ten of these strips are Snoopy saying “Are” and others characters reacting. Can you imagine making a story out of that? But Charles Schulz did. Woodstock flies off in a rage when Snoopy refuses to start from the beginning and read War and Peace out loud to him. After Snoopy gets to word #10, he learns Woodstock has been mauled by the cat next door and runs over to rescue him. In the last strip, Snoopy stops reading, saying he’s already had the war, now he’s ready for the peace.

Learning to write makes me appreciate stories built out of nothing.

I barely wrote this month. My energy was sucked up by a health issue from which I am now recovering. Looking back on my journal entries, this one sticks out: “When it’s over patient shakes and cries and nobody will let her go until she stops. She tries to melt down again in waiting room with same result. Patient shuffles out to her car where she can cry and remove snot-filled mask.” (Health issues caused me to journal in the third person.) I had forgotten about that day when I needed to cry, but nurses kept saying to me that they needed to stay with me while I was like this, so I kept pulling myself together and looking for a new place to break down. Sometimes you just need to break down.

See you on the other side of March, dear Friends of the Newsletter.