Three

I  came upon this photo in my late night I-pad ramblings and it embodies grace to me, more the quote than the picture. It just goes to show you that grace lives in unlikely places--even behind a smudged and finger-printed screen. I first wrote a finger printed "scream." Not sure it lives there, but you never know. I've come to think of grace as something elusive and unpredictable, like one of those viruses that hides and then kills you. It's like hepatitis but the good kind. It is not like hepatitis at all, except  that it is dormant and then it isn't. The surprise of it is what makes it different from kindness or compassion. 

Someone I know from college had the very bad kind of hepatitis and he posted about his experimental treatment on Facebook. I was riveted, even though I had not seen him in decades. and never really knew him that well.  He had to struggle through his treatment alone. It was heartbreaking. I never posted a word to him, though I thought about him and even went to his blog when he was going through a rough patch. At some point we were even living very near each other in LA and I thought about asking him if there was anything I could do for him, bring him some magazines or soup, or some cream for the terrible rash on his legs. But I didn't. I think I did press the like button when he was cured. There is very little grace on Facebook. 

But there is grace in the artist going back to the beginning, doing the same thing over and over, trying obsessively to reach some ache or lost dream. I know nothing about Isadora except that she died a horrible death. She was strangled by her scarf. Did it get caught in the wheel of a carriage? Was she alone?  If someone was with her, what they could have done? 

My mother was in a workshop of a play called,  "Isadora Duncan Sleeps with the Russian Navy." She played Isadora's mother and had to give birth to a young Meryl Streep. It's an odd thing to watch your mother give birth to a grownup blond lady on stage. I think I was 7, nearly 8 and had just learned to ride a bike. I tuned out my mother's fake labor pains and thought about coasting down a hill and how free and fine one feels with wind on your face and summer all around you. 

I have been thinking and reading about this woman this week. 

She is in Stamford New York, which is much further away than Stamford Connecticut. She's refusing to eat. She is dying of Alzheimer's. She is a secret saint, an artistic lighthouse, so completely herself. Her plays are grace personified to me. Honest, searching, singular. Her name is Maria Irene Fornes. Most people don't know about her. I never met her but acted in her plays in college, not really understanding them but then, coming to love them through learning that some things are understood after the fact. I got to kiss a very beautiful girl in one of her plays. I wonder about that beautiful girl, she was from Tennessee and spent her junior year in Africa. She spoke french really well and was the kind of pretty that makes you laugh too loud and check your eyeliner in the bathroom. I think she went into the Peace Corps and was a Development Studies major. I sometimes wish I had the foresight to have been a Development Studies major. I have been myopic in my devotion to this ancient dying form. I've never wanted to do anything else. I thought for the first time last night, not in a collapsed way but in an honest, calm way, "perhaps I have had enough of plays." There is space around that thought. It's not a plea.

One interesting thing I learned about Maria Irene Fornes is that she was Susan Sontag's lover. It was complicated too. Her first girlfriend, who she moved to Paris with, left her for Sontag and then Maria ended up with her. I cannot imagine what dinner was like at their house. Two dark haired, beautiful women full up with ideas and schemes. I miss that missed dinner. I have a read some bits and pieces of Susan Sontag's diaries of late. All her plans and schedules for writing are so familiar..."I will get up every morning no later than eight. (Can break this rule once a week.)" She must have followed her rules, at least some of the time. That Susan was no slouch. 

Isadora, Irene and Susan: Three Graces.