Home

Who knows how I came to this odd connection between a painfully beautiful film, and Heart-A-Rama. I'm sure abnormal sleep patterns affect the way ideas wander though the channels of one's brain - at any rate, I'm going to share my obtuse association with you with the hope that you will forgive me if, in the end, this doesn't come together verbally as cleanly as it has formulated in my mind.

I watched the moved "The Namesake" a few week ago...based on Jhumpa Lahiri's novel of the same name. Ashima, a young Bengali woman,marries Ashoke, a virtual stranger, and moves to America. Living with a stranger, and being a foreigner, Ashima soon discovers is like being in a perpetual state of waiting - waiting to belong, rather than experiencing a continuous sense of out-of-sortedness. Circumstances eventually allow Ashima to return to India for part of each year. Before leaving America, she makes an eloquent speech about the meaning of home defining it not as a geographic location, but as a state of mind. Because her ties to India have worn thin, she finds herself out of touch both in America and in India...she is without borders, a resident of everywhere and nowhere.

Now, how does all of this connect to Heart-A-Rama? In short, this year, it feels like we are home. Personally, I didn't feel the bugs as we moved to Two Rivers, but the buzz around town was that there were some. Apparently we were foreigners just seven or so miles up the road from where we began. Some who followed us felt the pang of unfamiliarity in our new surroundings. I didn't notice. Like many who work on the show, I walked into the Community House in Two Rivers and got right to work, tweaking the venue to meet our needs.

But this year, this year, things are different. We have two years behind us. We have begun to create a collective state of mind, and our new location is no longer new...it is home. We were so geared up for the calamity caused by the move that we all may have overcompensated a bit. This year, we are back to normal...I hear the cast laughing, joking and navigating the workings of HAR just like the good old days. The entire atmosphere is a little looser and a lot happier. Our audiences have seemed that way, too. As I look back, now I can see we were quite uptight the last two years, strangers waiting to settle in, hoping to shake the out-of-sortedness and move on to building a home. I think we're on our way.

And now, I will try to get some sleep, so that I can be more linear next week. Someone mentioned that my posts are too darn long (maybe she was too polite to say they are too boring!) so I'll just stop here.

One more thing...What am I reading? The Girl with the Skirt of Stars. It's a native American mystery. Pretty good so far.