Three Days to Remember: my mother, my friends, my girls, my seaside, poems, words

Everything about this weekend was perfect.

On Friday evening I joined my father at Villanova University, where my mother was being honored by artist Niko Chocheli. This was shortly after learning that my fabulous nephew has chosen to attend a very fine college not far from my own home. The kind of news any aunt would want to hear.

On Saturday, after writing a Going Over poem for a certain band of students who will be reading this Berlin novel over the summer, I had the immense privilege of visiting Little Flower Catholic High School for Girls on behalf of the first-ever, immaculately well-run Teen Writers Festival. All thanks to Sister Kimberly Miller and K.M. Walton, who organized the day, to the girls who came, to the families who encouraged them, and to my fellow rocking writers. The community strengthens. The friendships grow.

I read, and was deeply moved by, the portraits my own students at Penn created about people who matter to them. Something essential happens when we stop to remember. When we ask. When we listen. When we evoke. History of impressions.

My story about pre-season/post-storm Beach Haven appeared in the Sunday Philadelphia Inquirer, sharing a front cover page with Philadelphia's own archbishop, one of those small coincidences that makes a writer smile.

A poem I wrote appeared on Serena Agusto-Cox's blog here, in honor of National Poetry Month.

Words I'd once written about the young adult label were quoted alongside the thoughts of Lauren Oliver and Cornelia Funke in a very interesting New Straits Times story by Samantha Joseph, here. This was the second weekend in which something I'd said in one place was discovered (by Serena Agusto Cox) elsewhere. A week ago, the LA Times quoted me here, in this piece about Gina Frangello.

I received a gorgeous, handwritten (!) letter from Amy Gigi Alexander, a letter written while Amy sat in a cafe in the Petit Square of Tangiers. Amy, I could not be more honored by your words there. Treasured words, which will sit among treasured things.

And finally, but never ever ever finally, Bill and I spent yesterday afternoon with our beloved friends, John and Andra. John Bell was both conducting and directing Meredith Wilson's "The Music Man" at the Labuda Center for the Performing Arts at DeSales University, where John chairs the Performing and Fine Arts Department. It was a rich and wonderful performance. It was a perfect time with two very dear friends.

Today I sit preparing for the launch of Going Over at the Radnor Memorial Library, this coming Wednesday evening, 7:30. I hope you will join us.

Tomorrow I say goodbye to my students. That, my friends, is one of the hardest things I do.

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Hope in a Black Box Theater

At DeSales University these past several weeks, John Bell, Chairman of Performing and Fine Arts, has been directing "The Mikado," that classic Gilbert and Sullivan opera that, though first performed in London in 1885, prevails as comedy and satire even now. (Who today could not, for example, assemble 'a little list' of people 'who would not be missed' for the Lord High Executioner?) With the opera staged in DeSales' black b0x theater, those who were privileged to see the sold-out show sat at the very edge of a fine flirtation. Performers. Audience. Magic.

I grew up in a household where musicals ruled—"The Music Man," "The Sound of Music," "Windjammer." I knew the words to all the songs, my brother (a preternaturally gifted whistler) accompanied, and no couch was safe from being stood upon as we, in our turn, took the stage. It was what we did instead of most things. It taught me respect for the form.

Bell is a choreographer and composer in addition to being a chairman and director, and sitting there in the audience on Friday night it was impossible not to notice how brilliantly he and his students volumized that show—wheels of color on the painted floor, stacking boxes to give the actors height, parasols to catch and convey the sweet-hued light, percussive fans. With hardly more than a piano, a triangle, a gong, those snapped-fast fans, a rap-like dance, the sneak of new lyrics inside old tunes, this "Mikado" was a contemporary triumph.

Most of all it was a triumph for the freshmen, sophomores, juniors, seniors who were given the chance to make it their own.

You watch a performance like "The Mikado" on a campus like DeSales beside John and his (tremendously wonderful and talented) wife, Andra, and the mess of stock markets, housing markets, politics, fear fades for awhile; hope creeps in. Here are artists, you think. Here is the work that they yield. Here is their joy in yielding. Here is the light beyond the tangle of now.

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