I'm Dancing As Fast As I Can

Hi, Boomers,

It's been a surreal week. I haven't been able to blog because my mind of all over the place. I started my full yoga schedule this week at UCLA, adding my classes at the Wooden Center - 2 classes back to back totaling close to three hours more yoga teaching twice a week. Since these classes are held at the end of an already long day, I limp home, try to eat, review emails and go to bed to read and fall asleep instantly.

Monday I had my book signing at the Village Bookstore in the Palisades. I rehearsed my reading all weekend and then on Monday morning, I decided I wanted to read something else from my book. I was sitting in my car rehearsing between classes and never did figure out how I was going to pull it off. And who was going to attend and what the response would be. I sat in my car before going into the bookstore reviewing my reading and finally closed the book and gave it up to the universe.

Over thirty people showed up and those wonderful men and women were full of love and support. It was a completely fun evening. Some bought books, some had books already and everyone was chattering away. I saw old friends - really old friends from my past. There are important people to me and I felt completely blessed. And my new friends and supporters were also milling around and meeting and greeting everyone. Two of my new friends were so very helpful to me: David videoed me for You Tube and Marina, my adorable, brilliant new friend put the clips up on my Facebook page. And my oldest friend from college showed up and I hadn't seen him in decades. We were the essence of Berkeley in the 60's. That was the biggest treat of all. We went for drinks afterward and talked non stop. It was a profound moment when we remembered our being together with the law school gang and my ex husband the day Kennedy was shot.

I know I've said it before but I never had any expectations about writing SIXTY, SEX, & TANGO. I was just expressing an honest tale about getting older, living well in my sixties, forging new relationships, having new experiences, and seeing what comes up.

I have never been much of a career planner. Things kind of just happened to me. I am never afraid to go where I have not been. I'm not resistant to many things in life, including falling in love, even if those I have fallen in love with aren't great mates for me. I don't have a lot of fears or anxieties, except maybe about not having money to live. But that has kind of worked out for me, too, although I never made much - just enough.

I'm also feeling better about being single lately. I used to fret and worry about finding that man who would embrace me. Yet, I'm just find I'm just embracing myself and dancing as fast as I can.

I'm off to Portland to dance tango tomorrow. It's one of my very favorite places to go to dance tango. I meet up with old friends and meet new ones. I hear tango music for 2 days straight and never tire of the joy I find in being part of a very unique community of men and women who are passionate about what is also my true passion.

Life's been crazy but it's been a good week. I have gratitude for all my blessings.

Namaste

Time After Time

Hi, Boomers,

Frustration mounts. I'm trying to build a website for my book, Sixty, Sex & Tango-Confessions of a Beatnik Boomer - on IWeb on my Mac and I literally want to throw my beloved Mac against my wall. On what planet does IWeb help think I live on? It takes me twenty minutes of staring at the instructions about setting up a hyperlink and I still don't get it. Just by accident, however, I solved that problem and now I hate the homepage. I'm hopeless. Some lovely creature at the UCLA bookstore helped me yesterday, and no, I didn't bat my eyes and get all girly with him, but he was simply interested in the technical aspect of building a website from IWeb, and he played with it for half an hour and got me started. Then I got home and the information vanished as quickly as it came into my pee brain. Hopeless. Rome wasn't built in a day and neither is my website. Unfortunately, it's only 4:00 o'clock and I am eagerly awaiting 5 o'clock because that's cocktail hour. However, one can argue, and I have many a time that it is 5 o'clock somewhere in the world. But I will refrain because I'm on a tear about age at the moment. My parting words to my tech genius before making an appointment with him on Monday at 3 o'clock was, "I wish I had been born in the computer age so I would have the vocabulary to go forth and do the damn website myself." He laughed at the old lady stomping off.

While I am on the subject of age, I was recently invited to be a member of the Jewish Women's Theater in LA. Through a friend of a friend kind of thing, I ended up meeting eight other women this morning for brunch this morning at a home in the hills over looking the Pacific Ocean. It's one of the most spectacular days in southern California in a long time. I had a splendid several hours plotting and planning the next year's work with the theater. The age skewed to fifty-five and older - me being the oldest, of course, and I'm tired of that status, by the way. After a little champagne and some organic orange juice (what else in SoCal), I was listening attentively to all the women make contributions to organizing and planning a fund raiser, programs, salon readings, developing a literary arm for new material and all the while I kept thinking how lucky I was to be in the company of some of the most intelligent women I have ever met - all over 55 years of age.

The group revitalized my dormant theatrical bent. It's been dormant for a very long time, since the day I left the Old Globe theater in 1984 and trekked to Los Angeles to become a producer and writer. I was off "the boards" for good - until this moment at 66 and I became interested in a group with a mission to tell stories of Jewish women in the modern world. The Jewish Women's Theater is a virtual theater - changing venues from salons to temples to art galleries, and the organizers are laying the groundwork for a very interesting mission. These women are writers, rabbis, producers, filmmakers, lawyers, accountants, commercial producers, with so much talent and energy they could possibly defy gravity. They've been doing this work for two years and that's not a long time in the theater world. I ran a full time legitimate equity theater for 5 years and I can confirm that the road to finding an audience is rocky and long. But these women have tenacity and commitment and the group reminded me of decades ago when I forged my theater with my partner and my associate and we did it and we succeeded and we completed our mission before moving on in our lives. I can feel the excitement building and I can feel the youthful vigor I once had begin to percolate as I tap into things I want to do with the group.

It's amazing the emotions and feelings that are reawakened in my 60's. I feel this excitement offers an array of possibilities that I hadn't even thought about. It feels like Berkeley in the 60's again when everything was possible and the future was bright.

So age is only a number, they say. The Buddhists say that you are only as old as the health of your spine. And I say that passion and commitment and involvement is the key to staying vital and young.

Is it 5 o'clock yet?

Namaste

Joan

Slogging Through 60

Dear Boomers,

  I haven't blogged since April 26th.  I feel a bit remiss but not necessarily guilty...until now.

I've been in a general malaise outside of my yoga teaching.  Oh, I love my work and am grateful every day for my students, my private clients and my friends.  

I guess it has to do with adult children this week and the end of the old lover comeback.  Let me start with the old lover comeback:  there wasn't one; it was a non-started, a fake and phony attempt to reconnect with heart or devotion and with a dedication to carelessness;  Moving on (although I didn't move on all week), the other issues revolve around my sons and their inattention.  I guess it's great not to have sons that have a mother complex - the tiny voice inside of a man that says to a woman - No! No! don't come any closer to my heart because I really cannot love you with my total being.  That's the inner mother.  The outer mother is a symbol of the inner mother.  Too complicated, huh?

Anyway, whenever I try to connect to one or the other of my sons, I get, "Mom, didn't I tell you not to call my home phone," or "Mom, I'm on my way to work, getting Starbucks, call you later."  No call later. One is chewing me out while the other just ignores.  What's the brain process here.  We live in different cities.  I try to come into Vegas once a month to see everyone, be with my grandchildren, be available, yada, yada, yada.  

What is family connection, anyway?  What does it mean to be connected to family?  Family asks after you, as in, are you happy, feeling good, depressed, or are you doing all right with finances, work, dating.  Sometimes I think a mother/grandmother should just take off for Tibet for six months and let everyone wonder what happened to "Mom."  She used to be around a lot and now she just doesn't care about us anymore.

I won't leave.  It's just not in my nature to leave my family.  I almost did once in Buenos Aires when I could have had a job teaching English as a second language.  I thought long and hard about it.  I'd dance tango all night at the milongas and then I'd get home about 3 am and get up at 7 and teach English to those peacock Argentine men in their high rise buildings.  I'd last about one week.  I wonder if women who are a couple feel this kind of lonelinessor is it because I am single that I sometimes excess being ignored.  

Anyway, I had a great weekend despite kissing off the old lover with an epic Beowolf poem exhaustedly, meticulously composed over a three day marathon.  I was obsessed to get it perfectly written, and, if I do say so myself, it was a masterpiece of irony.  And I already know the old lover won't even get it, let alone read it.  But it doesn't matter because I feel fabulous today at 65.  Oh, but you see, I also had a marvelous date with a much younger man this Sunday and all went right with the world.  After the walk on the Venice boardwalk, which resulted in my buying T-shirts for my grandsons (oh, yes, I don't hide much), we went to an exquisite move called "Examined Life - Philosophy is in the Streets."  Age didn't seem to matter much.

The day and my date reminded me of the best of times in Berkeley in the 60's at the beatnik coffee houses along Broadway and Columbus Avenue with jazz puncturing the cold night air.  WOW!  I felt like 19 again.

Namaste

     Joan