But obviously life is still worth living with a child and

...daughter-in-law like these two!

And Freak Show A-Go-Go was incredible -- like a queer Cirque de Soleil! And Jimmie's father and wife finally managed to make it to a show after, what? Seven years. I spoke with them for a minute and Jimmie's father made me very happy by saying Hard Women's artistic legacy obviously continues in our child. I was rocking the old Hard Women three foot long pony-tail, Madonna-inspired ringmaster outfit, leopard spats and high-heeled tennis shoes, so I was glad if he was only going to run into me once every six years I was rocking an outrageous look. And he did behave very nicely. I am so glad he was finally able to see exactly what it is his child does as an artist. And I was so proud of all KnT and Jimmie and Cindy had done to pull off this marvelous show.

I had the most splendid...

Parent-of-a-Specified-Gender Day with my family! Thank you, Jimmie and Cindy and Maya Naomi and Autumn for the gifts and swimming and fun! Love you guys!

And thanks for a wonderful show on Friday, the Kings 'N' Things Seventh Anniversary. Hard to believe you guys are now senior kings of the troupe!

I got leopard spats made for me by Cindy for Mother's Day. I am gonna rock them all over town, and in Paris, too!

Headed out for a night at the opera

... and I am so excited! World premiere of Duke Ellington's Queenie Pie at Butler School of Music tonight!

Streaming video here:
http://www.music.utexas.edu/calendar/details.aspx?id=9595

I don't know if the technology will work, but you can try checking it out. I attended a recital yesterday by the young woman singing Café Olay and her exquisitely lovely and powerful voice made the little hairs on my forearms stand up, so that's probably a very good indication that the production will be marvelous. Full report later.

Today's the twenty-ninth birthday of my firstborn, who is far away tonight in Portland or environs. I miss him so, and it's hard to believe he's now only a year shy of thirty. Twenty-nine years ago he'd just come flying out of my body after only four hours' labor. He was always in a hurry to fly, mon petit oiseau Nicholas. He said he celebrated by going up in a private airplane -- always hoping to get his pilot's license, that one.

A letter I won't send: It's tragic that you deprived yourself of all this...

because, when all is said and done, it all boils down to this: truly, you could not take the risk. (You could not eat the peach.) You preferred the familiar sadness, the moral "correctness" of staying in name only in a marriage from which you continually seek to escape, whether through moving halfway across the world or through your several emotional or sexual affairs. It's sad, too, because you were so completely safe with me. But you were afraid. It must have been terrifying, to have all you said you dreamed of right in front of you, for the taking.

This is my family. One of my little granddaughters wears a dress and bonnet made for me in 1961 by my mother; the other wears my leopard heels. My own younger child, out of frame, takes the photograph, and I play the accordion.

The younger of my granddaughters is singing a song, à la Piaf, while accompanied by two melodicas, an accordion, and her sister on one of your minor key harmonicas. Our eight-year-old chanteuse composed her song on the spot. It's about an ended romance. It's about all the things that were sent back in boxes. The last words of her song are, "He's just a little man." She's brilliant, and her lyrics come from a deep, authentic, healthy place. We're a tribe of adherents to a philosophy of radical honesty, you see. We inhabit your Paradise Lost. And we rag-tag gypsies WILL BE HAPPY. We seek, and find JOY on a daily basis.

You've lost not only me, but all this. A tribe of women and girls will now wear what once were your clothes, your ties, your sock garters, your watch, your rings. They will play your harmonicas.

It's a tragedy. You, as my beloved, had earned the right to partake of this magical, nomadic feast, to enter a world of radical truthfulness to which you'll never, ever again be offered an invitation. My people were all standing by ready to welcome you as my chosen one, my beloved. It is a world of great beauty -- unimaginable, in fact, to outsiders -- and I am sorry that you will not be part of it. It might have filled some of that abyss inside you. It might have helped heal some of your terrible wounds.

It's on nights like these that I'll remember you most often and be a little sad. Not because I miss you and you are lost to me. But because of all you yourself deprive yourself of and have lost. Tu es perdu à nous et tout est perdu à toi. But the red wine will flow, we will make the music and I will sing and dance. Because, unlike you, I am always passionately committed to being fully IN LIFE.

Ultimately, that's why our relationship could not work out: I am committed to being fully in life and you most probably have chosen to turn your back on all these joys and spend much of your time in darkness. I'm not angry at you for rejecting ME. I'm angry that you reject life, and joy. What a waste. What ingratitude to life for all its riches.

It's the twenty-fifth birthday of my beloved younger child.

March 11 was a Sunday in 1984, the year she was born. I had insisted on doing the birth naturally, without any drugs, exactly as I'd delivered my son four years earlier. I labored nearly twenty-four hours and was going into shock. The doctor told me it was a Victorian childbirth since she was breech and huge -- nearly nine pounds. He told me we were both going to die and I'd be buried with her inside me like something out of a Thomas Hardy novel if I didn't allow them to perform an emergency Caesarean.


That got my attention. I agreed to the c-section and she was out of me in minutes. The doctor scooped her out of my womb, held her up and she looked around the operating room with her huge cobalt blue eyes. The radio played, "Isn't She Lovely?" by Stevie Wonder, as if on cue. She sucked on her wrist -- in fact, she'd already given herself a hickey since she was post-term and hungry those last days inside me. Her father had to hold her while they sewed me up and then moved me to the recovery room for an hour. When he finally laid her on my breast -- how huge and beautiful she was, like a pink rose! -- I said, "So there you are, Miz Pie!" I guess it was a pet name I coined based on Sweetie Pie, but it stuck.

She latched onto my nipple and nursed voraciously. I fell in love with her immediately.

She is still my treasure, my brilliant, unique, loving, talented, funny, complicated younger child.

I'm meeting her, her partner and a few of her friends to celebrate at a favorite Indian restaurant after work. I have a "Pat the Bunny" birthday card for her with cash in it, a harmonica and a few thrift-shopping finds that looked like her to me.