Annie Dillard wrote, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

On the first of each month, Catching Days hosts a guest writer in the series, “How We Spend Our Days.”

Today, please welcome writer

LAURIE STONE

It’s Sunday, and Richard and I are at the home of our friend Joanna. She’s telling us about the time she was in Nick & Nora, and Arthur Laurents, who wrote the book and directed the musical, decided to change the lyrics of a song right before the curtain was going up. In the scene on stage, Joanna is opening a series of hatboxes, and Laurents said, “Don’t worry, I’ve written the words inside the tops of the boxes. You open each one and sing what’s there.”

Joanna is telling the story at her kitchen table. The kitchen is big and full of stuff for cooking anything you could want. Joanna is married to Chris, and Chris grew up in a restaurant family. The couple met doing Nick & Nora, and even though the show tanked, it glows in the mysterious space in Joanna’s mind between remembering and forgetting.

In the back of their house is a fenced garden you could call a little farm. When you visit, Joanna sends you home with carrots she pulls out of the dirt, also leeks, every herb there is, and tomatoes. She says to me, “I know you don’t like beets.” I say, “Beets smell like the sorrow of trapped children.”

They also smell like what happened to Joanna that night in Nick & Nora. Laurents mixed up the order of the hatboxes, and when Joanna opened the lids, she looked out at the audience and sang nonsense. She reports this calmly. It heightens the effect. That’s what makes her a good actor. There she is on stage, living the actor’s nightmare in a real Broadway theater in front of a real audience. People don’t actually drop dead in dreams and very seldom take their last breath on a stage.

I try to imagine the moment for her. The boss comes over to you and says what you must do. You’re not experienced at saying, “Are you fucking kidding me,” and maybe a part of you is excited by the dare. The situation is bigger than you. You’re an actor, and an actor’s job, you’ve decided, is to act whatever part you’re thrown. You’ve developed a reputation for making anything work.

Not for one second could I have done any of these things, it crosses my mind, and I find thrilling the fact that Joanna could jump off a cliff, knowing there would be other cliffs ahead and knowing she would stand up and walk away. That’s what passes for confidence, I think—knowing failure doesn’t mark the end of anything.

That morning in bed, Richard I were planning what we might say about the writing Joanna had sent ahead to us. She’s working on a memoir, and she’d asked for some guidance. It was quiet in our house. The outside is under renovation. In the bathroom, I didn’t have to check if one of the workers was painting outside the window.

In the car, we each said three things in the moment we loved. It’s a little practice we do, so I don’t ask him when the deck will be finished and he doesn’t ask me to decide on a paint color for the doors. We passed a farm. I said, “I love the gray sheep. I love when seasons change and you’re in two at the same time. I love the way the women in My Brilliant Friend can’t stop circling each other—half the time it’s I never want to see you again and half the time it’s I want to be you.” Richard said, “I love living in a country I wasn’t born in. I love that it undermines the concept of the nation state. I love the first view of the ocean when you walk over the dunes.” I started to think about our friend Katie, who is selling her house in Maine. She needs the money, and she wants to move on, and I thought you don’t ever have to decide something is for the last time.

I never know how a work session will go. I worry I’ll say too much about what’s missing in a piece of writing instead of showing the person the beauty of what they’ve created so far. Teaching is an art form of its own. To do it well, you have to take in what other people need. You have to look at them and adjust yourself. You have to be a good actor, a good scene partner, and this is something Richard knows well after years of teaching at universities. It’s great for me teaching with him because he’s the one who can really see the other person.

We wanted to avoid making judgments and offering advice, so we decided to work with three elements. First to offer things we’d noticed in the pieces we’d read. Second to ask Joanna to ask us questions about her work. Third for us to ask her questions. It was helpful sticking to the plan, and of course I didn’t stick to the plan.

One of Joanna’s pieces was about auditioning for the Stephen Sondheim musical Into the Woods. She got the part. That’s not the story she told. She wrote about walking around the city, wondering why she didn’t have a repertoire of songs she could pull out of a hat. She thought that’s what other people always had prepared who took themselves seriously.

When you’re in a situation like this with another artist, it’s a little like opening hat boxes on stage and making up a song, no matter what’s written on the lid. I think a piece of writing comes alive when the reader can feel the narrator’s love for what the narrator is telling you. I think the narrator’s need to bring the reader close to something intimate is what seduces the reader into continuing. I asked Joanna what the up side was of being unprepared, and her face lit up. Her face is always kind of lit from within. The up side of being unprepared would be where to find the love for her experience and the way she’s lived her life. We spent the day flying, the three of us, bouncing ideas around in the jazz improv that is a rich conversation.

For lunch, Chris served lemon chicken with vegetable fritters and salad from the garden. He’s fit and beautiful. I asked him about being a beautiful man in the world of film and theater, and he said casting directors didn’t see him that way or as “leading man” material. He smiled. Joanna talked about being typed, too, and how she almost never feels the characters she’s asked to play represent the way she feels about herself. She’s seen as competent—often playing lawyers and judges—and not as sexy as she feels and looks.

It made me think about how we are all miscast as we move through life and how the concept of “identity” is actually a case of mistaken identity. These days, when I tell people for whatever reason I’m seventy-eight, I often get the thing about you sound younger, or you write younger, or some other insult offered as a compliment. People think nothing of revealing the horror-show vision of enfeeblement they carry around of people your age. It’s the last refuge of imagined safe “othering.” I say to people, “Everyone my age sounds and looks exactly the way I do.”

Everyone’s life turns out to be a version of the great Hitchcock film North by Northwest (1959), where Roger Thornhill, played by Cary Grant, is mistaken for a man named George Kaplan, who’s accused of being an assassin, and George Kaplan doesn’t even exist. He’s an invention of the CIA. We go through life saying to the people who have typed us—as female, as gay, as Black, as Asian—“I’m Roger Thornhill, not George Kaplan. You have to believe me.” Of course almost no one believes you, and if you live long enough as a wolf in sheep’s clothing, you get to eat pretty well.

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