Department of Redundancy Department

I feel like I'm living in the movie Groundhog Day. I suspect the repetition of any activity for 12 consecutive hours will do that to you. I just finished a long, long day of rehearsal for a play called 'The Government Inspector.' The play is insane. It's just weird, crazy, quirky Gogol (oh, those wacky Russians) and after pulling it apart and putting it back together again and again for twelve hours, you can't help but feel a bit distanced from reality. I'm so tired that my tired is tired.

Anyhoo. I did some reading on my lunch. I'm re-reading a wonderful novel called Song Beneath the Ice by a Toronto writer named Joe Fiorito. If any of you have an interest in music and art and literature - he tells a fantastic story that wraps them all up into a sort of gentle mystery. The language and the detail and the music of the novel are absolutely brilliant. He's a gifted man. And one particular passage I read resonated with me. Perhaps because art has been hard these past few months. Or rather, trying to be successful at art has been hard these past few months. I don't remember acting or writing or playing music ever being as difficult as it is now. But it is. It's hard. I'm past the point where I can fake it or just go through the motions. But this image appealed to me. Maybe because you have to be a little bit crazy to do what I do for a living.

"Music is a clipped hedge on the grounds of an asylum. It provides a refuge: It is an ordered, bordered beauty. And I am a gardener. I work according to the rhythm of my shears. As I clip, I hear the howls of the inmates.

They hear the crying of the leaves."