Grateful

Wow.

This week kicked me in the ass.

You've probably had a week like it. You know, when you've been maintaining your edge of uprightness and balance trying to fulfill the daily list of desires and responsibilities. And you've maintained for a while. And all at once, your body, mind, sanity don't want to work so hard any more.

Enough.

Suddenly, late for every rehearsal. Crabby for every rehearsal. More crabby at friends who have the audacity to be cheerful. Sick and at the doctor's office buying antibiotics for preventable infections. Late paying bills. Late for work. Wearing unbearable clothes combinations. Losing $7M clients. Aggravating the marketing staff via bad attitude. Sending an e-mail with a typo to the wrong person, triggering a 30-email chaos chain to clear it up. Not sleeping, of course.

Today, luckily, brought turnaround. I don't know why; it's not as if I slept enough last night or I feel any more relaxed. But it IS Friday. Maybe that's all it takes sometimes, to get to 5 p.m. on the final work day and be able to view the weekend with some hope.

Or. Maybe it was at about 4:30, actually, as I attached quarterly reports and letters to e-mails and checked off the sent ones, when my favorite music radio station (WERS 88.9 FM), brought one of my favorite singer/songwriters (Ellis Paul) into their Tremont Street studio as part of their fall fundraising drive (Live Music Week) and let him wail on the Steinway and sing, and then talk about how much he liked to wail on that Steinway and sing, and how grateful he was that WERS kept asking him back to do so.

See, tomorrow at 1 p.m. .... I, too, get to wail on that same f*#&ing Steinway in the Tremont Street studio while the cast of my show does the singing. See, we were invited, just like Ellis, as part of Live Music Week, in our case to perform numbers from "You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown" for WERS' weekend musical theater show "Standing Room Only." (Hint: WERS streams live online. You can listen if you want.)

How grateful am I for that? Like Ellis, to want to play and be able to play and be allowed to play and to perform on the radio with my friends.

Gratefulness must breed hope, eh?

Thank God. I think it has redeemed my week