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Happy Valentine's Day! Usually I like this holiday all right, but in the back of my mind consider it a kind of manufactured occasion to buy more stuff. But this year I participated in a performance art event that touched me deeply. The "happening" occurred at AgeSong in Oakland, a care center for elders with Alzheimer's related brain disorders.

I began a week ago by interviewing residents, asking them questions: what is love?; what's the secret to marriage?; what advice would you give to young people to help them have a loving, long term relationship? I reminded them about the high divorce rate and that some young people today feel marriage is a useless institution -- why bother? I taped the interviews.

We also decorated hearts and each resident told us one word to to write on a heart, words to express what makes a good marriage. I loved the words they gave: patience, wedding rice, laughter, kisses. I loved the interview comments:
* "You can't wait for your husband to care for you, you've got to care for him."
* "When times are hard you have to realize things are hard and separate a little, then come back and talk about what to do. It's hard work."
* "You've got to decide what you want to do in life, not just sit around making sugar cookies. I think we should all learn to dance, your husband, your cousins, everybody, and we'll all have great fun."

Yesterday I packed up a huge bag of hats, jackets, dresses, a ring box, and wedding veils. I put my fake wedding cake in a large stainless steel bowl. I'm proud of that cake, since I specialize in performing arts, not 3D construction. I glued boxes of different sizes together, painted them white and slathered them with vanilla icing. On top, I put candy hearts for decoration. It looked good enough to eat. I drove with my loaded car down to AgeSong.

Along with Patti, one of the wonderful activity leaders there, we staged a mock wedding ceremony. Jean put on the bright blue crepe dress with full skirt, low back and bow. Mary wore a green shawl, Ruben wore a gold glitter derby hat, Bill wore a tan felt stetson, most of the women wore tulle wedding veils. We sang the wedding march and made a procession with those who could walk or whose wheelchairs we could push. Rosie gracefully accepted her tinsel wedding ring. Someone agreed to hold the bouquet. As a combination bride and Justice of the Peace I gave a suitably metaphorical homily. "Love is sweet. And so we will put our marriage ingredients into our wedding bowl(I called out the words they had chosen the week before) -- trust, amore, dedication -- we stir up our Love Recipe -- and voila! What did we make? A wedding cake (I ran to the table where I'd hidden the cake and waved it in the air)!!"

Continuing in my role: "How do we end our marriage to our imaginary partners or to our best inner selves? We dance, of course." And so I got to dance with John, who smiled and smiled, and turned me under his arm in a graceful jitterbug. I wish I could have been as playful at my own wedding years ago.

God bless those who can play and pretend, no matter where or when, no matter how well or ill. It was the best Valentine's Day ever.

Achievement

Educators talk about mastery, success, test scores and other monikers of academic achievement. We subscribe to the theory that if someone works hard enough they can succeed at whatever they do. I agree that persistent effort does bring results. I'm not sure that we all agree on the definition of success.

What about the student who loves to dance and works hard, but can't kick very high or memorize choreography? Or the student who loves to sing and works hard, but lags way behind the rest of the class in singing in tune? Sometimes that student would get an A, sometimes not. Most of us need goals and evaluations but I've seen too many students focus on getting a good grade instead of getting an education that prepares them to be caring, thoughtful adults.

Our culture sometimes holds up an absolute value for mastery. Success looks like a 10 in Olympic competition, a multimillion dollar stock portfolio, Nobel Prize, lead dancer in Swan Lake, American Idol winner, 4.0 GPA. Our students may one day achieve these things, but I think that we'd serve them better if we prepared our students to notice different kinds of success. For some students, getting up in the morning, taking a shower and making it to school on time is success because everything in their lives conspires to make them drop out (I once had a student who told me he didn't need to graduate because he was going to sell drugs like his uncle, but he did manage to graduate). In Oakland, we try to acknowledge student effort or ethics with a catch-all Citizenship grade: 'O' (Outstanding), 'S' (Satisfactory), 'U' (Unsatisfactory); or a choice of comments like, "a pleasure to have in class," and "steadily improving."

I don't have a practical assessment system figured out, although I like the way arts and many other educators now focus on portfolios, presentations and written reflections as measurements. Ideally perhaps - instead of a high school Exit Exam - a student might demonstrate what they are curious about, what new discovery in assignments excited them, why the required curriculum is or is not important for their lives, what made a good teacher, how they grew (or not) because of school. Is it possible to grade the quality of someone's thinking and personal growth, or should each person learn to assess these things in his/her own mind and heart?

Fame

I'm collaborating on a play by a wonderful local actress, Gina Gold. One of the themes in the piece is the addiction to fame, to getting noticed, to being seen or heard, to ..to... to.. being loved.

In the theater world we understand the attraction to applause. Getting attention from an audience can be addicting; lack of attention from an audience can be devastating.

I notice that these days, non-theater folks seem to want fame too.

"I'm trying out for American Idol and So You Think You Can Dance and America's Got Talent." We can have a blog (ahem, like this one), we can see how many friends we've got on Facebook, followers on Twitter, connections on LinkedIn, how many hits on YouTube. My voice students long to catapult to Idol status; then they wonder why fame doesn't happen from singing a song fairly well along with a recording. Fame should be instant, like Facebook, right?

By the way, how are all the famous people doing? I wonder - when I read about the celebrities in rehab or on their sixth divorce. Is there something about the addiction to fame that makes us want more and more?

"The only reason to sing is because you love it," my 80 year old voice teacher, Margaret Sheldon, said to me years ago. We're seldom in control of whether we get noticed or not, so why not find something we love doing for its own sake? In a culture where we do things to "get" money or status or to "build" skills, I like the idea of "art for art's sake."

In fact, I think I'll take Mrs. Sheldon's wise advice even further. Maybe the only reason to live is because I love it.

Priorities

My head is spinning. I'm trying to put things together in my mind before the State of the Union address President Obama will give tonight.

Here's a fragment of an interview I heard on NPR: "Education is everything.. but the white flight to suburban schools has left urban public schools mostly to Latino and African American students without political or financial clout."

Here's a comment our trainer made when we applied for jobs as K-12 substitute teachers in the Oakland Unified School District last week: "A substitute teacher saved my child's life. That's the truth."

Here's a comment made by a full time teacher in a public school: "I can't actually support my family on a starting teacher's salary in this district."

Here's a comment made by a young man I passed in a high school corridor: "I'd go crazy if I had to come to school every day."

Here's a comment overheard in a job line: "We're spending billions every day on the war in Afghanistan, right?"

Here are two headlines: "Job growth Shows Economic Upturn" and "Obama will propose spending freeze."

Here's a how de do, to quote from Gilbert and Sullivan, whose ironic insights in the late 1800-s seem oddly current, in a world where opposites are equally true and where priorities clash with our values.

I appreciate that we have a few people willing to enter politics, given the painful challenges. I dread hearing from our President and our Governors about cuts to education and social services. I hate that we tell our community and state college students how important their education is one moment, but that we don't have the funding to offer the classes they need the next My head spins.

The sun shines today. Students remain intelligent and hopeful. President Obama will offer us some good ideas tonight. I will continue to embrace ambiguity.

Shootings

On April 4, 1968, I was in Chicago on my spring break from college. Staying with friends on the Southside near the University. It was already dark as I walked that night from the train to m my friends' apartment. The streets buzzed with groups of people shouting, cars full of people driving around and around. "What's going on?" I asked someone. "Martin Luther King Jr has been assassinated," the man said.

At that moment, I felt the same stabbing pain in the chest and dizziness I had felt only a few years before, on hearing of the Kennedy assassination. Someone told me that news on November 22, 1963 in an elevator and I almost fainted then, too.

Thankfully assassinations are still not commonplace; the word itself feels alien in my mouth. One dictionary definition reads, "to murder (a prominent person) by surprise attack, as for political reasons." JFK, Martin, Robert. Those of us who lived through these horrible shootings remember exactly where we were when we heard the news.

But are assassinations as rare as we think? We don't call drive-by shootings assassinations. We tally our homicides here in Oakland and compare them to the tallies in comparable large cities. The recent shooting of Representative Giffords reminded us how easy it is to get a gun and of the travesty of the "background check." My own high school students have scoffed at the idea. "Anyone can get a gun any time," they said. In fact, some schools have metal detectors at the front door and now we have body scans to detect plastic guns or explosives at airports. We don't use the word assassination for these murders - the aspects of prominence and politics, are missing. But in a way homicides on our streets are political, and shouldn't we view each human life as "prominently" valuable? Street shootings and violent crimes link to poverty and social injustice, which are political. Altars of flowers and teddy bears on street corners testify to the prominence of another young person gunned down.

When I first started teaching high school drama, I was shocked to learn of the frequency of gun violence in students' lives. We were playing a warm up exercise I called "the community game," in which we stepped into the center of our circle to identify common ground. Towards the end of the warm up I asked, "Step to the center if you've ever lost a friend or relative through gun violence," ALL OF US stepped into the circle. Slowly over the years I became accustomed to my students' need to talk about neighborhood violence, to write skits about it, to mourn.

Martin Luther King Jr, who exemplified peace making and was aware of the threats against his life, showed us the way we should live. I am grateful he has his own holiday for us to reflect on his dream and his reality. May both come to pass.

Invisible

We don't see a lot, in spite of social networking and instant Internet news. Sometimes a documentary or magazine article will reveal an invisible world, like say, rodeos, coin collecting or dog shows. The people and things within these worlds are a kind of closed circuit, revolving around outside our "trending now" everydayness.

The tragedy in Arizona suddenly brings to light one of these invisible worlds: mental illness. Clearly, the "suspect" shooter needed treatment years before the preventable disaster, but instead ended up isolated like so many in this mostly misunderstood world. We hide people with brain disorders in prisons, under freeway overpasses, residential hotels, a relative's spare room, or homes for the aging with dementia.

I spend most of my time in another invisible world: the arts. Sure, a few shining members of this world grace the front pages (of the Entertainment Section). But artists generally cycle unseen on two paths: 1) Create or perform work; 2) Work a "regular" job to pay off debts incurred in #1.

As an artist without a "regular" job, I've been keeping myself sane by engaging in various creative projects like radio drama with KPFA- Berkeley, writing poems and short stories, dancing, singing and actng. None of these activities pay even close to a living wage. Job listings in performing arts are - yes - invisible.

Seeking to become less invisible, I posted my performing artist resume on a popular online job site. Presto! I received three emails from various highly positioned employers. "I am impressed by your skills and think you're a perfect fit for our organization. Please contact me for an interview." Great! They saw on my resume that I can act, sing, direct plays and write poetry and will pay me to do these things! Or they want me full time as a drama professor at a college!

WRONG. The job openings for which I was asked to interview? An insurance company, a bank, a realty firm, full time data entry. Like Superman, we artists work undercover in such jobs. That man or woman in the cubicle next to you might even be one.

January

Happy New Year! New Year, new month, new beginnings. Resolved: meditate daily and be kind. I've already broken both resolutions. Add to version 4 of "final" New Year list: confront failure with grace.

The typical school year differs from the calendar year. In school, January is mid year; over five more months of getting up early, attending classes, studying for exams, writing papers, forgetting to bring an umbrella to school when it rains. "In the bleak mid winter, frosty wind made moan/ Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone," the carol goes. After the hype and anticipation of the holiday season, a bit of depression arrives, otherwise known as "seasonal affective disorder." Gone are the excuses to eat Grandma's fudge and Aunt Lucy's pecan pie (the fudge and pie are gone already anyway because we ate them all up). We're advised to exercise, lose weight, buy full spectrum light bulbs, volunteer at our local charities.

These ideas indeed work well. But sometimes I prefer the animal kingdom's solution: hibernate. In January I find taking naps and going to bed at 7 pm helps. Being someone who doesn't dream much (or remember my dreams), I'm amazed lately by the creativity of my unconscious world. I'm also more appreciative than ever before of the brilliant visions no doubt hiding behind the eyelids of my sleeping students in class.

Ah, well. It's California, and in another month the fluffy pink plum blossoms will come out on our block. Global warming will bring early spring, the days will get longer and I'll have to stay awake at work. I think I'll just.. yawn.. put my head down.. here.. a ... second... l..ong.....er... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz