*kendraspondence*

2008: A performance play in five acts
By Kendra Stanton Lee
with a nod to Susan Orlean

Act I: Birth

A handsome social worker answers the page and goes to the hospital at midnight, leaving his wife at home to breath through a deepening set of contractions. The irony is not lost upon the audience. Moments later, the social worker is at the hospital and receives a call. It is his wife. Buckets of water pour from the rigs up high. Symbolism! “My water broke, but I’m not in labor so take your time,” she says. The social worker moves between one hospital setting to the next. Comedy! The wife sits on a birthing ball. The wife paces the floor. The wife gives the nurses her book report on Eat Pray Love. The social worker husband takes a fitful nap. A dancing set of penguins in tuxedos cha-cha into the birthing room and offer an assortment of tea, cookies, and epidural. The wife chooses the epidural. A large clock winds in centerstage. Symbolism! The wife mock barfs and a nurse cries, Her temperature is 108! The wife is wheeled into a shop class where students in scrubs are making birdhouses and Amish benches with saws. She asks many important questions of the students, like, “Can I have some lip balm, it’s cold and dry in here.” The students tell her everything will be okay, she’s been through a lot, and by the way, she had a baby girl with big feet. The baby lets out a very loud cry, not unlike her mother’s. The first performance receives rave reviews. Various visits from several of the major donors follow.

Act II: Show and Tell

The new parents hold the new baby up like Simba on Pride Rock- only not so similarly so as to risk plagiarism – and then yank the child back. “Look, don’t touch,” they say in unison. The new parents default to perma-grins. Puppies jump over a rainbow in the backdrop. (Symbolism!) “She’s so cute,” the parents say, over and over. “She looks like me,” the parents say. The audience looks bored, with the exception of the major donors. “That’s the point,” says the director, satisfiedly.

Act III: Sleep

Zombies walk robotically across the stage. (Symbolism!) The baby cries. The mother wakes. “It is 1p.m., time to start our day!” she says, her enthusiasm questioned by the audience. The baby feeds. The mother looks at a calendar and asks, “Is it a freak leap year? Because yesterday was January 31 and today it is March 13!” The husband calls and asks for the 320532539082nd time how everything is going at home. The wife says she is hungry and can he bring home some sushi and KFC and a pumpkin pie? The baby smiles and says Noogoonoogoonoogoonoo. The husband arrives home on his bike with all of the rations. (Comedy!) The baby sleeps in her crib. The wife sleeps in the bottom of the bucket of KFC. The husband hides in the bathroom reading five months worth of ESPN the Magazine.

Act IV: Forgetting

The wife looks at a cart of merchandise from Target. “I didn’t pay for half of this?!” she says, incredulous. The baby laughs. The wife smacks her forehead. “I forgot to turn the oven off when I left the house!” The baby does a raspberry. The wife calls her husband on the phone. “You left your sandwich on the counter this morning. And then I left it there, too, even though I was supposed to bring it to you. Do you still want it?”

Act V: Remembering

The wife looks at pictures from the last year. She gets misty-eyed, even at the pictures of her face looking like a topographic road map and her pants covered in Desitin. The father sleeps for the first time in a year. The baby stands and says, “George,” and hugs her stuffed monkey. It is too early yet for her to know how to take a bow.

Every year since my brother had the neck control to do so, my siblings and I have taken a holiday picture in front of the fireplace at our mother’s hosue. My sister TP is the blondish bombshell waify thing. My brother Mikie is the beanpole guapo guy. You can see we are all still puzzling a bit how the strands of DNA are shared as far as our similitudes. One thing is for sure, though, we are three musketeers that take family photos Very Seriously. The following are a few out-takes of the session.

And one of just the girls (Nana Red in middle).

I felt extra specially blessed this Christmas, and by that I mean that I wasn’t self-coaching myself to Be Reminded of All My Many Blessings in some hypnotic Chicken Soup for the Holiday Soul kind of way. I mean I really felt it. The blessedness. ‘Twas palpable. I got a boost from being home in Ohio, even though there really wasn’t enough time to spend in any substantial conversation with any one family member, except for the night we stayed up talking late with TP about the time she missed the toilet during her freshman year of college. Like, missed it by a whole walk down the hall (hah!). And then there was the day I got to bust out the Bible with Nana Red and Grandpa Goobs with respect to sabbath keeping. So, yes, there were some meaningful discussions mixed in there with multiple naps, and the rhythmic cuckoo-clock popping of Christmas cookies into my more than gracious maw. And all those things and moments and people and sprinkles-coated chocolate dipped OREOS made me feel so blessed.

Now, I’m still pushing my way through this seasonal depression valley of ache and demotivation and urge to fall into a full vat of Edy’s Samoa ice cream and eat my way out. But I’ve been surrounded lately by such wonderful people, namely my two favoritests, the Baby Girl and the Loverpants, and they have both made themselves more than available for the constant snugglings that I require roughly every twelve minutes. I’m doing better than I was a week ago. The weather has been craptrocious here, just rainy and London gray, but I’ve been helped by the fact that the churchies came over for lunch on Christmas Day because you best believe my booty was in motion all a Swifferin’ and scrubbin’ down every inch of Casa Stanton-Lee. Amazing how much better you feel, how quickening it can be to the senses when you leave the couch.

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Baby Girl opens first-ever Christmas present with mark of suspicion.

Baby Girl, do you approve of said present?

Baby Girl is indeed pleased with present.

Baby Girl got a mini-me, as well.

Her parents got new shooz from each other. Pretty spoovie, no?

Later, the churchies came for lunch. How amped do they look about chili and baked potatoes?

Our wee churchie Justin came over and played dress-up from Baby Girl’s bin o’ fun. I think he looks pretty fetching. It must be the cupcake hat. No. Gotta be the panda slippers. Hat? Slippers.

I was fortunate to have parents that upheld holiday traditions, reinforced in a big way by having a brother with autism that goes berserk when dinner is not served at 6 p.m. sharp and the corny robotic snowman is not played daily 15 minutes prior to that, and the Harry Connick Jr. album is played in entirety, but NO! BEFORE!!! the David Bowie Christmas album. The combination of my parents as tradition stalwarts and my brother as a tradition stall-out culminated in year after year of festivity, rinse and repeat.

Baby Girl got to experience hints of these traditions this year — some more fully and comprehensibly than others. But it was a delight to go through the motions in a way that seemed fresh and more magical, always on the edge of my seat and with a camera ready to catch some new nuance I had never seen before, all because of a little 10 month-old angel in Robeez whose eyes were always alight with the splendor of the season.

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