Chance = Change

Like in Elliot's ..Prufrock, measuring time..and it does become, as one grows older, almost a palpable substance, measurable and textured, each moment with its own smell, taste and feel. The fabric of time...cutting through with that subtle knife Philip Pullman speaks of...we pattern our lives like so much apparel..we cut, snip, make the time fit us..stretch it, shrink it, according to our desires and fears...color it with our emotions..explode it with our rages...and devour it with our appetites...time is our closest companion, always...see? ALWAYS! There it is again: TIME. It IS what we are. Since even Spirit is defined by how long we are conscious of it. The older I get, the more aware I become of time's material nature...there is an absolute comfort in that realization: that time is something.Some THING. That as long as we are, it is. And tonight being the Eve of yet another New Year, I am always particularly conscious of Time and its infinite meanings in a life lived. Thoughts of Time quickly dissolve into mental images of people, places, events, changes and emotions. Clear, palpable pictures, as if only yesterday: I sat in that Ladies Room and realized, as a young woman of maybe 16, that midnight is not that late...or the New Year's Eve when it snowed in my Atlanta hometown, my first, with Daddy still alive...images of the New Year's Eve parties my Mom and Daddy would always throw in the upstairs part of our Edison Avenue duplex, the floor where my grandmother Honey lived...Daddy would always make his special eggnog...2180 Edison Avenue...the smells of perfume and liquors, beguiling and so adult...the New Year's Eve I spent having a too expensive dinner with Chuck Abbott and Marina Sertis at the Philadelphia Sheraton, while we were rehearsing HOTEL SUITE...I made a wish for true love, and Peter came into my life very soon thereafter. The quiet, snow-muffled Eves at the Upstate House, with a huge fire roaring and no one around for miles....or, during the time I was doing Les Mis on Broadway, the utter oddness of Times Square, squared off for the thousands it was preparing to greet...it looked like an enormous stage set, with all the side streets roped off, so the casts of Broadway shows could get to their stage doors.gigantic floodlights everywhere..I would always scurry home fast afterwards, schlepping all the way over to 10th Avenue to get a cab Up Town...and there was the New Year's Eve Bob Friday was my date to a party thrown onstage at the Broadway Theatre when Les Mis was still there...so many memories crowding around each other...56 years' worth of them....tonight we are going over the annual party thrown by Rick Rose and Amanda Aldridge, our friends we love so much...we will stay up til dawn playing their infamous game of charades and we will laugh and cry as we realize the 2005 Barter Season will dawn without us! But we will laugh! Let's not forget that.