June 2012
3 posts
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Greedy (a First Love/Worst Love excerpt)
I loved both of them, men and women. I still do. But women were so much work, so much sifting through things being said and done and wondering what was truthful and real versus what a woman considered truthful and real, always subject to change. Tick-tock and ding, ding - new definition of reality. Thank Christ, there’s none of that with men.
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From the heart's nadir...
to the universe-at-large. So many thanks to all 89 of you, the First Love/Worst Love backers who’ve shown so much love and support it nearly makes my head spin! This adaptation of my minutelovestories to the Fringe Festival stage is happening because of each and every one of you. with love, RC
BIG THANKS TO YOU ALL:
Megan Stelzer Anna Deschatres Matt Allard Gregg Leonard + Astrid Reed Beth...
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“He disappeared into complete silence.”
– Louise Bourgeois
May 2012
23 posts
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The Divorce Hotel [minutelovestory #62]
Making our reservation at the Divorce Hotel was surprisingly easy. I was chewing gum while I dialed. I never chewed gum during my marriage. Maybe I was shifting into someone else. People shift. That happens. And we erode, too. We’re more like the earth than we realize.
Like all of our travel plans made throughout our marriage, I was in charge of coordinating the hotel, airfare, cab, and...
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“‘I beg you,’ she said in the gentlest of voices. ‘It was so...”
– Milan Kundera, Let the Old Dead Make Room for the Young Dead
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How will you stay in love next time? (first...
You’ll listen to Motown with greater curiosity, brought to surprising sobs by the tragedies of Tammi and Marvin. Your cyclamen will not be neglected. You will swear less. You will learn how to perfect spaghetti Bolognese. You will be more resilient.
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“Every relationship has at least one really good day. What I mean is, no matter...”
– Charles Baxter, The Feast of Love
“somewhere between a wound and a jewel.”
– Lewis Crofts referencing Egon Schiele’s paintings (via descroissants)
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“There are few things we should keenly desire if we really knew what we wanted.”
– La Rochefoucauld
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“In the very depths of Hell, do not demons love one another?”
– Anne Rice
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How will I stay in love next time? (an excerpt)
How will I stay in love next time? What will I do differently? I will not cling. I will remember to forget remembering the past with mawkish nostalgia, as it is reliably inaccurate. I will learn how to ride a bicycle and I’ll be ready for anything.
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Droll (minutelovestory #61)
Eve knows that dour and droll are not synonymous.
She pulls at her pintuck sleeves and glances at her husband, Ron, his popped collar obfuscating his neck, flat-front trousers taut across his quads. He exercises forty minutes every morning, squats and stretching included. Eve doesn’t bother him during his workouts. She reads the obituaries and tries to discern whether the deceased was, in fact, a...
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Meditations in an Emergency - Frank O'Hara
Am I to become profligate as if I were a blonde? Or religious as if I were French? Each time my heart is broken it makes me feel more adventurous (and how the same names keep recurring on that interminable list!), but one of these days there’ll be nothing left with which to venture forth. Why should I share you? Why don’t you get rid of someone else for a change?...
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“In the first flush of melancholy happiness he realized that he was loved as...”
– Milan Kundera, “Symposium”
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“I want to take my bodyboard into the water, not for myself, nor for my comrades,...”
– Simon Van Booy, “As Much Below As Up Above”
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Vacationland (minutelovestory #60)
It was their first vacation together and being accustomed to the city’s 99-cent stores and Thai massage parlors, the girl was overcome by the space afforded in Maine’s landscape. Moments of dizziness accompanied by numbness that came and went in her cheeks were held accountable to agoraphobia, which was the only logical conclusion, but she was not fearful in the grid of the city, its teeming din,...
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“I took the Lexington Avenue subway
To arrive at you in your glory days
Of the...”
– To Psychoanalysis, Kenneth Koch
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“With the lights out, I can see people’s lives unfold. A person’s...”
– Little Birds, Simon Van Booy
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Swedish-born (minutelovestory #59)
Before encountering Ben, Lisa had considered herself like the Swedish-born, six-legged calf she’d read about online, the farmer unable to entertain euthanasia due to her venerable desire to live. Like this calf, Lisa continued on despite her deformity of desperation, which cleaved itself to her, a warm and faithful companion.
She was sure she’d given the wrong impression to Ben, with all the...
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April 2012
21 posts
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Signpost (minutelovestory #58)
“They flew like a saucer would if you skipped it across the water.” Kenneth Arnold had witnessed something blinding in the sky while searching for survivors of a C-46 Marine Transport crash in the Cascade Mountains. A peripheral distraction he couldn’t explain. Little green men were spotted in France. It had grown global! Kenneth determined that extraterrestrials had been visiting the earth,...
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First Love/Worst Love Kickstarter campaign!
Please give some love, share the love, spread the love and help bring First Love/Worst Love to life!!! with love, rc http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/420927275/bringing-first-love-worst-love-to-life
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How will you stay in love next time? (first...
How will you stay in love next time? What will you do differently? You’ll listen to Motown with greater curiosity, brought to surprising sobs by the tragedies of Tammi and Marvin. Your cyclamen will not be neglected. You will swear less. You will learn how to perfect spaghetti Bolognese. You will not assume anything.
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“Loves are like empires: when the idea they are founded on crumbles, they, too,...”
– Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
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“Love was action. It came to you. It was not a choice.”
– Ann Patchett, Bel Canto
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“Before too long, we were back to where we were before, slamming each other...”
– Charles Baxter, The Feast of Love
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Anything (Something)
Their shirts were graffitied, overlaid in phrases conveying sentiment and memory to only the writer and recipient: “Burn with a weak heart.” “No Slushies for you.” “Pet the bunny and suffer the wrath!” There was no one to censor them this day, this last day of their togetherness, the sunburned faces, over-intellectualized cadences, the making of the Oxford English Dictionary a long and complicated...
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First Love/Worst Love →
Heads up, Angelenos, theatre-aficionados, love lovers, and tale tellers, First Love/Worst Love takes the stage at this year’s Hollywood Fringe Festival. Click the link for the serious scuttlebutt. More details to follow. xx
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“I am only responsible for my own heart, you offered yours up for the smashing my...”
– Anais Nin
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how will you stay
You will not pass verdicts in an accusatory way, proclaiming ‘Your sense of smell is bad’ or ‘You aren’t a good dancer’, then attempt to back away from such statements like bloody roadkill that’s crept onto the sidewalk.
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Diablo
It’s a Tuesday evening. In the ten-apartment complex, Tom is in the spare bedroom slaying armies from the Burning Hells and cavorting with barbarians, monks, wizards, and witch doctors. His wife, Kit, hears him through the closed door. “Die, fucker!”
Kit is alone in the living room, where a small porcelain plate of sliced carrots, raw broccoli, and a dollop of hummus sit on the glass and bamboo...
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“In the car on the way back from San Antonio the ladies talked about the rump of...”
– Donald Barthelme, Overnight to Many Distant Cities
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March 2012
25 posts
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“Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing; a confusion of the real with the...”
– Goethe
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Surprise
You so provocatively texted me “I have a surprise for you”, that my thoughts ran from the salacious to the sweet. I imagined naked photos of you, a tripod arranged in your bedroom, dim lighting, but that didn’t seem like something you would do. You could be, however, surprising. And so I thought you’d bought us Springsteen tickets, because I could easily imagine us singing Born to Run together,...