"The party wasn't anywhere else."

In November of 2010, Charlotte Stoudt from the LA Times interviewed my friend Anne Gee Byrd about the role she was playing in Lillian Hellman's "The Autumn Garden." In the interview, Charlotte asked "What have you learned about life over 60?" Anne Gee Byrd answered "That the party wasn't anywhere else."

I'm not only going to steal this line...I'm going to try to actually believe it, and live accordingly. 

What an amazing opportunity to not waste any more time wondering if I'm in the right place...doing the right thing... If a woman as wise and witty and all-around fabulous as Anne Gee considers that one of life's greatest lessons...I'm lucky to have been within earshot.

x

p.s. The delightful image is by Courtney Beloch 

The Name of this Blog

                                                                                                                                                 

One of my all-time favorite books is Give Me the World by Leila Hadley. 

It's her memoir of being 25 in 1950 and leaving New York City to sail around the world with her six year old son. It's fabulous.

I think she got the title from Yeats. According to Pound / Cummings: the correspondence of Ezra Pound and E.E.Cummings byBarry Ahearn, “Give me the world if Thou wilt, but grant me an asylum for my affections,” is an epigraph Yeats added to The Wanderings of Oisin for his 1895 Poems. Yeats attributed the statement to the Czech painter Josef Tulka, but, as Richard J. Finneran notes, Yeats may have invented it.

I know "Give me" sounds quite grabby. But I promise, I'm trying to earn my way.