These poor little New Yorker children don’t get out of school till the very end of June, so it’s very important that we parents give them all kinds of almost-summer fun.  Oh sure, they may be busy with their school work …

But that doesn’t mean there isn’t time for amusement parks, ice cream cones, bike rides, scooter rides, balloons, playgrounds and visits to the river!   Take that, you long school year you.

As if May hasn’t been exciting enough for the three of us, we spent the last week with Shannon visiting from Austin along with a special guest appearance by Aunt Jeni all the way from Illinois to help us celebrate our 20th wedding anniversary!  It was almost too much fun, as this excitement-over-Jeni-showing-up-in-taxi picture perfectly illustrates:

During this non-stop fun week (immediately on the heels of another non-stop fun week) there were several massage parties on our brand new massage table …

lots of cuddling …

lots of laughter as we made up for the years Shannon’s been gone from New York …

(shortly after this next picture was taken I did my Aggressive Signer routine for old time’s sake and injured Shannon’s foot.  After googling the symptoms, it became clear she was suffering a Jones Fracture, which is all the more awful when you know that her nickname for me is, in fact, Jones.)

a visit to Coney Island where Jeni got really dizzy on all the kiddie rides and I began showing signs of dementia, mistaking golden delicious apples for a set of watches.  Uh-oh …

a memorial day river picnic with classmate emelia (whereupon we added our beloved hammock to the sad list of items mysteriously lost since we moved last October)…

a delicious Indian dinner to celebrate Shannon’s birthday a few days early …

… and a charming little potluck picnic anniversary party at the nearby Castle Village lawn.  We did this mainly so that Shannon and Jeni could show everyone how little they’ve aged since our decade ago party.   Here’s 2002:

And 2012:

And here’s young bride and groom through the years.  1992:

2002:

And 2012:

Along with Shannon and Jeni, only three friends from our 10th anniversary party made it to #20 (which goes to show how many people are busy during Memorial Day weekend, how many people have moved away from New York AND how many new friendships we’ve made in the last ten years).  One of them was Tia Rosie, who also made our delicious cupcakes:

Another was Michael Arthur himself, who made us this work of art …

Most of these children did not yet exist ten years ago …

And the third was Charlie, our dear friend, pastor and boss, who somehow did not get a picture taken.  He did, however, hang this decoration on the gate.  Aside from perfect weather, wonderful friends and much laughter, the highlight of the evening for me happened seconds after taking this picture:

A family walked by and the mom told her child, “Oh, looks like someone’s having a 20th birthday party.”

Then she caught my eye and said, “Happy birthday.”

Thank you, Party Champions, for making every special occasion even better!

We can’t think of a better way to celebrate 20 years of marriage than spending nine days working on our play down in beautiful Fayetteville at the Arkansas New Play Festival surrounded by mountains, amazing food, and fantastic theatre people while Huck spent the week in Kansas with grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins.  For Troy and me, it was lots of late nights and lazy mornings and the realization that writing a play is much, much harder than we thought.  We stayed with our friends Bob and Amy who started TheatreSquared, which The American Theatre Wing (otherwise known as the Tony Awards) presented with a 2011 National Theatre Company Grant as one of the nation’s ten most promising emerging professional theatres.  They gave “The Ballad of Rusty and Roy” Kevin Fox, a wonderful Chicago director who was immensely helpful in taking our play to the next step, practically holding my hand every step of the confusing way. We now have two brand new songs, one written by Dusty last week whenever he had a free hour (or five) and the other by Troy in the week leading up to the festival. And because all of us were there to bring four new plays to life, it sort of felt like a dreamy theatre boot camp.  One of my favorite days was spent at the house where I sat on the deck trying to fix the last scene, Troy paced around with his guitar trying to finish the new song, Bob (also Head of Playwriting at the University of Arkansas) sat inside talking to himself as he worked on his play and Amy (Head of Acting!) sat at the piano working on an original composition and an English accent.  The dog and three cats stood there watching us like we might be crazy.

And of course throughout the week we fell in love with Fayetteville and all its charming people, delicious restaurants, delightful shops, perfect weather, progressive politics, quiet peacefulness, natural beauty and lack of traffic.  As we got ready for our big adventure back in New York I made one of my famous CD mixes by listening to Johnny Cash Pandora Radio and downloading songs that we liked.  Without realizing it, the majority of songs that ended up on this CD had lyrics like this…

and this …

and our favorite …

Troy and I have been hatching a plan to leave the life we know next summer and Fayetteville has been on our mind.

Call these New Yorkers crazy, but it sure feels like Home to us.

On our way …

Here we are spending ten minutes with Aunt Lori, Uncle Steve and cousin Lauren before sending Huck on his way and getting to work.  (They had a graduation ceremony to attend at the University of Arkansas which just happened to coincide with the day we arrived.)  Notice our beautiful home in the background!  I mean Bob and Amy’s.

Huck got to be with my mom (and some radishes) on Mother’s Day …

… but I had his love note to keep me company.

Our director Kevin with Roy & Rusty.  I mean Troy and Dusty.

One of the things we fixed in the play was the confusion some audience members had about the relationship between Rusty (Dusty) and Jenny (Roy’s wife based on me).  We accidentally made it sound like they were having an affair, which was NEVER what we intended!  (You see?  Playwriting is tricky.)  Meanwhile, here’s Jonny and Dusty cuddling on the deck.

About seven minutes after this picture was taken we got Huck’s first homesick phone call that nearly caused me to get in the car and drive directly to Kansas.

About 20 minutes after these beautiful Lake Fayetteville pictures were taken we got another heartbreaking homesick phone call from Huck, causing us to question the wisdom of right-before-bed conversations with Mommy and Daddy.

This is the really cool sculpture that Huck made out of wood with my dad.  It is currently on its way to New York.

This is what happens to playwrights, actors and musicians who don’t do anything else all day.  They drink a lot of coffee.

May 16th!  We drove up to Bentonville, Arkansas for a lovely lunch and a visit to the beautiful Crystal Bridges art museum.  Later that day during the cast dinner I made Dusty announce to everyone that it was our 20th anniversary and I acted all surprised and embarrassed.  Thanks, Dusty!

Rehearsing can be fun.

We had limited time to officially rehearse thanks to our union actors, so sometimes we just went to bars and had rehearsals and meetings there.  Behind me is a table of very drunk college students.

Here we are in Little Rock following our first staged reading in front of an audience, which made me feel a sudden urge do more rewrites.

After eight days apart we were reunited with our boy!  I told Huck earlier in the week that when I saw him again we would hug for at least 15 minutes.  He held me to it.  Literally.  Later in the day when we broke the news that we had to split up for a couple more hours he looked at me with terrifying intensity and said the following awful sentence: “I cannot believe that after leaving me for EIGHT DAYS you are now going to leave me again.”

I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again: Parenting and Playwriting, Not for the Weak.

Lake Fayetteville with Aunt Tina, Jackson, Rylee  and Nana (Uncle Scott and Papa David not pictured), who were kind enough to drive five hours to bring Huck back to us and see our reading.

More sneaky rehearsals on the deck (my favorite place) before the second performance.

The staged reading in Fayetteville … much better!  Though Huck fell asleep on my lap about 30 minutes in,only waking up once when Dusty started playing the harmonica.

Huck is not an animal lover, but he has special feelings for Prego the cat.

Our magnificent hosts who do a good job talking people into moving to Fayetteville.  If you don’t like this plan of ours you should take it up with them.

We should try to write Huck into the play.

Rusty and Jenny!??!

On our last night we accidentally stumbled upon a beautiful eclipse!  A perfect ending to a perfect week.

One more year, Fayetteville …

But for now, it’s all New York …

Back when I had a baby Huck attached to me 24 hours a day, I began writing about this strange new phenomenon called Motherhood.  When I was a couple months pregnant our brother in-law made us troyandjonny.com and I pretty quickly began posting mommy essays and religiously updating the Huck Blog with pictures and anecdotes for our family and friends (some things never change).  Taking a break from acting and the real world outside the comfort of our little home and neighborhood was something I needed to do for a while there, and writing about it fulfilled the part of me that needed to be creative.  Plus I could stay in my jammies all day long.

In 2010 another mom and blogger named Amy Imig organized a group of writers to read their work in front of an audience, and Listen to Your Mother was born. Two years later, her vision has become a very successful national series of live readings on motherhood by local writers.  This year there are shows going on all around the country in places like San Francisco, Austin, Fayetteville, Arkansas (where we’re about to spend a week), Chicago and Philadelphia.  I was honored to be one of the writers/performers chosen for yesterday’s sold-out show in the Big Apple, joining 14 other remarkable women and one delightful man (plus several amazing producers) to share our diverse stories of motherhood with one very enthusiastic audience.  We told stories of austism, infertility, adoption, aging mothers, sick kids, off to college kids, twin kids, and identity crises, proving yet again the obvious old saying “having a baby will change your life.” It was awfully nice to spend the day this way and take a break from trying to convince Huck to listen to his mother.  (Can I get an Amen?)

After the show we got to meet each other’s friends and families, including a few of the kids who had been the stars in their mother’s stories.  As I learned their names I realized I had never mentioned Huck by name through this whole process, nor had I ever heard the names of most of my castmate’s children.  Living in a world where all we do is talk about our kids (half the time I’m known as “Huck’s Mom”),  I was again reminded of how unique this experience was for all of us.  Though Listen to Your Mother is centered around motherhood, it was actually about each one of us as individuals and not our children.

The piece I read was written back when Huck was a baby and I was brand new at this parenthood business.  In it, 19 year old Jonny makes 35 year old Jonny feel a little nervous about her choices to stay home with the baby.  It’s been fun to revisit this essay, now that I’m an old pro and couldn’t care less what Young Me thinks.  Though I must care a little bit, because I had a big old smile on my face picturing her approval as I walked down Broadway heading to the theatre.  Take that, Jonny Hottman!

Here’s the amazing creator, director, producers and cast …

Here I am with Ann Imig, who came all the way from Madison to see our show, giving us all a great big thrill!

And here’s our fabulous MC Rene Syler:

And my two best fans Chad and Troy, whose laughter during the show could be heard from 76th Street all the way to Washington Heights, I’m sure.  (I didn’t get pictures of my other best fans Tiffany, Jennifer, Sue and Tracie but thank you four for being there, too!)

Best of all, I got a home-made break-a-leg card and roses from Troy again.  It’s been a while …

Huck’s been a bit of a monster lately, totally fragile and breaking into full fledged tantrums when angry just like a horrible two year old or a drunken Stanley Kowalski.  Who knows what he’s going through?  Top secret anxiety over our upcoming week apart while he’s in Kansas and we’re in Arkansas?  Stress over first grade coming to an end?  Anger towards Blanche Dubois being in town?  All we know is that as soon as he goes to bed at night Troy and I give each other really sympathetic facial expressions like we’ve just survived a war together. Because that is exactly what parenthood feels like these days.

Meanwhile Huck’s favorite pastime is to build a gigantic nest on his bed with every blanket we own, turn up his Vornado fan full blast, turn up his rain forest bird chirping sound machine full blast, dim his lights to the lowest possible setting and rest in the nest as an imaginary poisonous creature whose name I can’t remember how to pronounce.

Anyway, yesterday Huck had another outrageous response to being told TV time was over, which prompted many discussions about his behavior and the consequences, blah blah blah blah blah.  Again Troy and I stole meaningful glances when we could, briefly revealing our war wounds to each other while delicately trying to move our violent soldier onto the next phase of the evening, which was making dinner.  Approximately 12 minutes later I completely lost my mind trying to log onto TD Ameritrade’s website to check on an account.  I literally felt like I was going to begin kicking, screaming, sobbing and maybe blowing things up, and when Troy asked if he could help I think I growled something like “JUST LEAVE ME ALONE EVERYONE AND LET ME BE MAD ABOUT THIS!”   I have a hazy memory of the two of them tiptoeing back into the kitchen with Huck sarcastically saying a melodic “Okay …”   I finally found what I was looking for and regained my normal blood pressure, hoping no one noticed the irony of it all.

I think there’s something in our water.

Troy and I have birthdays four days apart so each year there’s a week of fun and overeating.  Here are some pictures from this year’s escapades which included lots of sunshine on our building’s back patio, visits to Ft. Tryon Park, lunch in Brooklyn, cheesecake, homemade ice cream sundaes inspired by Uncle Scott, the Cloisters chess exhibit, a day rehearsing and performing a reading of our friend John Walch’s wonderful play (and finally capturing a fantastic picture of him for once in our lives), Indian food, a neighborhood picnic at Castle Village, dragging a suitcase through the city, getting suntans, getting rained on, Bull Moose Saloon for greasy food with friends, losing Troy’s wallet for a day, getting separated on the subway train, too many late nights for Huck, lots of games of Sorry, lots of good book reading, and more laughter than I can describe. And now back to regular old normal life, which thankfully is generally full of all the above.

While tucking Huck in just now on this birthday eve of mine, I began reminiscing about what I imagine this night was like 42 years ago for my mom.  Huck asked who was more important to remember at birthday time: the mother who gave you birth or the father who married your mother and allowed it so she could give you birth.  I didn’t really like so much how he worded that question so I quickly answered “the mother” in a lower voice than normal.  Next he began talking about how without the mother and the father there would be no baby and how the father plants the seed into the mother, and then his voice trailed off a bit in uncertainty and he asked, “How does the seed get gotten in?”  Glad to be in darkness, I made that facial expression like when you’re about to see two cars collide into each other or like when you’re hearing Rush Limbaugh’s voice.  ”We’ll talk about that a little later,” I said.  And then he told me how his little friend at school explained that when the mom and dad sleep naked and their private parts touch the seed gets planted.  ”Is that true?” he asked.  ”Pretty much,” I said.  ”Oh!” he replied, somewhat surprised but perfectly pleased with my answer.  And that was that.

Happy my birthday, Mom and Dad.

I think it’s very funny that I, who know very little about popular music these days, and I , who often feel like a social media nitwit, had a YouTube video go viral thanks to the tweeting of a superstar whose name sounds vaguely familiar.  I posted the Muscota first graders’ flash mob a couple weeks ago innocently enough, but somehow the singer of that song saw the video and Tweeted about it to all his fans.  Suddenly my sweet little video got over 15,000 hits, which means over 15,000 people enjoyed Huck and his classmates dancing (as well as my sister Jeni, brother in-law Nathan and niece Lily applauding at the end)!  I’m expecting Ellen’s call any day now.  But even more exciting?  They got a writeup in our neighborhood’s little newspaper The Manhattan Times.  At least that’s what is most fantastic to Huck.  (Would it have been too much to ask for a flash mob to “Sunday Bloody Sunday?”)

Anyway, if you guys need me to tell my good old buddy @chrisbrown anything just let me know.  He loves my work.

Sigh.  Where’s @BonoVox_ or @ANNELAMOTT when you need them?

Huck returned to school on this summer-like April morning a little tired from all the adventures we packed into the final three days of spring break, which is what happens when non-car owning New Yorkers suddenly have access to one. Pre-Car Spring Break included a packed Easter Sunday, a little friend’s birthday party in the park, lunch at Chuck E. Cheese, and many hours of Huck entertaining himself while his parents tried to earn a living at the church.  A couple of delightful moments during this car-free time: While looking over his Easter egg goodies in the bright sunshine Huck  innocently said, “Let’s go shit in the sade,” and a few days later while playing Monopoly asked me, “What’s your real name again?  Angelica?”  I hope he keeps getting things a little wrong for a few more years, although I do hope he memorizes his mother’s name sometime.

(We also spent a lot of money getting faulty wiring in our bedroom fixed so that we could install a ceiling fan.  Once the two day job was complete the electrician sympathetically said, “That was a very expensive ceiling fan.”)

Once our friends went on vacation and needed their car looked after, things got exciting.  We drove down to Liberty Science Center in Jersey City on Friday, up to Bear Mountain near Peekskill, New York on Saturday, and way down to Coney Island in Brooklyn on Sunday.  If we owned a car, we’d probably never be home.

The highlight of the week was our day trip far from the city noise and crowds.  We spent the day climbing to the top of Bear Mountain (with occasional fearless rock climbing excursions led by Huck) accompanied by our good friends John, Shana, Dusty and Natalie.  This was especially impressive because two of us have bad knees, one a broken rib, one a hurt achilles tendon, and one a seven year old body.  Once we returned to the bottom of the mountain all intact, we began searching for a charming upstate eatery.  We stumbled upon a wonderful place in Peekskill where we could sit outside in the lovely spring weather.  As we got ourselves settled Troy asked if I recognized the woman in the beautiful sweater nearby.  We all  turned to look, and because each of us are fans of The Wire, our entire table of tired mountain hikers let out a collective scream/gasp when we realized it was Sonja Sohn who plays the wonderful Kima!   We sort of scared Huck with our ridiculous reaction and so I explained to him that it would be like if Uniqua from The Backyardigans suddenly walked into the place.  Suddenly he understood our excitement (though Uniqua is animated so it’s not a perfect example).  It took us a while to settle down from that thrill of a lifetime.

And now life is back to normal.  No more celebrity sitings, no more mountain climbing, no more ocean gazing, no more driving, no more electrical problems … until next time!  Because I’ve noticed that about life:  For good or bad, there’s always a next time.

‘

Here’s two Hucks exactly one year apart on the Coney Island Beach wearing the same white shirt:

Oh spring break.  You’re adorable!

The Tacketts Four (T4) just kicked off our spring break with four days and nights of non-stop fun.  We doubt the rest of the break will compare to our time with them, but at least we’ve got the memories and pictures galore!  It all began on Tuesday when they arrived via Washington, D.C. in time to pick Huck up from the school bus stop.  In honor of the occasion, they all dressed in orange, his favorite color.  What a family!  From there we began our whirlwind adventure which included playgrounds, parks, ice cream treats, Huck’s surprise Flash Mob at school (see previous blog), Huck’s final science class for this session wherein we all got to participate (Lily makes a mean catapult), New York pizza, rock climbing and bedtime stories.  And as if all this wasn’t exciting enough, we also spent a couple afternoons with Uncle Ronnie, Aunt Dottie and second cousin Bryce who were also in NYC for spring break!  We visited the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island under my truly substandard leadership, and Troy joined us for a delicious dinner in Little Italy.  On Good Friday there were Easter eggs to be filled for Sunday’s big after church hunt (might as well put the kids to work), followed by a visit to Times Square and Central Park where Aunt Dottie, Nathan and I got some much needed Middle Child bonding time.  Back at home Lily and Huck enjoyed manicures as well as a Laundry Party with their moms (which resulted in underwear hats), and Jeni and Troy finally got some quality “Stove Time” while the rest of us slept in a bit.  Oh, sure, T4 met the Vice President of the United States Joe Biden during their D.C. stay, but here in NYC they were treated to a lifesize Johnny Depp made of Legos, a Ripley’s Believe it or Not sword swallower, a Morgan Freeman wax statue, a guy dressed as the Statue of Liberty, about 29 guys dressed as Elmo … and to top it off Noah was chosen to star in one of those aggressive acrobatics shows down in Battery Park.  When asked how that compared to meeting the Veep, Noah replied with an enthuasiastic: “It’s gettin’ close.”  MY JOB IS DONE HERE!

After T4 left S3 sadly waving goodbye from the sidewalk this morning, Huck asked me to print a picture of Aunt Jeni so he could snuggle with it.  Then he sighed, climbed into my lap and decided that snuggling with me in real life was probably better than snuggling with a picture.  Aunt Jeni has really spoiled us this year …

(Thanks for bringing the whole fam this time, Sissy.)

(Secret “M” signal for Middle Children Only.  We hope Uncle Ronnie is okay back there.)