I was quoted in my favorite NY paper/mag (well, besides the New Yorker) today, the New York Observer.

I like John Koblin's story - though because he was on stage, "in" the party, he didn't quite get the full effect.

Last night, Atlantic Monthly - excuse me, now it's just "The Atlantic" - threw a party to celebrate it's 150 Years.

The theme? The American Idea, the title of a recent issue and an essay anthology of Atlantic writers.

It's an important theme, and with bigwigs like Arianna Huffington, P.J. O'Rourke and former governor William Weld slated to speak, I expected something weighty.

Oh, no. No, no, no, no. Instead, those of us who bought tickets sat in an auditorium and watched a cocktail party. We watched the glitterati get drunk, grab asses, laugh loudly, shake hands and mingle, and eat smoked salmon. Without ever looking at the crowd of 860 watching them, because they are used to being watched and pretending not to notice.

Then the bigwigs mumbled through some  BS about what the American Idea means to them.

Then Patti Smith got up to play. And that woman, that rock star, she has some ideas about the America Idea. And those ideas are about justice, and speaking out, and the power of the ordinary person.

But the glitterati, they didn't want to hear Patti Smith's American Idea. So they just kept drinking, kept talking, trying to drown her out as she sang "the people have the power," tears clogging her voice.

So, today my mom went to the hospital to get a biopsy. Three hours she was there - and now she needs to wait five days for the results. The material they took out was stringy, she said, like wet noodles.

She is grateful that she has close friends who have been through this, a good doctor, a respected hospital.

I can't believe any of this unless it is actually true. People survive cancer. I tell myself that.

I only have one parent left, though, and anything that threatens her frightens me.

So now we wait.

Let's take a moment today and listen to the names. And remember how small most of our daily losses are, compared to this great hole in our hearts and in the ground.

Every evening, a lone trumpeter sings out from the low brick apartment building across the street. Tonight, he plays a single, sweet jazz riff over and over. He can't get the F.

I am walking my dog Max and we pause, as we always do, to try to figure out which window. I think the western-most one on the second floor, the one with the cool darkness behind rattling blinds. On the east side of that building, on the first floor, is an opera singer. She rehearses with piano in the afternoons. Even when the windows are closed I can hear the arias; when the windows are open I can see her, her broad back to me, her music snapping crisply in her hands.

We walk past the building on 160th and St. Nick, with its cage of noisy parakeets propped up against the steel bars. It is an apartment, I'm sure of it--but it is also a beauty shop, and on Saturday mornings, women chat on the couch with rollers and foil in their hair. A makeshift salon is on the fourth or fifth floor across from the back courtyard of my apartment, also. A buff gay guy lives there. I see flashes of him at night in his long mirror; some evenings, he stands before a woman and carefully holds up strands of her hair.

Tonight, the air is soft and almost wet. A girl with a long ponytail practices maneuvers on her skateboard; a white woman woman comes up from the C train with pink roses nestled carefully in a  shopping bag and twin blisters on her heels, red spots revealed by her flipflops.  Max and I cross the street, past a small gang of children doing what one of them calls the "chicken little" dance, with complicated feet and a few jerks of the chin. If it were afternoon and sunny, these same kids would be playing baseball, or stickball, a broom handle cracking against a ball made of hard, white rubber.

An entire family is camped out on a stoop, their toddler screaming when she sees my dog; her mother smiles at me and comforts her. They speak to me all at once in a rapid-fire English/Spanish. "His name is Max," I say. "No, he's not a wolf." I have rehearsed this speech, and I can say it in a halting Spanglish in return. I have seen this family before, too. On Sundays, the men haul out a white plastic table and folding chairs or milk crates and play a slapping, militant game of dominos.

The firefighters have turned on the fireplug across from their station. They watch lazily as it shoots water in a blue arch onto the street. From where I live it looks like a fountain, back lit by a car's aqua headlights. We start to walk home. Two rats, the size of the small dogs the neighborhood Dominican women carry, munch contentedly at the vulnerable corners of a plastic bag left out for tomorrow's trash. Max takes no notice.

He does notice, however, the chicken bones that are scattered everywhere on the sidewalk, like a talisman. I never see anyone eating chicken. Yet there are always the bones around the bases of trees, and they are tempting to dogs. He tries not to look at me as he pulls toward them. I jerk him away.

A trio of men stand by an open car door that's playing reggaeton. A city bus thunders by, one of the new hybrids. Max and I make our final circle,  through the darkened, cobbled streets of Jumel Terrace. The gate to the mansion is closed, as it always is at night. Still, we look for a glimpse of the resident Tom cat who usually  splays out on the  schist  wall. Yankee Stadium shines in the distance across the river, brighter than the waning moon. On quiet evenings, with the right wind, the name "Alex Rodriguez!" or a snippet of the national anthem will float gently over to our borough and flutter in the trees.

I trudge slowly up the steps to our brownstone. The trumpeter tries one more time. Dark has fallen completely.

I'm leaving for Guatemala this week, to visit my cousin....so, look for more posting after August 26!

Have a great couple weeks!

Saturday night, Naomi and I checked out The Danger, a hipster performance/party held every so often around the City.

This time it was in the ante "room" of Spiegeltent, on the pier at South Street Seaport. Green lights (supposed to remind one vaguely of Absinthe) twinkled saucily at the bar; a DJ played jungle beats.

And then the show began.

I was waiting for the brass band. But first came Lady Circus. There were two beautiful women on stilts pretending to be identical twins. There was a sword swallower and dancers who used glow-stick pois instead of the flaming kind.

Then there was the midget.

About 4 foot 9, she held up an industrial staple gun and a $20 bill. "Who will staple the midget?" she asked. "I feel no pain. You pussies. Who will do it?"

A man came up to her and, expressionless, did.

He was followed by a trickle of party goers, each holding a $5 bill, or five singles, or more. One man stapled his money to her chest. He seemed to get a dark pleasure from it.

So, maybe this was some sort of political statement about women and pain and being paid to be an object. I hope it was a political statement. Because if it was, it was kind of brilliant.

But if it was just a schtick to get money, than it was disturbing. And awful.

I never want to see anything like that again.

There are two guys who work for the building next door. I think they're homeless---or maybe not homeless, exactly, but I think they might sleep curled up next to the trash area at night behind the locked door---it amounts to the same thing.

Usually I come home to find them sitting in the doorway, splitting a paperbagged-bottle between them.

Or they'll be hauling trash out from their little door, sweat running down their faces.

They do little things for our block, too. Take away the circulars left on renters' doorsteps, pull in anything that needs to be recycled on the block and put it back out in recycling shape. Sometimes they ask me for a few dollars. I usually say no. Politely.

Tonight, coming home, one of the men smiled at me as he always does, and asked how I was.

I replied as I always do: "I'm fine, thanks. How are you today?"

Tonight he said: "Better, darling, now that I know you're home safe."

I laughed. He slapped his knee, and said, "Now that's what I was looking for."

A year ago, I was coming to the tail end of a six-month relationship with an almost indescribably lovely woman.

She had a strong effect on me, then and now. Surreptitiously smart, her wisdom snuck up on me; sometimes I'd find myself a day or a week later smacking my forehead and thinking: "Oh, that's what she meant! She was so right. I should have listened."

Just before I moved to New York last year--breaking up a relationship that was, perhaps, my best to date--she gave me a necklace. A clay charm with the Chinese character for strength etched peacefully on one side. Once I moved to New York, I wore it all the time. It was a reminder to tap inner resources; but more than that, it was a talisman from a time when I was decisive and certain.

Almost exactly a year after she gave it to me, I found it on my bureau broken in half. I'm not sure how that happened--did I lay something on it and not notice? I had no idea it was that fragile.

With the mood I've been in this week, one might expect that I took this as a very bad sign.

Instead, it felt positive to me, almost Buddhist. Maybe because I've been thinking about that relationship a lot, and how much I took away from it. Maybe because I feel like in the past year my perceptions about the world and my place in it have undergone a sea change.

Strength is fragile. Strength is vulnerable. At least the best sorts of strength. And when those best sorts of strength are broken, they become more, not less---they flow into a new kind of strength, a bigger kind, that takes into account frailties and vulnerabilities and bends itself around them into a clear, green pool.

The strength that I thought I had before is broken. I am someone new now, different from who I was a year ago.

I thought about piecing the charm back together with superglue, but I don't think I will. I think I will leave it as a new reminder: that those things we think are central about ourselves aren't always central; that sometimes vulnerability is the best asset you can have; that even broken love is powerful beyond imagining.

I know. I haven't been blogging for a long time.

You know why?

It's been a hard month.

Today, I should be leaving for the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival. I should be there. I 've been there every year for seven years---but this year, I decided to take an August trip to Guatemala instead, to visit my cousin.

What was I thinking? Seriously. What was I thinking?

I am so sad about this now that I am spending a lot of time crying into my keyboard. Not only are many of my Chicago friends going, but so are many people that I deeply love. It's hard for me to even understand that I won't be spending a week on the night stage field, surrounded by half-naked women who are radiating love.

I've been lonely lately. Too lonely. I'm a social girl, and at best I have one in person conversation a day. I haven't found a good segment of the NYC lesbian community to call my own, and it's left me adrift and sad.

Michigan, I know, only amplifies where you are - that is, I might have been even lonelier there. But she also gives you exactly what you need, and what I need right now is a week in the woods with long firelight conversations and silly laughing and breasts bare in the sunshine.