10 Oct 63
At last on the plane! (TWA flight 801 Athens-Rome-Paris-New York – Chicago, that’s us! Awoke this AM in the Amonia Hotel in Amonia Square. No breakfast because cooks on strike. Bunch of men came in, rolled up their shirtsleeves and tried to cook breakfast for several hundred starving people. Admirable in spite of the fact my tea contained pieces of what looked like shredded napkin. Long wait at the Athens airport. Paris! Hideous problems trying to find a hotel. Saw Marcel Marceau in person at the Renaissance theatre! “La cage” is a masterpiece. Off to the SS France and the US of A! (“Give me your poor, your tired, your huddled, your yearning masses. Whatever.”) 16 Oct 63 We leave ‘The France.” Great boat. How different I am from what I was! Sun. Nov 24 – 63 – Brockton, Ohio What keeps a diary from becoming a hateful duty? Absolute honesty. Yes I am afraid of someone reading it but the “unexamined life is not worth living.” My soul is a warm, wet place, warm with love and wet with tears. What is it that I long for, love or security? Parents & sisters love me – perhaps even Aunt Nina feels something in her frozen heart. It must be hard never to have loved or been loved. (Uncle Burt’s “love” is not worth having.) What a sentimental goop I am but I want to be number one in someone’s life. I want someone who values my love as a precious diamond, who opens his heart to mine. What could be more beautiful than awaking from a terrible nightmare to snuggle closer in his love? If this could happen to me just once the awful turmoil in my soul would subside. I hope this is not just a feminine quality. I hate my feather-brained weakness. Mom just came in and bellowed about what a shambles mine and Genevieve’s room and bathroom is. (And because she’s away at school it’s all my fault.) Does she not see the shambles my soul is in? So much for the internal “me” let’s look at the external. Avril and I are fighting left and right for a TV. I still think we won’t get one. Avril has no tact or diplomacy but relies on having been spoiled rotten all her life. I spilled ice cream on the pajama coat I finished sewing for school – how I dread that home ec teacher. But the really important thing is that our president has been assassinated. I was sick to my stomach when I heard it – he is a wonderful man and we sailed past his wife (when she was on the Christina). It was a personal loss. When I say he understood us it is the highest compliment. I figured out why I like cats so much! They read my soul.
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Sun. Sept 8 – 63
Saw Delphi, which we adored. It was in a much better state than Olympia. We watched Electra being performed in the old theatre. Even the language difficulty could not harm it. I went right home and wrote my own 8 page play Chrysothemis because there are always overlooked characters (and middle daughters!!!) whose story has not been told. Now at work on Dido. Read Balzac’s Père Goriot. “Human richness” is the most beautiful richness in the world. We arrived in Piraeus in a harrowing gale and one of the first things we did was DEVOUR our mail. Later we visited the Acropolis whose beauty is so masculine. If it is not one of the 7 wonders of the world then there are 8 wonders is all I can say. Sublime. Museum also good. I loved the statue of a dog; it had a savage gleam in its marble eye. The smiling sphinx is so delightful it makes you smile right back at her. Dad got us tickets on the SS France out of LeHavre Oct 11 – longest ocean liner in the world!!! Tues. 17 Sept 63 Island hopping is fun! Short runs of 13 mi each. However today we did 70 miles from Spezia (search me how you spell it) to Milos. (Where You-Know-Who comes from. I love it that they found a potbelly attractive.) That’s where we are now. By great good luck ran into Ace Quarles, a professional captain looking for a boat to sail on and Dad took him on. No pay, just room and board but he is giving a lot more than he’s getting. He’s wiry and dark with hair just beginning to gray. Says he usually charters in the Virgin Islands. 29 Sept 63 Ace draws pictures of women with huge chests. He claims to be a realist yet refuses to admit these pictures are not realistic. I told him muscle strong man cartoons are the exact same thing and he did not seem pleased. Have decided to become a Great Ballerina, laugh at my childish notions as you will. A profession without a place for giant breasts. Merrill says mine are so big she calls them “watermelons”. I feel hampered by taking only modern dance. My terrible desire for security impedes everything I do. I want to be sane, I want to be normal, I want to go to college I want to have children: all these desires seem incompatible. I want, I want, I want. I would have to give myself over totally to dancing and I don’t want to give myself totally over to anything. I cry from the depths of my heart. Conundrum. Take a ballet class I guess whenever I get home. Maybe it’s just a passing phase. (Note from Nov. 9, 1963: “I do not want to be a ballerina any more.”) Wed 2 Oct 63 Lovely postcards from Delos. Arrived from Mykonos on Thurs 26 Sept. Boat full of chattering, gaily dressed, colorfully windblown sightseers. It’s a holy island and you can’t spend the night there. The open-mouthed dog lions gave me a special sense of connection to the past. They seemed to be howling to Apollo on Mt. Cynthos, Drive these people away from the sanctuary! Bring back a silence broken only by the sound of priestess’ feet on marble! He will never hear them; no one has heard them but I. It was here that Ace said goodbye, expressing a hope that we will meet again in the Virgin Islands. I said, “As soon as you lower your charter prices.” But wasn’t there something more there? Something you can’t put on paper? No of course there wasn’t. Went to the museum. I liked the statues NOT on display, the head of Perseus stacked in a corner. If something looks wonderful in a rubble pile it is really wonderful. I was raised by a violently pacifist father and a devoted self-obliterating mother to sail around Europe and wander through African war zones. They assured me and my three sisters that everything was “fine”, but to our grown up selves admitted the peril of many of our adventures.
After graduating from a Quaker co-ed boarding school with a superior working knowledge of hypocrisy and duplicity I enrolled at Circle in the Square Theatre School in New York City where I studied under David Margulies. He was wonderful but I became disenchanted with acting, which seemed intent on bringing the world into the self, rather than birthing the self out. And my Self needed to get out. I liked my classes at The Martha Graham School of Dance much better. I loved the silence of dance, the “yoga” of dance. I began working on a novel about prep school entitled The Speechless. I fell into an early marriage with a “rock star” (dead these fifteen years) which lasted all of two years, during which we bought a 140 acre farm in Devil’s Elbow, upstate New York, where alone with my two dogs I wrote while my husband toured. I completed a novel Flycatcher about an inappropriate relationship between a widow and a schoolgirl on the make. My parents had a friend who was a literary agent; he signed me to a contract which I didn’t know at the time is never done. It ended badly. On the collapse of my marriage I found myself in Washington DC where my parents had an empty sixteenth storey apartment with a gorgeous view of Rock Creek Park. I worked as an exotic dancer while establishing myself locally as a poet; my apotheosis was being invited to read my work at The Folger Shakespeare Library. (This period of my life is commemorated in my memoir Inspired Pleasure.) But I liked dancing much more than I liked poets and I found poetry readings downright creepy. Since gothic novels were the rage at the time and I wasn’t having any luck with autobiographical stuff I wrote a romantic Victorian murder mystery entitled Devlyn. This sold over 100,000 copies and is still selling; it even got pretty good reviews for a gothic. My high school boyfriend looked me up and surprised us both by proposing to me – I astonished everyone by accepting. We bought a case of Moet Chandon and wandered up the Eastern Seaboard trying to explain it to each of our families. A cousin said: “I give it three years.” We’ve been together thirty and have two grown children. Once I’d figured out the wifing-mothering thing (that took awhile) I sold a psychological thriller Find Courtney which garnered excellent reviews (although mediocre sales). My boutique publisher sold me and my second-book contract to another publisher where my second book moldered for two years (the term of the contract) before they sent out letters saying they’d decided not to hire editors for fiction because it just didn’t pay. Unable to get anyone interested in Woman Into Wolf I published it myself to a very satisfactory reader response. I also published a book of short stories (Awake Till the End) and two more thrillers - I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead and Depraved Heart (which won the 2011 CT Press Club Fiction Prize.) Good reviews, small sales, terrifying readings – business as usual. After struggling with spirituality and the Problem of Enlightenment (the secret is yoga!) I decided I was looking for something new – an evolved experience bringing the Audience into the story. I can’t think of a better way to do that than through theatre. I started with short plays – Make Me and A Bruise A Cut A Fever and Creativity One - Death Zero (which is wordless - entirely dance.) Then I managed three full-length plays; The Honey & the Pang using only Emily Dickinson’s own words and those of her family as they squabble over her literary inheritance, meaning to demonstrate why she became a recluse: the general shockingness of Society. (“They talk of hallowed things and embarrass my Dog.”) I wrote SoulM8 about college students searching for soulmates, discovering that by slaying each other’s dragons you become all-powerful (but of course first you have to figure out what those dragons are.) I just completed Queen of Swords, which is a duel between the Woman Who Has apparently Everything and who went to apparently any lengths to get it and her justice-obsessed stepdaughter. Now I hunger for physical bodies, fresh ideas, new approaches, contrary opinions; willing to settle for nothing less than Incarnation. Like any playwright. My next project is a rock opera about twinship, bad friends, unsatisfactory mothers-in-law, murder and raging husbands. |
Alysse Aallyn
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