gosh, another packed week/end

i'm not sure i know where to start! i guess with the good news: i have a temorary day job! and it's in an organization that i actually care about! the Performing Arts Workshop in san francisco does a lot of the same type of thing that the Julia Morgan does- artist residencies in public schools, weekly workshops with students, and they've just come out with a report showing how arts learning (their workshops) affect student achievement in school. very cool stuff. i've been working with their program director and executive director on a conference this summer about art, social justice and youth (called "making art, making change"). their program assistant left unexpectedly, so i'm filling in. it's lousy office work (not the program development stuff i'd love to be doing), but it's money (HURRAH!) and it's an excellent opportunity to network and show that i'm a good worker. i'll be there until at least apl 7.

also - i chaperoned caitlin'e middle school party on friday night, so poor tracy wasn't the only adult in a houseful of shrieking 7th graders. it was pretty funny. but exhausting (so many hormones - the girls all look 17 and the boys all look 10, but really they're all 12-13).

on saturday i went to a 'swearing festival' with jess h. and tristen and tristen's friend (see pic of jess h. rockin' out to obscenities). that's right, a swearing festival. sounds cool, right? WRONG. it was sooooo lame. they made the collossal mistake of having an "open mic" - where anyone who wanted to could take the stage and rant obscenities for 1 min. it was soooooo annoying, including the obligatory d&d master bay area anti-bush nerd with a mullet. the fish and chips were FABULOUS, but we waited about 40 min for them. all in all, an anticlimactic night.

the next day, Wonderful Women's Brunch in SF with jess and friends. Jess organizes this event every month and we get together for brunch (obviously). this time we were at "q", a restaurant in the richmond district of sf. so much fun! a few smithies and new friends and the food was fabulous. you know how i like brunch (see pic).

Finally, i went to the coolest wedding ever. Sabrina Klein, the Executive Director of the Julia Morgan, who has literally taken me in to her personal and professional families, was getting married for the second time in her life, and everyone was invited. but this wasn't just a wedding between two older people. this was a family marriage. Sabrina's adopted son, Keefer, was on stage with his parents the whole time, got his own tux, and shared in the ceremonies. they got rings, read vows, and keefer got a silver necklace which they both placed on his neck, saying the vows they wrote specifically for him.

it was really beautiful, and very participatory - with peformances by friends and family, including a piece put together by a documentarian friend, who interviewed friends and family involved in tom and sabrina's story. he then took those interviews, devised a script out of them, and had actors (also friends) play the parts of parents of the bride and groom, as well as longtime friends. together, their words told the story of tom, keefer and sabrina. It was beautiful and sweet tho' a little long (the munchkins in the audience were definitely restless).

somewhere during that wedding i realized i had stumbled on a family here. "Sabrina invests in people." someone told me that day. and i could tell how true that was - both from my own expericne and the experiences of others there. it was one big, warm, beautiful display of social capital. people were dancing and singing and creating art and cheering, and also networking and talking about how this school could work with this art organization, and how this artist could come into that classroom. i met the young woman whose parents i met on a mountain in oct - she's coincidentally dating an artist i observed in the classroom when visiting with the Julia Morgan program - and they introduced me to the head of Kaiser Permanente's Theater Education Wing. I saw Stephanie and Louise, with whom I've been working at the Alameda County Office of Education, and Louise introduced me to the Superintendent of Schools. it was a beautiful harmony of differing communities becoming one - which, ironically, is the goal of our conference this summer.

"i'm so, so happy that you're here." sabrina said it to me, and i know that she meant it. she also made every other person there feel loved and welcomed and warm, because that's just what she does. she invests in people. and we can only be grateful to return that investment.