Diva Las Vegas Baby

I feel compelled to write an entry today, even though I have nothing specific to really relay. My time here in Vegas has been consumed by my pregnancy lately - only 8 more days until my due date. I seem to write about the weather lately when I think of Vegas. Incidentally, we've been having a rain spell for the past two days and it is marvelous - cloudy, chilly, with a fresh rain smell permeating the air, I love it. My husband is fighting a cold, which I think I may be starting to get, so I've got to be careful and rest. Unfortunately, I am not in the resting mood right now, I feel like I've got to keep busy before the baby arrives. I've entered the nesting zone, where you just want to organize and clean and you have all this energy. My Lamaze teacher advised against giving into the nesting instinct and instead saving up the energy for imminent labor. But it really feels good to accomplish things that I've been too tired to tackle and have been putting off. ...

What a nice day out here in Las Vegas! The temperature is moderate, just like Autumn in NY, and the sun is shining intermittently through cloud clusters which make for a nice moody ambience, and there's just enough nip in the air to require a light sweater. I took Brooklyn out for a walk and actually sat down on the bench to enjoy the outdoors, which is unusual for me. Lately my walks have been short and to the point - Brooklyn does her stuff, I head back in. Not today. And it occurred to me that Autumn is my favorite season; something about it makes me so nostalgic. Perhaps because my birthday is in Fall, and the start of school, and Halloween, and candy and cookies and the color orange and the beginning of coats and corduroys, and all that good stuff. Autumn, I think, is more of an adult season that requires an adult sensibility to fully appreciate (I could be wrong). If you asked a kid what their favorite season was, more often than not, the answer wasn't Autumn. Spr...

So, tonight, after watching the show, I packed up my belongings from my dressing room, since my time at the theater will be limited after the baby arrives. All of my family photos, my costumes, my toiletries, my language books, notebooks full of notes - two years of my professional life in Vegas packed in a duffel bag, a shoe box, and a Koi plastic bag. It was sad, the beginning of the end. Which is so disappointing because the show is so good and so much work went into it. And since no one has started packing yet, I felt a little bad being the one to start it off, as if to rip off the rose-colored glasses and shine a ray of harsh reality in everyone's eyes. But, I'd rather do it now; it will probably be too emotional and sad to pack when everyone else is packing at the same time, closer to our end date. I am predicting tears.

Well, I knew when we moved out here that it wouldn't be a permanent move, and it looks like our return to the East is becoming more visible on the horizon. Our show has to move out of the casino first week of January and we do not have a new home as of yet. And it doesn't look like a new home will be available until a year from now. Which is too long to wait around. So, looks like we'll be moving back to NY in late winter, early Spring. And as much as I've written about missing NY and about my difficulty in accepting Las Vegas as a nurturing place to set up home, there are definitely things about our life out here that I will miss. The slower pace, less pressure, the people at work, the driving, the space, the mountains, the milder winters - in lots of ways it has been a real sweet ride. Looking back, I wish I could have been in a less preoccupied, more open and engaging state of mind when we first moved out here, perhaps my transition here would have been a bit ea...

My son will spend his very first years under a Black US president. This will be his "normal" and it won't occur to him to think that this is unusual. If he ever thinks to himself, "When I grow up, I want to be President," he will see the face of a Black man and know that being President of the USA is a completely viable aspiration for him. Tonight, as President-Elect Obama gave his speech, I couldn't help but think of all the people who gave their lives over the past century so that tonight could be a reality, a reality for all of us, a reality for our children; God bless them. God bless us all.