A Day In The Life – January 2002
I woke up this morning feeling sad. Henry, the cat I have had for almost 12 years, is missing. He hasn’t come home for 2 ½ days, and Ian and I are worried that a coyote got him. Henry’s brother, Ted, was eaten by a coyote 4 years ago, when we first moved to Malibu. The houses across the street are on a cliff and cats love to explore there. So do coyotes. Even knowing the danger, I would never have made Henry live solely inside. He would have been miserable, and I believe it is better to have a happy, shorter life than an unhappy long one. Sunday, we searched the hillside in the pouring rain, and yesterday we went back out again. No Henry.
It is 6:45am and I need to get up so I can make the 7:30am yoga class. Ian is already up as he is coaching a client at 7am and then coaching masters swimming (read: swim team for people out of school) at 9am. After yoga, I go running. My usual route, from the ocean inland and back, which is a hair under 7 miles. Today is beautiful as it rained so hard the last couple days. The air is clear and cool, the sky is blue. I know that even though I can now see for miles and miles, the air is only clean because the ocean is dirtier: when it rains in LA the smog falls to the ground, and all the debris in the streets get washed into the ocean. On days like these, after a rain, no one is supposed to swim there. The surfers will get in if the surf is good, but most sane folks avoid it for a week. This is a metaphor for the fact that pollution doesn’t just “go away”, it simply gets moved around.
My pace is pretty good on my jog. I have a celebrity sighting (Sally Field, on a brisk walk) and 2 social consciousness sightings (2 electric cars!). This is a metaphor for LA…a little glitz, and some progressive ideas.
I drop off two movies at the local video store that are due today: “Rock Star” (which we enjoyed very much. I am a big Jennifer Anniston fan) and “Under The Sand” (a French film that was very well done but which depressed us. Not the film to see if you are missing your cat, as it is all about Charlotte Rampling dealing with the disappearance of her husband). I then go to the bank to cash a residual check of $163 (a Perry Mason re-run). All this in my yoga/run clothes, and my hair in disarray. Who knows whom I could run into at the bank? I mean, Ian and I ran into Robert Townsend (an actor who was in “American Flyers” and who is also a successful director) last night in the health food store and I saw Sally Field running this morning, so maybe Steven Spielberg is in the bank!
Ian is dealing with the electrician when I come home, as we had a blackout in our house over the weekend. Luckily, the solar system on our home picked up the slack so we still have electricity. My manager, Daniel, calls me to ask if I would go to Africa on a tv series and I say “sure”. That only means that Daniel is submitting me for a role in the pilot, so I don’t start dreaming of African savannahs or anything. I guess a lot of actors wont fly there nowadays and a lot of actors don’t want to leave their families for that long, especially if they have kids, so the producers want to make sure the people they audition are willing to go.
I have a meeting about “Kaleidoscope”, the local environmental talk show I host once a month. The show has been on television for almost 100 episodes, but I only began working on it six months ago. My co-host, Peter Kreitler, was the founder of the show and we interview people on environmental issues. As we are changing the look of the show and expanding our audience, we need to meet with the producer, director and editor. In the meeting, we decide to change the name to “EarthTalk”, and we discuss the new logo. The producer gives us constructive criticism on a couple recent interviews (one of which was that my ears stick out when my hair is in a tight ponytail…), and all in all it is a productive meeting.
I go directly from there to pick up Alex. Tuesdays and Thursdays are my tutoring days with him. Today we have planned to go to the library because Alex has to give a report on Alexander the Great and we want to xerox some pictures for the report. We end up having to go to a second, bigger library which was fine because in LA the libraries are no more than 10 minutes apart. I tell Alex how much I love libraries and he just snorts. Alex doesn’t like to read, which is a big reason he needs a tutor! I love to read, and while Alex is copying the pages he needs, I take out “Savage Beauty”, a book I have been wanting to read about the poet Edna St Vincent Millay.
After I drop Alex off at his house, I call my beloved, Ian, who is himself tutoring Ulysses, the boy he mentors. Ian has to coach a “Weightlifting for Triathletes” clinic tonight so I go to the health food store to pick up some soup for him, soy icecream (for me!), and some eggwhites for both of us. Even though I was interviewed on a vegan radio show last week and was roundly chastised for eating egg whites, I am still eating them. I wish I were a total vegan, but right now I have to accept that I am not.
When I got home, no Henry. I miss him so much! I do get a message from Jonathan, my brother, asking if I have found him. I settle down at my computer to answer the “Ask Alexandra” questions and to write this column. I realize that my day had hardly anything to do with acting! But it had a lot to do with other things, and that is what gives me a balanced, happy life.
