Hi, loves. 🌿

It's all unbearably fleeting.

When my daughter dances, she is so, so deeply in her body — it’s actually the most shocking thing about watching her. It’s not her talent or the skills she’s acquiring; it’s not her lines or finesse or strength. (Yes, I’m biased.) It’s the fact that, as her teacher put it, “the girl only has one mode and it’s full-out.” I’m not entirely sure this is something one can teach. It comes from so deep within her that it feels both inherited and inherent, and it almost belies explanation. When I asked her recently how she accounted for the fact that she is a shy person who performs like an animal (I didn’t put this it this way but this is how I meant it, the biggest compliment of all), she looked at me sort of stumped. “I just love to perform.”

So when I sat myself front and center at the little studio showing at the end of her first week of dance camp and held up my phone to record every piece, as requested — to show her father, who was in Europe is what I told myself, but actually I did it because we record absolutely everything now and I knew she’d want to watch and rewatch it all later — it was inevitable that something would go wrong. I recorded every single dance but the one she really cared about, a killer piece to Beyoncé’s “YA YA.”

The only explanation for this is that I’m a middle-aged woman who sometimes can’t quite figure out her own phone. The mistake was small and stupid, but the impact was tremendous. She went from flying high at nailing all the steps to the dance of her dreams to giving me the silent treatment for hours.

In the hour between when she realized I’d failed to film her favorite dance and when we (inevitably) got the video from another parent, I had the urge to yell, “It’s LIVE PERFORMANCE! IT IS NOT MEANT TO BE CAPTURED! It is meant to be EXPERIENCED! YOUR ONLY JOB IS TO JUST DO THE DANCE!”

What I actually did was cry on the bathroom floor when we got home because I’d been unable to cry about so many bigger, more painful things going on, and this one small thing sent me careening over the edge.

But mixed up in my disappointment at my own mistake was the very real fear that we’re missing the plot.

There is absolutely nothing better than seeing your kid perform live: the energy, the particular, anticipatory feeling in the room. The fact that anything could happen. The truth that she has this one chance to make the whole thing work. None of that translates to a miniature screen after the fact, no matter how many times we glue our faces to it, no matter how many people we send it to, no matter how many likes it gets from strangers.

The beauty of live theatre and dance — of life itself? — is in the fact that it is fleeting and unpredictable. Any performer will tell you there is nothing better than the exhilaration of getting back on that stage every night, of dancing the steps, saying the lines, getting the laugh or not, hitting your spot or not. There’s a wildness to it. It only exists in that one moment for a select group who come together for that one purpose: to bear witness, to gather their attention around this one moment. Go on a different night and different things happen.

I’ve made a habit of telling my daughter about all the crazy things that used to happen to me in my performing days to normalize the errors: when the strap to the slip I wore during one scene broke one minute before I walked onstage and my friend Billy saved the day by somehow tying it to save me from total exposure. The time my friend Ariel pulled my sagging pants up all the way upstage while she danced by. The night I slipped and I had to just get back up and keep going. Perfection may be the goal but it’s not the most fun or memorable part.

At the performance of the Cirque du Soleil we attended last week in Montreal, mistakes were made — the juggler dropped pins (multiple times!), acrobats failed to stick landings — and something about that was thrilling. It hadn’t been perfected out of its humanness.

In Montreal, my mom and I went on a walk and sat on a bench with this view of a tree. We laughed at our “obstructed view” of the pond, but this was its own view. Nothing was better than being there with my mom.

I told this story to my Summer School crew who’ve committing to writing through the summer. I said it by way of reminding us all to just do the dance. Just do the dance. That’s your only job here. For the hour that we’re together, show up and stay here.

In my daughter’s case, this was a literal directive, but for the rest of us, it’s a metaphor for whatever we want: write the pages, call the friend, get the work done, build the thing, call the senator every damn day, volunteer, protest. Stop worrying about watching the reel back or showing someone else the reel or worrying about what the reel (pages, project, experience) will look or sound like. Don’t spend your time outside of it looking at a reflection or a replica of it. Try to simply be inside your experience. Nothing will ever be better. Nothing will ever be better than just being there.

On July 4th, we hung out with two families we’ve known since we moved to LA nine years ago. The kids were so small then, but are now all teenagers or close to it. As we screamed through Celebrity, not a phone in sight, I could not get over how old the kids were, how old they’d continue to get, how much fun it was to be with them, how I wanted to hold onto this part forever. This age is so unbearably fleeting; they’re still here but you get a whiff of a time when they won’t be. They will — knock endless wood — continue to grow up.

When I left my parents’ home this trip, I couldn’t help but feel that things would not be exactly the same when I returned at Thanksgiving. This is the lie I’ve been lucky enough to tell myself my whole life: at home, things will always stay the same. Of course this has never been true — we are all always changing, aging — but it is feeling so much more acute and tender and painful these days. Our time together isn’t endless. I don’t want to miss any of it.

Sending love,

Abs xox