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The great American playwright Edward Albee is celebrating his 80th birthday next month, and numerous Albee plays are being mounted in distinguished Off Broadway theaters in New York. The playwright himself is directing two of his one-acts, The American Dream and The Sandbox, at the Cherry Lane Theatre in Greenwich Village, where they were originally produced in 1961 and 1962. Both plays are included in the new paperback edition of The Collected Plays of Edward Albee 1958-1965, available from Overlook.

This morning, I woke from a vivid dream of my friend Barbara Seranella, who died in January of liver failure far from home, hospitalized while waiting for a donor to come through. In my dream, I went to her house and helped her husband clean out her closets. In the back of the hall closet we found a zippered, insulated grocery carrier that still held her last shopping. I thought it would be spoiled, but when we unzipped the blue bag, it wasn't. The frozen things had thawed, but the milk was still cool. Still, we decided to throw away everything. I kept one thing - a tiny, expensive yellow-capped bottle of unusual oil. I didn't know what I would use it on, or when, but I knew I would.

When I go running or even walking, I'm always on the look out for change. Finding any kind of coin seems like good luck. This morning when I parked at the farmer's market, I thought how I would love to find a penny. Sometimes weeks will go by before I find one. Walking up the sidewalk, I found one, then another and another - six in all. Obviously someone hadn't seen the value in them. Me, six times lucky.

At the market, I ran into someone I hadn't seen in more than 10 years. We used to work together. His last name is Satterwhite, same as my grandmother's maiden name, and years ago we were able to figure out that we were descendents of the same four brothers who came to the United States from England in the late 1700s. My ancestors were brown-eyed Protestants, his blue-eyed Catholics, but all from the same roots.

It feels like a meaningful day.





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