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My husband and I (yes, my husband and I, for I'd somehow persuaded this lifelong-will-not-attend-musicals-under-any-circumstances citizen) traveled to the Penn campus last evening, walked the wide streets to the Penn Museum, and waited with hundreds of others for the door to the Harrison Auditorium to open.  We were there in that old-world space to watch "Sing, City! 3:  Red Dot Dreaming," a musical that my student Rachel both directed and co-wrote.

"Once every two years, Club Singapore's members set aside their books, come together and put up a musical that attracts Penn Students and Singaporeans from all over the East Coast for one night only," the promo had explained, and that's about all I knew when those doors swung open and I was rushed, within the crowd, toward the stage.  It might have been a rock concert or a celebrity jam. It might have been another country.  Rachel Rachel Rachel, hundreds (it seemed like hundreds) were chanting, chanting the names of the other actors, too, the names of the musicians and the dozens of students who had worked for months to put on this self-parodying show.  What is a Singaporean?  What is a Singaporean Penn student?  Over the next few hours, those questions would be answered in a smartly choreographed and well-paced theatrical spectacular that had Rachel Rachel Rachel laced through its every original song, its well-told tale.

Every imaginable Singaporean stereotype marched onto that stage and then devolved or evolved, became more. Every imaginable Singaporean joke (it seemed to me) was elevated and exploited, delivered by actors having contagious fun and underscored by clever multimedia titling.  All the while, behind me, sat those hundreds, that crowd, cheering the actors on—talking out to them or back to them, shaking hand-made signs, calling out awwwww in unison, as if those who had come to watch had rehearsed their lines just as religiously and vigorously as those who had come to perform.

Rachel Rachel Rachel, we all called out, when it was done, and then those on the stage took to tossing this petite, extra-special, she-can-do-it-all-and-so-she-will (Rachel, I know you don't think much of hyphenated of language, but heck, I keep using it here) student into the air.  I've never seen anything like it. I might not again.  But oh, was it something to leave my world for awhile to enter hers.

A final note:  My husband admitted to having had a fine time.  I have proof.  I saw him laughing.

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There are, it sometimes seems, not even six degrees of separation in the writing world.  Today, during Alumni Day at Kelly Writers House (University of Pennsylvania), I shared this moment with the tremendous KWH deputy in charge Al Filreis (I would take one of his extraordinary classes, but I'm afraid I'm not quite smart enough), Alice Elliott Dark (whose short story, "In the Gloaming," was selected by John Updike as one of the best of the last century, and who read from it beautifully today), and Moira Moody, a writer and almost bride, who was Al's student before she was mine, and, after Al and I sent her on her way, a student of Alice's at the Rutgers-Newark Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program created by none other than our mutual friend, Jayne Anne Phillips.

But that's not at all.  Dear Moira was also the inspiration for "Moira" (is inspiration too broad a word for such a flat-out stealing of a name and persona?)—the star of the zany corporate fable, Zenobia, that I penned with then-Shire CEO, Matt Emmens.  

Altogether, then, on a gorgeous meander of a day.

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Years ago, E, C, and I stood here, at this stone banister, looking down on the University of Pennsylvania's quad. We wore straw hats and alma mater colors. We had become what we had set out to be—degreed and ready for the world.

My freshman-year dorm room was in the far corner, on the fourth floor. My memories were of Spring Fling, Arlen Specter's son, the roommates whom I could not rescue and the ones who rescued me. E and C had been there throughout the best and worst of it—allowing the artist in me to talk to the scientists in them, enduring my endless hunt for emptiness in a decidedly urban place, staying near while I danced without regard in the quieting rooms of dying parties—and they are still in my life today. Yesterday, I sent E this photo. She replied, It really is beautiful, and so green.

That's how it struck me, too, yesterday, as I walked the campus with my camera. That's how it strikes me today, as I sit here at this desk, the day closing in around me. My mind is loose and wild and indeterminate with time. I am back then. I am right now. I'm ether and nether.

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We considered foreground and background in English 145 yesterday—the interplay of primary and secondary, the fringe of context, the depth that is gained by incrementally adjusting the writer-observer's depth of field. We took our cameras out and searched for the iconic, then asked ourselves what lay beyond the chosen subject, what defined the borderlands, how the borderlands in turn shadowed and shaped the subject.

For my part, I returned to the Quad at Penn—my home during a tumultuous freshman year, when the new was alarming, and the raw was very real, and I was saved by a sophomore downstairs who played Bruce Springsteen loud in his room. We were just friends, but friends mattered most. They are what now come into view when weather and mood return me to then.

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