Lucia Frangione

Well it’s dress rehearsal and we have our first audience tomorrow and it dawns on me I am not doing my job. I have been skittering around this character. I’ve done my historical research, I’ve decided what region she comes from, I’ve thought about her health, I’ve thought about her record collection…and ever so briefly I have touched on her marriage, her fertility, her history with violence. The director has spent too much time on my scene, in my opinion, because of me. I haven’t landed her yet. I am allowing her to escape into her “character” that she puts…

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Half of us who ever legally declared “I do” now legally declare, “Actually, I don’t”. So many exes. It makes me go “o”. I had a reasonably amicable split but many don’t. And the information age takes advantage of this pain and there’s a whole market around figuring out how to be divorced. So many self help books and spiritual practices and websites and blogs and therapists mixed in with unqualified spouters playing Dear Abby. It is so easy to pick and choose, like a psycho-spiritual salad bar, sound bytes to justify any selfishness, fear and emotional violence towards others….

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Thanksgiving is coming up and I made a few test pies today with this recipe that I made up last year. Geesh…it’s good. I feel I should share it again with you… Lucia’s Pumpkin Pie with Maple Whip Cream (warning: this pie may cause spontaneous marriage proposals. Antony Holland was the first to ask for my hand after having a piece of this pie. I also wish to credit Kathryn Aberle with the pie crust tips) Pumpkin I roast my own pumpkin. They’re cheap and yummy and you can use the excess to make soup. Get yourself a pumpkin, clean…

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Calgary is all sunshine and blue skies again, as though she never even had her bad moon.”Was I grumpy? Was I tempestuous? Oh bother! What’s a girl to do if she can’t have her moods! I don’t even remember that! Here, have another summer day, take a bite out of that pretty apple you harvested in a hurry as the snow fell, and tell me you still love me. Oh don’t be cross!” My sister’s kitchen counters are full of bags of root vegetables she hurriedly pulled out from under the snow. We eat the last of the battered brave…

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Calgary is having an inversion. At least I believe that’s what you call it when one day you’re wearing a summer dress and the next day you are scraping a foot of snow off your car and trees are falling over onto neighbour’s balconies. A wicked cold is ripping through the cast like a cat with its tail on fire and this week is my turn. Fortuitously I wasn’t needed in rehearsals today so I can lay in bed and rest. I am a stuffy runny hacking mess. At supper I hobble down the stairs, waver in the hallway and…

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I have two days in Vancouver. Oh I have missed my fellow and he has missed me. While walking up the empty stairs from il Mercato, he spontaneously spins me around by the hips and kisses me passionately mid flight. As we reluctantly part, out of my peripheral vision I spy a husky young man in a courier’s uniform. He side steps us with a huge grin on his face, witnessing a moment I thought we were alone for. His cheeks are flushed bright apple red, like a boy’s, as though I have just kissed him instead.

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Today I fly back to Vancouver with Nora in the vain hope she may have school to attend. As we head out the door, her two cousins run towards her and hold onto her so tightly: a little huddle of girls with hot earnest tears running down their sweet little apple cheeks. Two pug puppies are at their feet whimpering, little tails beating against the girl’s pyjama legs. Their shiny wet eyes blink. Nora says, “I’m going to miss you so much.” They can barely say, “Good-bye, Nora, I hope to see you…at Christmas!” This has been unprecedented family time…

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I receive a slap across the head kind of email and chuckle as I stare out the window of Sunterra at the gorgeous hot Calgary sky. The clouds are thin and fibrous, like I’m sitting in the centre of a huge blue seedless watermelon. A business woman is outside battling the wind with her coffee, sandwich, phone and smoke, prioritizing what can and cannot get blown away. Her kitten heels cast long shadows and they bend inwards like a schoolgirl. She must enjoy the bluster, trying to do all these things at once. I breathe in the beauty and decide…

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Calgary is the third most ethnically diverse city in Canada, next to Vancouver and Toronto. Nearly thirty percent of the population is a visible minority and of that number seven percent of the population identify as black. This is much larger than Vancouver, where less than one percent of our population identify as black, even though over fifty percent of our population is a visible minority. (is it still a minority if it’s the majority?) When I grew up in Calgary in the seventies and eighties we had a Chinatown and that was about it. When I moved to Red…

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Warning: this story is gross. I am orally independent. If you ever need top secret information from me, forget electric shock or bamboo under the nails…threaten to stick someone else’s toothbrush in my mouth. Maybe this distaste for other people’s visible saliva comes from sharing beverages with younger siblings and cousins who were always phlegmy with a cold or too young to understand not to backwash. The communal root beer was always milky by the time it got to me so I would often pass. Likely it was exacerbated by dating not one but two gentlemen who suffered from an…

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