Lynnette and Krystiana discover Cabaret!

*The musical. Circling HomeWork #16

Hi, friends. Today I’m doing something a little different for HomeWork — I spent most of a week in Brooklyn with Lynnette, and left so joyfully filled up that I thought I’d outline our activities through the lens of how our interests showed up IRL. (Theater! Folk Art! Sustainability in artmaking! Yoga! Domesticity! Day jobs!)

We’ve lived in different cities for most of our friendship-life, ping-ponging back and forth to visit each other in every place we live. In quantity of nights slept, I have spent more time on Lynnette’s air mattress or sofa across her past three apartments than I have anywhere else besides home. I have a repeat lunch order at the cafe nearest her house (it’s the sweet potato bowl). She bought the chai concentrate I like and kept it in her kitchen waiting for me.

This fall, we decided to forego doing an event, instead spending time developing a new event format for 2025 (stay tuned!), so this week was more like an self-directed artist retreat for just us. We didn’t produce a lot, but we soaked up so much. I left feeling just deliciously full creatively, steeped in art and communion.

Below are the items on our itinerary from this week, organized in a real haphazard way. Enjoy!

Item 1: Theater

Lynnette wrote an essay a few weeks ago about play, and we have talked a lot about the importance of having secondary, tertiary, dare we say quaternary interests that are not our daily bread of creativity, but that feel juicy in part because they are so extra, so unnecessary. For Lynnette as mostly a visual artist, this might be softball. For me as mostly a textile maker, it’s theater.

This visit, we saw so much. We saw The Outsiders. We saw Oh, Mary!

We saw Wicked from the second row. Having seen the show [redacted] times before, but never so close, this was to me a Costumes Watch, and let me tell you the sparkles on Alexandra Socha’s bubble dress were FRESH.

And MOST OF ALL, we saw the revival of Cabaret.