PaperGirl

There are raspberry bushes around here.

Along the side of the road that I take to go from the bungalow to the theater, there is a glorious patch of raspberries owned by Shania and Bill's neighbors, Donna and Chip. The raspberries are plump and countless -- the temptation to pluck one off the bushes every time one passes is great, but this is strictly prohibited. Two large signs, laminated and stuck on tall sticks announce:

"PRIVATE GARDEN! NO PICKING!"

and:

"PAWS OFF THE BERRIES!"

The locals would know better than to pick berries that weren't theirs (hopefully) but the locals aren't the problem. It's the day-trippers. They lumber off the ferry and shuffle up the hill in large, fudge-seeking groups. Inevitably, they come to this delectable looking berry patch and salivate. If every day-tripper took one berry, there would certainly be nothing left for the people who cultivated the fruit in the first place. Thus, the signs.

Yesterday, I was coming down the hill as a particularly unctuous group was walking up. They were loud and wore fannypacks and there were a lot of them. I watched as a woman in a visor who must've been in her late 50s looked at the berry patch, saw the sign, and, with an impish, giggly, surprisingly slick maneuver, reached into the bushes and snatched up a few berries. I couldn't believe it. A little girl in the group squeaked, "Aunt June! It's says 'paws of the berries!'" Aunt June was undeterred.

As I passed them, the woman looked up at me. With laser focus, I very pointedly looked down at her hands. She actually tried to hide what she had stolen. I moved up to meet her eye. She gave a guilty, caught-with-her-hand-in-the-cookie-jar look as if to say, "I'm a bad little girl! But I just couldn't help myself!"

My look was withering. I think my lip actually curled. My message of "you disgust me" could not have been clearer if I have used actual words.

At dinner, I told everyone what had happened. Shania was pleased that I put the smackdown on the day-tripping locusts. Tonight, when we got home from rehearsal, what was sitting on the dining room table but an extra large box of fresh raspberries.

"I told Donna and Chip what you did," Shania said. "These are from them as a thank you."

That's the kind of place this is. And as soon as I popped a handful of those sweet, perfect raspberries into my mouth, I realized that they are the kind of berries worth stealing.

We're registered at:

Williams Sonoma
Bloomingdale's
Amazon

The wedding date is September 27th, 2008. They say the bride and groom aren't supposed to say outright where they're registered, but this is my blog.

New items added daily.

The rule that I've read in numerous wedding magazines is that a bride and groom should register for twice as many gifts as there will be guests. When you've got 500 people coming to your wedding, the bridal registry becomes something of an albatross.

Regarding the registry in general, yes, it does feel weird to create a long list of stuff you want people to buy and give to you, but it's easy enough to get over that. The cookware I've selected will be used to cook thousands of meals for me, D.W., our future children, and innumerable guests in the years to come, for example. I feel OK saying to people, "Hi. We are starting a life together and we could really use this All-Clad cookware. If you want to get us a gift, we'd sure appreciate the All-Clad." It helps avoid the 30 Toaster Problem and streamlines the process in many ways.

And it's a whole lot of fun -- especially when you're writing laughably large checks and waking up at night in a panic because you really, really, really need to order your junior bridesmaid's dress tomorrow or you're going to have serious problems.

However.

Nobody needs 1,000 things. Nobody needs 500 things. Few people need 250 things. Most people need about 10 things. The rest is all wants. And I definitely want the china and I certainly do want the immersion blender, but at this point all that stuff has been covered in the registry and I'm in panini press and marble cheese platter territory now. Yes, I want those things too, but they're kinda more on my "B" list. It's really unappetizing to me to start registering for "C" list wants (i.e., fondue pot, asparagus cooker) but with so many gifts to register for, I'm afraid that's going to have to happen soon.

When you get right down to it, what I want can't be put on the registry: I want a home.

All the asparagus cookers in the world aren't very much good without a place to hang them (preferably on a copper pot rack hanging above an island in a mosaic-tiled kitchen with a fine stove and lots of tall windows.) The joy of clicking "add to registry" is dampened because most of our lovely gifts will have to sit in boxes until my brilliant husband-to-be and I have a place to put them.

And though it's dangerously close to groan-worthy, I have to say: What I really, really, really want, more than anything (even the Cusinart 4-slice toaster) is a happy marriage.

Please, God. Please help us have a happy marriage.

I thought I understood about the summer people, but I didn't. Tonight I got it.

When I heard "serious money" I thought, "Oh, okay. Sure. Serious money. CEOs." No, no, no. Well yes, actually, but up here it's so much more than that. The kind of money up here among Maine's summer people is Rockefeller money. It's Hearst money. It's chateaubriand-if-you're-slumming-it,"we-had- the- Kennedys -over-for-drinks -and-you-wouldn't- believe-the-joke-Jackie-told," old American money.

Tonight, Shania and Bart and Sheldon and I all went to eat at The Dock, the one restaurant on the island. The place does a hell of a business during the eight weeks a year that it's open. The food was truly excellent -- we had crab cakes, semolina gnocchi, seared sushi-grade tuna with wasabi mashed potatoes, you get the idea -- but though the pork ragout was good, the crowd stole the show.

All of the visual cues that telegraph that a certain person has more money in liquid funds than most people will make in their entire lifetime were on display tonight, including:

sweaters thrown around shoulders (men and women)
expensive sunglasses holding back bangs (men and women)
white linen
solid gold tennis bracelets
Polo shirts with popped collars
docksider shoes with no socks
freckles

Wealth is in the details. Look, I've spent some time among the truly wealthy. I have. I've been a house guest several times in various gated communities across this fine land; I've dined in restaurants with bottles of wine on the list that were priced well into the four-digits; I've ridden in the Porsche, I've worn the cashmere wrap. Money is great fun. It's intoxicating. I work hard because I want money. I work hard because it satisfies me, too, but also because as Mae West said so famously, "I've been rich and I've been poor. Rich is better." I know this firsthand to be true.

No matter how hard I work, though, I can't have the kind of money that was on parade tonight. That's money that a person can't make -- you have to be born into it. Anyone who gets that rich in their own lifetime still isn't on the same level as those folks: new money is new money is nouveau riche, which isn't the same.

Nonetheless, it was fun to be around them. It was fun like catching a good nature program on PBS is fun. It's another world, and like watching a lion devour a gazelle, watching a group of 10 members of bonafide Society clink glasses and toast to the successful remodeling of Brad and Jenny's summer home kitchen, you simply can't look away.

There are two distinct groups of people on this island: the locals and the "summer people." Shania and Bart are locals and since I'm here to do the play this summer, I'm finding myself in a luxurious position. I'm getting serious street cred from the locals because I'm a friend of their own kind and I'm here for a very specific reason. I don't count as "summer people" and that is a good thing around here.

On an island like this, and in any resort community, there's a delicate balance that exists between the locals (or "year-rounders") and the folks who only show up when the weather's nice enough to buy pottery and fudge. On the one hand, the summer people are seen by many locals as being one suspicious step up from the lowly day-tripper; on the other hand, the fudge and pottery the summer people buy (and the money they drop in restaurants, at arts events, etc.) is what keeps the locals in firewood and groceries throughout the winter.

It's a symbiotic relationship and the groups do successfully co-exist, but one often gets a slight whiff of rancor from the year-round residents. The thing is about summer people is that most of them, if not all of them, have serious, serious money. Serious money. Sometimes this means the locals, come June, must put up with an influx of demanding, entitled people with no sense of perspective and an inflated sense of self-worth and suffer them through the end of August.

Of course this isn't always the case. Saying that all rich people are awful or rude is like saying all women lose their minds when they're about to have their periods. Or saying that all local people are charming and wonderful and down-to-earth and lovely. It's ridiculous; there is no "all people."

What there is, however, is another batch of warm chocolate chip cookies, so the rest of this observation is going to have to wait.

The cottage where I'm staying is absolutely perfect in every way. There's always something wonderful either on the stove or just come off it, there are numerous rocking chairs around the premises, the porch is all windows and wraps around the house, and there's sculpture or photography or literature everywhere you look.

It's the house of two highly creative people. When their baby comes in October, it will be a house of three creative people. There can be no doubt.

The last actor working on the project, Sheldon, arrived tonight. We all welcomed him and gathered around the table in Shania's pretty kitchen with the robin's egg blue floor and the 1950s formica-topped table. There was chocolate chip cookie dough in the freezer, which was promptly brought out and put into the oven. Within 10 minutes, we were all eating warm chocolate chip cookies straight off the cookie sheets, washing them down with hot tea. It's chilly here at night, which is to say it's perfect cookie-eating weather.

There is no doubt in my mind that life is precisely what you make it.

I went hiking yesterday around the perimeter of the entire island. The land up here is breathtaking.

First, there was the woodland path that led to the water. Flowers and bees went about their business and I saw the first grasshopper I'd seen in a couple years. I soon hit the beach and my trek began in earnest. Abutting the woods was a vast stretch of lush, emerald marsh. Think sea, marsh, woods, like a sandwich. Tiny white butterflies flitted around and I stood up on the rocks, waiting for Bambi to come bounding out of the trees. In fact, as soon as I crested the hill, I saw the landscape and breathed, "Oh. So that's the problem." And I meant that the pressure I feel, the fears I try feebly to manage, it's all because I have so little connection with nature at this time in my life. Dumbstruck before a vista like that, I realized the extent of this problem. We people, we need to be close to nature.

After the marsh love pangs subsided, I continued on my way. The whole trip took about three hours. I was glad I packed a sandwich. It was just me and the sea and a ham sandwich. Perfecto.

Sadly, I lost my sunglasses on the trip. Real nice ones, too. One minute they were around my neck, the next minute they had vanished.

I set down my pack and turned around to retrace my steps. At that point, I was navigating the huge, craggy rock part of the hike. Words like "foothold" and "shimmy" and "leap" give you an idea of the terrain. I surveyed the impossible path I had just traversed. There was no way I was going to find my glasses. No way. I cursed, I whimpered, I got over it.

My only consolation is thinking that one day, an effete, effeminate young man will be taking the same summer hike in order to escape his out-of-touch parents, his plebeian classmates, his smothering small island town. He'll be jumping from boulder to boulder, dreaming about New York City and Diana Vreeland and crimson ascots and Inspiration with a capital "I" and it will all seem so very, very far away.

Just when he's about to despair and throw himself into the Atlantic, a glint of metal will catch his eye. "What could that be?" he'll think, and go to investigate. In a moment of sheer ecstasy, he'll find my Marc Jacobs sunglasses wedged between a rock and some algae. He'll put them on and find strength.

Nature, in all her glory, bears gifts.

I will not allow myself to have nightmares here.

From time to time, as I have reported, I endure some pretty horrifying nightmares. Lots of people have nightmares, but I think I tend to have them more frequently than some. Mine seem to come in batches. I'll have a series of nights that find me awake at three in the morning, having just snapped out of a dream that was so awful, so disturbing, I couldn't even tell D.W. about it later.

Well, I had a nightmare today. It was one of the worst. Like, one of the worst ever.

I had one little one yesterday, too. That one wasn't as bad -- in fact, I can't remember what it was now, which is a good sign -- but the one today...

When I was reading Oprah's magazine in the airport, I saw that Dr. Phil does a "script of the month" in his column. It's an italicized monologue written by him from the point of view of the person with the despondent husband, the meddling mother-in-law, etc. It's supposed to help the person who wrote in for advice to concretely know what to say when faced with the conflict in question.

I'm going to give it a try:

"Brain? I won't stand for it. I absolutely will not. I know you tend to get a little weird when we sleep on islands. This has happened before. I think you like to subconsciously indulge your fears about being surrounded by deep waters and pitch-black thickets. You work out this fear while I'm not lucid enough to tell you to stop being ridiculous. So you go be ridiculous and I suffer for it.

The image you had for me today of my sister, obsessively picking her disfigured, rotting, infected ear? Yeah, that's not anything I want to see ever again. I don't care that it was 'just a dream.' I feel like I want to cry. That was so horrible. Please, please have respect for me and don't give me nightmares while I'm here on this pretty trip.

I respect you and the work you do. Please respect me and my sleep. I need it, and I feel so bad when you scare me like you did today."

It's time for bed, now. I'll let you know if that worked. But I still want to cry.