I'm still wrapping my head around Linda Lavin's passing. She was such an essential actor who elevated the quality of whatever she did. I remember her vivid performance in the otherwise bland revival of THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANK -- no accident she was the only cast member to score a Tony nomination. I respected her choice to walk away from OTHER DESERT CITIES (and FOLLIES!) to do THE LYONS, with no guarantee of a move to Broadway. And she blew me away two years ago in YOU WILL GET SICK, a daring and uncomfortable play, to which she fully committed herself. What a talent, who pushed herself to the end.
"You travel alone because other people are only there to remind you how much that hook hurts that we all bit down on. Wait for that one day we can bite free and get back out there in space where we belong, sail back over water, over skies, into space, the hook finally out of our mouths and we wander back out there in space spawning to other planets never to return hurrah to earth and we'll look back and can't even see these lives here anymore. Only the taste of blood to remind us we ever existed. The earth is small. We're gone. We're dead. We're safe."
-John Guare, Landscape of the Body
