I recently rewatched the film REDS with Diane Keaton playing Louise Bryant and Warren Beatty as Jack Reed, a movie I had loved decades ago. This time, knowing more about Bryant than I did at the time, I was struck by how she was portrayed, as a political naïf, as unserious about her writing. In actuality Bryant was active in the suffrage movement long before she meet Reed. She gave speeches, traveled around Oregon talking about suffrage, rode on a suffrage float. She also had many political friends from college on. She did not acquire her politics from Reed. Nor were her affairs unusual in their social group in Provincetown or Greenwich Village – and Reed had far more affairs than Bryant did. She also was publishing articles at the time she is depicted in the movie as a dilettante. Her suffrage beliefs and activities are entirely omitted. They depict her acting none too well in an O’Neill play but omit the fact that a play of hers was on the same playbill. We had a bit of snow on Friday but none of it stuck here. We drove through some snow and what I call snew but around Provindende, it was clear although grey. We had a lot of trouble with the directions we were given on this trip, starting with the Holiday Inn. We drove in circles till we finally found it. It was marginally okay. From then on, the directions were far worse. However we’d allowed enough time so we got to Patterson with plenty of leeway which it turned out we needed. I gave a reading in Patterson 20 years ago; things are much worse now. Very deteriorated and many streets have no singage. We finally called in and someone found us and brought us to where I was supposed to give a workshop. i am very fond of the woman who runs this series, a very fine poet in her own right and a woman who has been very supportive of poets. She also edits a really fine journal that I have a lot of respect for. But things were quite disorganized! I had never been told I was reading with someone else. Patricia Smith is a very strong poet and reader, so that was delightful, but I had prepared 55 minutes and had to cut it down on the spot. Also I had written that I was doing one kind of workshop and found that the poets who had registered had been told it was a totally different workshop. I had to improvise on the spot. Today we are home, both rather worn out. Driving in circles in Patterson looking for part of the Passaic community college down street without signs was stressful. Today I’ve been doing half the laundry and started seeds in the storeroom: 2 kinds of eggplants, sweet majoram, summer savory, finocchi, Brussels sprouts, sungold cherry tomatoes and three kinds of paste tomatoes. I just finished. I’m trying to catch up on correspondence, Facebook, putting things away and back where they belong. I learned, by the way, that there’s a name for the kind of cat that Willow is, white with spot spots including some on her ears and face: a panda cat. Before we brought her home, I’d never noticed that kind of cat. The only black and white cats I was familiar with were tuxedos. Now that we have Willow, I keep seeing pictures of panda cats. It seems they are everyplace. It’s the same way when you buy a new car of a different type that you had. You start seeing your car everywhere you drive.