Grace Paley, Keynote speaker

I remember loving Grace Paley in college. While I couldn't remember specific stories she had written, I knew they were about smart feisty women dealing with many of the issues that we all have to deal with. When I saw that she was going to be the keynote speaker, I pulled a couple of her volumes off my bookshelf and checked a few more out from my library.

Re-reading her stories, and reading some of her autobiographic essays for the first time, gave me a new appreciation of her work and her life. Her characters were as feisty as I remembered, but they were also more complex. They were at times strong, weak, introspective, or clueless - occasionally all in the same paragraph. If her characters weren't always aware of the absurd, Paley was and pointed it out with gentle affection.

I was also inspired by her autobiographical essays. I hadn't realized (or maybe hadn't remembered) that she has been a life long activist. She worked for women's rights, the environment, and most of all world peace.

So, in short, I was really excited to see that she would be speaking. I unfortunately missed the first couple of minutes of her talk, but caught most of her readings. She 'wowwed' the audience with a conversation between a middle aged woman and her aging, perhaps dying, father. The woman is trying to tell her father that she is separating from her husband, while the father is trying to pass on some last words of advice. The piece showed how tender, awkward, and frustrating family "communication" can be. Grace received an enthusiastic standing ovation from the crowd. I was so happy to be there, but kept kicking myself for leaving my copy of "Enormous changes at the last minute" in my room!

We got an added treat when the Underground Railway Theater read/acted a couple of adaptations of her work.