Happy Birthday Lauren

This week's topic  Personal Musings: Happy Birthday Lauren

I was going to write about the fact that August is national vaccine awareness month. Immunization rates are lower than they should be, mostly due to the quarantine. Other things such as the importance of ergonomics now that we are slouching over our computers so much were on the list of possible topics to tackle, but I just wasn’t getting motivated. I considered skipping a week altogether, but writing the weekly posts has been one of the ways I have been keeping some normal routines intact during the quarantine. So please indulge me as I do another post that is mostly personal musing. Both of my kids have summer birthdays. That means I got to waddle around with an enormously pregnant belly in August for my first daughter and July for my second. This gave me an enduring love of San Francisco weather and the delicious fog. I couldn’t have stood the heat and humidity of the east coast. Last month I wrote about my July baby Alana when she turned 30. I had no qualms about her reaction to getting showered with some birthday love and attention. This week it is my daughter Lauren’s birthday. 33! Even though she is my actress who is quite comfortable on stage, she otherwise does not seek to be the center of attention. Lauren would tend to ignore her birthday if given the choice. Between her amazing husband Adam and the rest of the family, we won’t allow that to happen. Before Lauren was born, there was no crossword puzzle with answers confirming the baby’s gender and name But…. Right before I gave birth, my mother in law and I were having tea at the Japanese tea garden in Golden Gate Park and the fortune in my cookie was “ a short stranger will soon enter your life!” I am in complete awe of this oldest daughter of mine. She is an adventure seeker. This is the daughter who successfully guided her dad and she to the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro and then to Everest Base Camp a couple of years later. They both would have liked to try to go higher, but fortunately they were wise enough not to cross me! Before their first climb someone asked about their training. Sandy talked about how he was in the gym daily and hiking our local mountains while wearing increasingly heavy packs. Lauren, who was living in NY at the time, paused and responded that she was too busy to do any hiking but she was practicing learning how to pee standing up. Aside from the mountains, she has been skydiving twice (that I know of...), is certified to scuba dive and has flown a plane. She loves to travel and actually spent weeks traveling solo through Europe. She does try to protect me, so there may be things here that I simply was never told about! She is hands down the funniest person I know. She is a remarkable mimic. She had her Lowell high school teachers voices and mannerisms down pat, and would imitate them so perfectly that when I would go to the open houses and meet the teachers in person, I could barely keep a straight face. She can make a stand-up routine out of little every day events that will have everyone in the room hanging onto her every word and howling with laughter. Her brain has little savant traits that even she agrees are off the charts. She can unscramble the jumble in the paper instantly, no pen needed. There is a game called Set, that is based on pattern recognition. I haven’t met a person who can match her. She has been beating me at scrabble for years, and I am pretty good! She has always been musical. She was singing all of the Disney and Rodgers and Hammerstein show tunes with perfect pitch at an age where most kids are simply learning to talk. My favorite thing is still to listen to her sing and/or play piano. She and I play piano duets, as I used to do with my mom. Most of the time we sound pretty good, but full disclosure, there are plenty of times when one person is ready to turn the page and the other person is still playing because somehow they ended up a few measures behind. She and her dad play guitar together. She is one of the lucky people who has discovered the career path that they are meant to be on. She changes children's and young adults' lives by exposing the neuro-diverse to the joys and benefits of theater. Families leave her students' performances in awe, and frequently in tears, of what their children have accomplished. She is a teacher of drama and improv, and has been sought out by world renown theater companies to help them reach this population with their work. In 2019, she was the first ever recipient of the San Francisco Arts Learning Achievement Award, presented to her by Mayor Breed.  I am constantly learning from her. All you parents out there. Savor every single stage, but it is okay when they grow up and turn into amazing people who make the world a better place. Happy birthday Yaya!