“Going to the theater every night, standing in the back to watch how your show is coming together, and staying late to give feedback — let alone going to Chicago for a pre-Broadway try-out — is not something a lot of us can do,” said Ms. Madover, who has three young children.

I can relate.  My Kid turned one shortly after we moved to New York.  I didn’t audition for anything because when I did the math the equation I came up with was that paying a babysitter market rate to stay with my kid for the hours it took to ride the train into Manhattan, wait to be seen and ride the train home was a cash up front and do it again for a callback meant that for each audition I needed to be prepared to pay about one hundred dollars.  I just couldn’t justify it even though I had finally made it to New York.  It was frustrating, but I made peace with it.  Our  life as a family has been more fulfilling spending evenings and weekends together.  The Husband and I are probably still married because I didn’t met him each evening, when he came home from the office, by standing at the door with my coat already on, ready to hand over the baby and dash off to rehearsal or performance only to return after they had both gone to sleep.

I was in one play when My Kid was three years old.  It was the result of a developmental process of more than a year, that produced a fascinating original piece of theatre called SIX.  The diverse cast of six women, three Black and three white, ranging from new mother to retired grandmother.  The production was spearheaded by the mother of a toddler who had been a professional director.  We rehearsed once a week late evening after the toddlers were in bed and performed in a church.  Few saw it.  It was never remounted.

I didn’t look for another opportunity to perform on stage until My Kid was in kindergarten.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/16/theater/theaterspecial/16women.html

We’ve got studio time scheduled tomorrow for the women of Clowns Ex Machina. It’s not a rehearsal.  It’s just some time in the studio to play.  Just a “clown jam” and yet I feel uneasy about going.

What if I’m not feeling “wildly fun!”?

Should I stay home?

Even if I don’t go I still have to contribute $10 towards studio rental, unless I give Kendall 72 hours notice and it’s too late for that .  That’s more notice, by the way, than my dentist or my therapist requires!  So, now I feel like I have to go because I already said yes.

I should be looking forward to it.  But, I dread the command to have energy followed by the command to stop being tense.

It is meant to be fun.  That’s why I do it.  It usually is fun.

But, the last production was so stressful.

I just got an e-mail from a neighborhood mommy who has an organizing business, Urban Clarity.

She sent out a friendly list of tips to keep from becoming overloaded.  The last one on the list; Say “No”.  That’s something I failed to do when I succumbed to perceived group pressure to take on publicity tasks in addition to rehearsal in addition to the rest of my life as a wife and mother

I remember my mother talking about how hard it was to say no to the League of Women Voters after she went back to school full time when my younger sister started first grade.

At the end of the day there are only 24 hours in each day, and it is so hard to say, “No”.

So I’ll be going to the BrooklynNite this evening, the annual spring gala and fundraising auction for my daughter’s school, I bought my ticket from the PTA president.  I wrote a check for her after she cornered me on the playground yesterday afternoon.  As I said, it is hard to say, “No”.

At least there will be cocktails and tasty snacks.

Last Day

Up and awake and watching Discovery Network Shark Week.  The clock is ticking.  Today is our last day together in Seattle.  Tomorrow The Husband returns to work in New York City and My Kid and I continue on to two weeks with My Parents in Montana.  Last year the husband was able to take enough time to come to Montana with us (but the Seattle leg was cut short).  It’s so frustrating trying to combine parental obligations with a family vacation and also trying to see old friends in the city where we used to live.  We never get to succeed in doing it all.  I think we’re starting to feel that “sandwich generation” squeeze.

more Saturday 8/8/09

The pressure mounts on the last day of vacation, the last day of summer vacation for The Husband.  We left the Westin Hotel (the one that looks like 2 round nuclear plant cooling towers) for a walk to Pike Place Market.  I guess I was fantasizing when I thought we could eat them for breakfast every day of the vacation– on that first day when we took our walk from the other hotel through Pioneer Square to Pike Place Market the Nordstrom Rack and the rest of downtown in our relaxed “here we are again in old familiar–and also different since we lived here–traveling home to Seattle city day.

Today, we walked again to Pike Place market where we ate crumpets covered with yummy sweet and savory foods and unlimited mugs of tea (and we bought a dozen crumpets for his mother and my mother). We passed Goldmine Jewlery where our wedding bands were made.  I would have stopped but there was a “back in a minute” post-it on the door and as I said the clock was ticking. The thought crossed my mind, wouldn’t it be lovely to have her design a tiny gold ring for our little princess–maybe when she is older…  Then we walked on to Pioneer Square to take My Kid to Magic Mouse Toys.  She enjoyed her time there very much but didn’t find anything she needed to buy today.  Amazing.  My Kid can show amazing restraint.  (I mean come on, we were vulnerable parents feeling the pressure of a vacation ending, we probably would have bought anything if it brought a smile…)

We didn’t get to the pool today.  We never made it to the Pacific Science Center.  We never went for a boat ride.  There are friends we’d hoped to see who we never got to see.  Now our time is up.  When The Husband talked to his mom on the cell phone about all she thought still needed to be done there was so much tension that I ended up with significant shoulder pain from carrying the same purse I’ve been carrying around all week long.

We went up to The Mother-In-Law’s apartment to work on THE LIST.  We took some old chairs to Good Will and waited in line to drop them off.  We took some stuff to the UPS package express store and paid $100 to ship it to Brooklyn even though we don’t want most of it that is still the easiest way to deal because we are out of time.  (that list had 14 items on it when I looked–just sayin’)

Finally…

For dinner we had reservations at Etta’s, the Tom Douglas restaurant.  Our kid didn’t like the not-so-great-tasting-of-hamburger-grill crab cakes we got from the hotel room service last night and The Husband wanted to change her mind.  She wasn’t impressed with the Tom Douglas crabcakes either but that’s OK because we inhaled what she didn’t eat.  AND  My Kid ordered half a Dungeness crab for her dinner and ate it all by herself!!!  It was so good that when My Kid and The Mother-In-Law ordered desert The Husband and I split another half Dungeness crab.  It’s so much better than lobster or any other kind of crab even King crab.  Dungeness crab is the best shellfish either of us have ever had and it is not available on the East Coast.  Our meal was over $200.  But it was that time versus money thing and The Husband’s vacation time is so short and so not relaxing, we have to enjoy what we can.  We enjoyed the seafood at Etta’s restaurant in Pike Place Market very much.  

After The Husband dropped My Kid and I off at the hotel and drove his mom and her car home and returned in a taxi (more cash up front that seems extravagant to my people of origin who drive their own cars and carry their own food) he said his mom said something that acknowledged that he may not have had as nice a time as he might have had because of the numerous errands he succeeded in accomplishing for his mother.

The highlight of the day fro My Kid and The Mother-In-Law was lunch at the Rainforest Cafe in Southcenter Mall which has been inexplicably renamed “Westfield”.  As an aspiring downtown Seattle creative person I never went to that mall.  Then when we got pregnant and had a baby we started to go there frequently because of the nearby Babies R Us.

The Rainforest Cafe, impressed my kid to the point that it is now her second favorite restaurant after Dave and Busters (beating out Bubba Gump Shrimp).  The drinks were too sweet and the food too heavy.  But hey there were anamatronic monkeys, elephants and snakes, with live sharks in the saltwater fish tanks.  And the dessert brownie volcano was topped with a lit sparkler!  Other than that the mall was a bad mall according to My Kid did not get anything.  She couldn’t  even any clip-on earrings at Claires, her favorite mall store.  I looked at handbags, but I did not buy one.  She was upset that they were all over $100 and therefore not anything she could expect to get so she stopped enjoying the mall.  The only person who got anything at all was The Husband who purchased a much needed pair of casual sneakers to wear during the rest of the vacation.  And it must be remembered, My Kid did get the giant special frog-head glass with a toy in the bottom compartment at the Rainforest Cafe so it wasn’t like she was leaving completely empty handed.  But, her emotional state may have been entirely unrelated to the mall experience.  In the car her child’s piped up from the back seat asking if this was Tuesday:  

“Today is Eliza’s birthday and today is the day I’ll never see Mutessi ever again.”  

She was thinking about neighborhood friends back in Brooklyn,  one lives on our block, the other is moving to Uganda.

Because My Kid’s dark mood plans were changed and I hoped out of the car alone at the Northwest Film Forum while The Husband took My Kid and The Mother-In-Law to Uwagimaya to look for novelty erasers and snacks.  Then back to her apartment to make small repairs while I watched the evening of short films about water commissioned by the Seattle Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs with Seattle Public Utilities;

  “The projects reflect SPU’s management of the complete cycle of hydrology for Seattle’s water resources from drinking water through drainage, and Restore Our Waters, the city’s initiative to protect and restore Seattle’s urban waterways.”

Everything in the Northwest is green.  Even one of our old theatre friends now works promoting sustainable agriculture.

There were 5 films.  SJ Chiro (our Annex Friend) created a fairy tale based on a story by Brett Fetzer (another Annex Friend) narrated by Susanna Burney (another Annex Friend)  Cynthia Whalen (another Annex Friend) was in it.  Other people we knew from our time at Annex worked on the film and some were at the screening and it was good to see them and go to Eleseyan afterwards for some yummy Seattle microbrew.

But, I was filled with mommy guilt throughout entire film event.  My Kid would have enjoyed the short films, especially the stop action animation piece in which the role of water was played by clear glass marbles and the two live-action stories featuring children near her own age.  I wish she had been there to see some kids on screen from outside the Disney Studio stable and I was blaming myself for not monitoring everyones protein, rest and happiness levels in the hours ahead of 7:00pm in order  to alter the balance of my child so that we could have gone as a family to see the films and friends.  Besides, there were some friends’ kids in the audience she might have played with.

Two of the films featured novelty photography and modern dancers in the rain which reminded me why I was hesitant to major the arts while at the University of Montana.

 SJ Chiro’s films and Kendall Cornell’s latest work Clown Axioms both rely on fairy tale imagery and that is exciting to me.

I don’t know how much of my “writing time” I wasted hitting buttons and guessing at the procedure for logging in from a different connection.  I ended up calling The Husband on the phone and having him walk me through the simple procedure that I ought to have down by now.  But, I don’t.  Story of my life–and that’s why I am a clown.  The movements are too small though, getting frustrated in front of a laptop, it would have to be so subtle, so underplayed.  Maybe it could work on film, certainly not on stage.  In either case it would be a pretty boring piece to watch.  (I do have a performance date in the fall…will I do something completely new or rework something I’ve already tried…)

While I am trying to remember what brilliant mommy thoughts I had that are now lost I am overhearing parts of the conversation of the two men at the set of couches next to my own seating arrangement here in the lobby of the Westin.  One of the men seems to be ordering custom made shirts and possibly other clothing from the other man.  It seems to be a regular event as the salesman type in a suit said to the other man in shirtsleeves “See you in September.”  And they both made references to “last time.”  I think that’s how Obama gets his clothes.  Fascinating.  Most of my clothes come from the sale racks at discount stores. 

Speaking of clothes, I have been looking at the clothes of the people on the street her in Seattle.  So much khaki, such baggy clothes.  It was a difference I noticed right away when we moved to New York and there was so much black and the clothes were so much tighter, even on people who weren’t athlete thin.  There is also more bright  color in New York.  Seattle people wear muted earth tones.  When we come back each summer I start to feel dressed wrong in Seattle, but by the time I am in Missoula I start out feeling so uncomfortable I inevitably buy items like Tevas or shorts that I proceed to wear nearly every day of my visit home and never wear again back in New York.  But I did notice a Gucci and Louis Vitton stores right across the street from each other near the 5th Avenue theatre in Downtown Seattle.  That was a bit disorienting.

 I see the thin young people riding their bikes and am then startled to see myself, a middle-aged mom type, reflected in a window, not at all the person I was when I lived her as an aspiring actress riding a bike while wearing Dock Martin boots with black leggings under a skirt, oversized T and flannel shirts.  Yeah that.  I also learned from another out of work actor that if you got a very large Starbucks coffee off the day you could doctor it up with vanilla and cinnamon and milk and it tasted like a latte and with enough milk it was a fine stand in for a meal all for less than $2.  

That period of my life came completely to an end when The Husband, Baby and I flew back to Seattle from NYC where we had lived for only a couple of months for the final Annex party in the theatre space at 1916 Fourth Avenue.  We stayed at the Kings Inn under the Monorail tracks on 5th Avenue.  In preparation for the trip I pushed my stroller around Macy’s in Fulton Mall and Marshall’s at Atlantic center struggling to find something “presentable. .  Presentable was a disappointing goal for such an emotionally charged special event.    I was still nursing so I ended up with a easy access stretchy polyester  top and skirt outfit for the party, a far cry from the slip-like or corset containing Betsy Johnson dresses I had worn to previous Annex-related events that were part of the courtship that led to our wedding here in Seattle over 10 years ago.

And my alone time has once again come to an end, The Husband, My Kid and The Mother-In-Law will be here in a few moments and we’re going to drive to a mall.

The Yellow Kid

Last night out in cyberspace I came across video of the 1995 Annex Theatre production of The Yellow Kid.  Seeing it again… an amazing production–so ambitious in scope for a Seattle fringe theatre company– has me revisiting what is important in my life and how I respect or disrespect my own art.

In a September 21, 1995 Seattle Times interview, Brian Faker told Misha Berson:

“The thrust of our play is the decisions an artist makes – what do you do just for the bucks, and what do you do for your heart’s inspiration? In the end Outcault actually murders the Kid, symbolically destroying something in himself.”

Low-budget production

The struggle to earn a living while maintaining one’s artistic integrity is one that Faker, 35, a versatile stage actor with credits in many Seattle theaters, knows intimately. Currently living on unemployment benefits, he scrambled together $1,100 to finance this shoestring fringe production.

“We’re doing `Miss Saigon’ at the Annex,” he laughs. “We’ve got 27 actors, a cat, a goat, two dogs, 200 slide projections, film, rolling scenery. It’s just a monster.

“We’re funding this completely out of pocket – and out of favors. My wife (actress Peggy Poage) is probably our biggest contributor. And a lot of other people just decided to go insane with me on this.”

 I was in that production and The Husband was in the booth as stage manager.  We began dating during the run.  A framed poster from the production hangs in our living room, next to photos of My Kid as a toddler in long yellow shirt.

As a child, I too learned about renewable sources of alternative energy –off the back of a truck:

This week, My Kid came home with a letter from her First LEGO League coach about their mission for 2008

The Project: 

1.) Research how climate affects your own community.  Identify a climate problem in your area, analyze climate data about the problem, and discover what your community is doing about it.  Find another community somewhere in the world with the same issue and identify any solutions they are working on. Discuss the various ways climate impacts your community and your lives. Look at climate data available for your area as it relates to your climate problem.  Consider talking with experts who work with or in climate everyday, like climatologists, farmers, foresters, and community leaders.  Then find another community in a different geographical area that is experiencing a similar problem.  

2.) Create an innovative solution based on the information you gathered that could be used on a local or even global level to solve this climate problem or improve on an existing solution. Consider all the potential solutions to your climate problem and how great an impact you can have.  Talk with experts to see what solutions are already being developed or used.  Build your climate connections by creating an innovative solution to your chosen climate problem that could be applied in both communities and could be adopted by even more communities who face a similar issue.  

3.) Once you have researched and developed your solution, get out there and share it!  Take what you’ve learned to build awareness of the problem and promote your solution.  Show your research and solution and use this project to see just how great an impact you can have on your community and your world!

That’s a lot to ask of elementary school students.  And yet it is the same thing they asked of us when I was in grade school.  Our teachers, and TV, told us that the adults who built the factories with smokestacks that filled the air with acid rain causing pollution, and poured the sludge into the rivers that killed the fish, and the birds that ate the fish, were ignorant.  They didn’t know that would happen. 

So Woodsy Owl told us kids that the clean up was our job!

This year My Kid’s multidisciplinary curriculum is based around the theme of community, both local and global.  The children are taught the same thing they learned watching High School Musical; “We’re all in this together”.  In the spring there will be a large art project utilizing recycled materials.  The students will learn how to police the glass, paper & plastic sorting skills and light bulb choices of their parents.  They will sell us canvas shopping bags covered with pictures drawn in Sharpie marker of crying trees and slogans reminding us to reduce, reuse and recycle! 

“Next year I am going to save the world.”  My Kid said in happy anticipation, at the school festival last spring, believing this to be what one does in the third grade.

As children, we were told that the world was ours to save.

Years later my kid is being told the SAME THING because WE FAILED!

My generation was raised in the 1970′s during the Energy Crisis, in cold houses with adults fretting about the length of our showers and the high price of oil. “Could gasoline ever really go over $1 a gallon?” was one summer’s unending conversation.  Yet, many of us grew up to buy SUV’s to chauffer our own kids from mall to soccer field to McMansion in suburban housing developments without any sidewalks, miles from the nearest store. 

Renewable energy missionaries were out in force when I was a kid in the ’70′s:  

I rode my bike to  their revival meetings.  I wanted to be an actress, but there wasn’t much live theater where I lived.  Desperate for role models. I fell for The New Western Energy Show hook, line and sinker.  It was like meeting the real life version of my  Sunshine Family dolls, made by Mattel, Inc. (NYSE: MAT)

 I even had the Sunshine Family Van.  I considered it one of my best Christmas presents ever! It was converted truck, with a wooden shack on top, from which the dolls apparently sold handmade pottery and leather goods at craft fairs.  So you see this all seemed to me, at the time, to be an acceptable, viable, creative, even mainstream, future way of life.

But, by the time I was graduating from high school and college in the ’80′s, communal living hippie-types had turned into selfish Yuppies, and those who hadn’t were scorned.  I polished my resume and wore suits in order to project a professional image.  Wall Street said “Greed is good”.  

Now, hipsters are getting crafty with recycled textiles, making clothes and bags to sell at flea markets and festivals, magazines and newspapers offer frugal living tips, and billboards advertise energy saving appliances.

DEJA VU!