There is also the matter of my parent’s 50th wedding anniversary next summer.  My small extended family of origin is beginning to plan a multi-generational vacation…

OK so maybe that teeny tiny cup of espresso was a mistake after all.

It’s nearly 2:00 am and I am wide awake.  My head is still full of Julia Child and Ted Kennedy’s sisters and the neighbor friends we had dinner with tonight and I am worried that I won’t get up early enough to clean the front room and gather together a good assortment of costume pieces before it’s time to leave for rehearsal tomorrow.  I’m afraid I will be late.  I’m afraid I won’t be ready.  I’m afraid I won’t have done enough housework before I go to the studio and leave The Husband and My Kid at home to cook all day like Julia Child.

Julie and Julia

We saw the movie hours ago this afternoon but we are still talking about it.  We’re googling Julia Child and an actor friend from our Annex days– Julia Prudhomme (we never knew she was related to Julia Child! ).  We have less than six degrees of separation from this movie in several directions:  Julie Powell lived in Brooklyn at some point in the story;  our friend is related to Julia Child; one of our native French speaking neighbors recorded some text for another neighbor who was a vocal coach on the movie…

But mostly, we loved watching Meryl Streep and Stanley (“Big (food movie) Night”) Tucci as Julia and Paul Child.

From a going into the studio to do clown work tomorrow perspective; Julia Child was a 6’2″ woman who couldn’t play the 1950’s cute little woman ideal and oh what freedom that gave her to do great work!

Rosemary Kennedy

 While I was listening to all the news coverage of the death of Senator Ted Kennedy, I began idly googling the Kennedy family and was drawn to the women, especially Rosemary Kennedy.

She was different, troubled, but most likely not retarded as has been printed repeatedly.  Some reports speculated that she probably had an average intelligence, but compared to the future president and his competitive siblings she just seemed retarded.  She may have had learning disabilities. Some speculated that she suffered from mental illness exacerbated by her inability to meet the exceedingly high standards of her birth family and the Catholic Church of the period.  Rosemary Kennedy was prone to emotional outbursts and seemed to like the attention of men.  Maybe she expressed anger at the double standard when the men in her family were encouraged to sow their wild oats, while the women had to avoid “the thing the priest says not to do”.  In another culture, in another time, in a different family, she might have been happy and successful.  (Or not, as in the 1961 film “Splendor in the Grass”.)

I think of the Clowns Ex Machina work we do with Kendall, in our all women troupe, riffing off cultural images and expectations.  Some of my most successful improvisations in the studio have at their core attempts to maintain some physical manifestation of a feminine ideal.  The failure brings simultaneous laughter and tears because when a clown does it the absurdity is obvious.  When it happens in real life.  

Well…

Rosemary Kennedy was given a lobotomy.

There is a photograph of a pretty bright-eyed young woman, Rosemary sharing a laugh with her little sister Jean, a freckle-faced girl with braces on her teeth who looked into the eyes of her older sister with obvious admiration.  It was taken about a year before the lobotomy left 23-year-old Rosemary Kennedy completely incapacitated.  Jean would have been about 13 when that happened.  Jean is described in the press as the shyest and most guarded of the children of Joseph P. Kennedy.  In 1974, Jean Kennedy Smith founded Very Special Arts, a non-profit organization that promotes the artistic talents of mentally and physically challenged children and is an affiliate of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

preparing to go into the studio to work on “a gory romantic tale told by clowns”

      “Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside of, herself.  She is not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance.  She is a veil, rather than a mirror.  She has flowers that no forests know of, birds that no woodland possesses.  She makes and unmakes many worlds and can draw the moon from heaven with a scarlet thread.  Hers are the “forms more real than living man”, and hers the greatest archetypes of which things that have existence are but unfinished copies.  Nature has, in her eyes, no laws, no uniformity.  she can work miracles at ther will, and when she calls monsters from the deep they come.  She can bid the almond-tree blossom in winter, and send the snow upon the ripe cornfield.  At her world the frost lays its silver finger on the burning mouth of June, and the winged lions creep out from the hollows of the Lydian hills.  The dryads peer from the thicket as she passes by, and the brown fauns smile strangely at her when she comes near them.  She has hawk-faced gods that worship her, and the centaurs gallop at her side,”

 —Oscar Wilde (“The Decay of Lying”)

Our first full day back in NYC

This morning after an appointment in Brooklyn Heights, My Kid and I ran into some neighbors who had just been to the dentist.  They were on their way to Greenwich Village to see Click Clack Moo at the Lucille Lortel theater on Christopher Street.  Since it was free with tickets distributed an hour before curtain, we went along too.   We saw ate pizza, saw the musical, and played in a couple of playgrounds; the very popular Bleeker Street Playground and the seriously neglected Minetta Playground.  Then we returned to Brooklyn and My Kid and her friend had a playdate at our apartment which began with an egg creme and ginger ale from the local diner and ended  at “camel park” on DeKalb, the third playground of the day.  Now we’re going out for sushi!