Tag: Amy Salloway

The show was fun today with lots of tots in the house!

We had a lively audience of people who were less than 3 feet tall. The Husband and My Kid were there and our friends with their 3-year-old and 6-month old. The performance felt a lot different today with so many little ones participating. Nobody really cares what we do when there are walking babies on the stage. Stakes are low and fun quotient high. It really worked today! Too bad we’re done.

There was talk of an extra show next week at the festival party showcase. But, we’ve got some scheduling issues in the cast and so we’re not going to do it again. I didn’t think it would ever turn anything more than a baby-music-circle-time-class on stage the first time we met to rehearse and got absolutely nothing done with the kids there in the space too. (But I’m a pessimist.) In the end we did develop something that was much more and it has potential to rise out of the diaper bags again.

I had a nice conversation with Amy Salloway who is in NY to perform her solo show, “Circumference”, at the festival. The Husband and I know her from Seattle when we were all in the fringe theatre scene out there. Amy said she was recently in Seattle and a lot of the funky old theatre spaces we use to know are gone. All slick and no charm now I suppose. She said the young people on Capitol Hill are all working a high maintenance goth look. Grunge was so a much easier. I totally used to wear a black skirt over leggings with Doc Marten boots with an oversized t-shirt under a plaid shirt on top. So did everyone else. (It bugged me so much when Bridget Fonda had it wrong in the movie “Singles” because she wore black nylons with her Doc Martens. The Hollywood foreigners co-opting our Northwest style got it wrong! Only opaque leggings or tights were ever worn under a skirt with Doc Martens!!!! (I suppose because I wore Doc Martens with skirts, I have no right to criticize the young ladies of New York in their UGG ugly boots.) Amy is loving New York and wants to live here. But how. How does one come up with the cash, or the job, or the relationship, or the scholarship to project ones self from the West or the Mid-west all the way to New York City to do theatre. It’s hard.

After we left the West End Theatre today, we walked down to 84th and had lunch at Ollies. Then we walked down to 72nd to catch some air before catching the train. That took about three hours because the 3-year-old and the 8-year-old had some shopping to do… My Kid introduced a pre-schooler to the wonder that is Claire’s. All those accessories. My Kid who does not yet have pierced earrings can’t get enough of the clip-ons. That store used to be for the tweens and teens who cruised the malls, but now with all the Hannah Montana, and Princesses and even Dora accessories, they’ve lowered their target market age to include the pre-school set.

Home now and My Kid is watching TV and The Husband is taking a nap.

My goal is to get them to the Brooklyn Lyceum by 8:00 pm tonight to see The Civilians “Brooklyn at Eye Level” at the Lyceum. It’s a theatre piece based on interviews with real people involved with the Atlantic Yards development (which I hate so much I could go on for pages and pages about how awful it is). The mommy friend we saw today is involved with The Civilians theatre company. Her biased opinion was that the show is great and we must see it.

OK blogging time is over now. My Kid is hungry.

Sitting alone in my apartment looking forward to a theatre festival

I was feeling sad and lonely a few moments ago after pawning my kid off on someone else’s babysitter for a play date and then stopping at the Target in Atlantic Center for some bulk packs of paper towels and TP on the way home from the school’s early pickup–it’s parent/teacher conference day in our world. I was dwelling on the fact that one of the mommies I know has written more plays than I thought she had. Another friend has founded her own theatre company in New Mexico, (I don’t know if she is a mommy but her website is pretty impressive). Me I got nothin’…! So I looked up the website of the Six Figures Theatre Company which is producing the Artists of Tomorrow Festival at the West End Theatre beginning this weekend–which I am in thank you very much. I’ve worked there before in several of Kendall Cornell’s clown pieces. It’s a great space. It’s on the second floor of the Church of St Paul and St Andrew United Methodist Church. I think it used to be a chapel.

As a side note about theatre companies in churches; in my own neighborhood, the Irondale Ensemble Project has finished renovating the upstairs Sunday School room, and mounted a new production in their new permanent theatre space at the Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church (which was founded by abolitionists)–where my own baby went to toddler play group several times a week for the first two walking years of her life.–and opened their first show in the new theatre space. Some churches are really cool.

Anyway,

This coming weekend and for the next few weekends I will be on stage in; “Oh My Toe!…Why I Walk So Slow”, an theatrical experiment developed with children in the room, conceived by Lindsay Newitter.

In the same festival I am looking forward to seeing my friends:

Victoria Libertoire…
in “The Should Dream”; “An old vaudevillian illuminates the secrets of humanity. Victoria Libertore, aka Howling Vic, lip-synchs, shimmies and hula-hoops her way through perverse, profane and saucy characters including the crone, prostitute and hedonist. Libertore uses her trademark style of combining humor, sensuality and a touch of the inappropriate in this wild and cheeky montage”.

And

Amy Salloway…
who is from Minneapolis but who I knew when we were both part of the fringe theatre community in Seattle… is performing her solo show “Circumference”; “Ghosts of Gym Teachers Past meet the Fear of Fitness Centers Present and the Obsession with Weight Loss Future in an all-new solo comedy about size, sweat…and exercising your demons. From Minneapolis actor/writer Amy Salloway, creator of the hit touring productions “Does This Monologue Make Me Look Fat?” (Artists of Tomorrow 2004!) and “So Kiss Me Already, Herschel Gertz!” comes the show the Calgary Herald calls, “hilarious, honest and unsparing, with a great sense of pace.” Says The Ottawa Citizen, “…an appealing and marvelously funny performer…you can also add brave and original.” And from the St. Paul Pioneer Press, “A MUST-SEE: poignant, sensitive and hysterically funny.”

And

Jenny Lee Mitchell…
will be in the cast of “Dress”, “The war was over yet Communists were lurking in your backyard. Follow Susie, Ace, Betty, Bill, Madge, Mitch and Ralph the Negro Milkman as they navigate their way through Cold War paranoia and forced morality told in the Technicolor style of a 1950’s sitcom.”

That’s three nights for which I either need to arrange for a babysitter and make it a date-night with The Husband or confirm that he will be home from work in time for me to be able get to my friends’ shows by curtain time…