Tag: Montana

The First Step on the Road to Vegetarianism

The waitress had just set down my food, the vegetarian combination, and my husband’s Doro Wat when she looked at my daughter and told her, “I’ll be right back with your lamb.”  My child’s eyes grew large and filled with tears.
“I told you I don’t eat anything cute!”

It’s true.  My daughter does not consume the flesh of any creature that might appear as a plush friend in an Easter basket.

My husband had been so happy to find something on the menu mild enough for our daughter, so that we could come as a family to this neighborhood Ethiopian restaurant where she does not like the way the vegetables are prepared.

The first time my daughter tasted the meat off her father’s plate, he didn’t tell her what  it was. I wasn’t paying attention, I assumed it was beef.  The Husband told me later that it was lamb and he hadn’t told her because he wanted to be able to go back to that restaurant as a family.  I suppose I should have told him, that this would be perceived as betrayal.  But, I thought he knew.  How many episodes of The Simpson’s have my husband and daughter watched together.

How often does Lisa’s vegetarianism come up?  Why didn’t my husband see this coming?  

My own road to becoming a vegetarian began in elementary school the first time I refused to eat anything I had seen dead.  
It was not long after we had moved to Montana and my father shot Bambi and hung the corpse in the garage to cure before he and my mother butchered the meat like some kind of pioneers, or Sweeney Todd, or Hannibal Lecter.

Some kid argued with me, “You eat cows don’t you?”

“Not anymore!” was my answer as a 7th grader and I still haven’t.

When the waitress returned with the lamb stew, she took one look at my daughter, turned right around, and returned the Ye Beg Alicha back to the kitchen.  When we got our check it had been crossed off the bill.

I don’t know how this incident will to shake out for us as far as the timing of my daughter becoming a vegetarian.  But, I’m pretty sure we won’t be going back to that particular restaurant any time soon.

This is an original NYC Moms Blog post.

Listening to Carol Burnett on WNYC talking about her New York years

Carol Burnett was on the Leonard Lopate show today.  She talked about coming to New York and living at The Rehearsal Club, the real life role model for the boarding house in the movie “Stage Door”.  Of course it no longer existed by the time I was an aspiring actress.  I didn’t come to New York in the 1980’s even though it was a dream of mine, like Carol Burnett, to be on Broadway.  I was discouraged from the prospect as the reality seemed to be more “Taxi Driver” than “42nd Street” and I became pretty convinced I would be raped in a stairwell if I couldn’t afford to live in a good neighborhood.   So I stayed in Montana.  My friend came.  She did fine.  Maybe I shouldn’t have been such a chicken.  (But that worst nightmare did happen to Kelly McGillis in while she was an acting student at Julliard.)

Still Struggling With the Production Process

I am still struggling with the production process and how it all went down, how Kendall was disappointed with my work and I was so upset that I shook.

Because Kendall told me that I was drifty and unfocused in rehearsal and because of all the talk about stepping up and taking on production tasks, I didn’t feel as though I had a right to say something like, “This is not what I expected, I cannot do this work by myself, I did not plan to spend my week this way. Instead I didn’t say anything to Kendall, begged my busy stressed-out husband to spend his home time helping me to do volunteer clerical tasks–which was stressful. I let other things slide in the process of focusing on the marketing letter that seemed to be an audience building whim. I mistakenly put off important things like getting my bio and blog up on the NYCMOMSBLOG website and talking to family members about the developing plans for a 50th wedding anniversary family vacation to make a priority out of something which ended up costing me money and making me feel bad.

I hesitated to “step up” and commit in a meeting in a conference room in July, to essentially clerical tasks that would need to be accomplished during and after the beginning of school. From the very first rehearsal I was thrown off center when we had our first talk back and I said “I don’t feel entirely here in the studio.” And I expected other people to say things like “Yeah me too.” and “I can’t believe summer is over already.” Instead, Kendall said “What do you need to do about that? More sleep? Better nutrition?” I was the week between flying back to New York from Montana and the start of school. My time and priorities belonged to The Husband and My Kid and I was not expecting to schedule any “me time” with Pilates classes and lap swims at the Y until after My Kid started school.

As it turned out those planned workouts also slipped off the agenda as I tried to get the marketing letter done.

Because I don’t work I think I can do anything and whatever I have in mind to do gets pushed to the back burner because I live with the flexibility to do that (in the event of My Kid coming down with a cold and staying home from school or being available to chaperone a class field trip. During this production I also was deflecting daily requests to volunteer to be a class parent.  It’s easy to give my time away.  It takes so much effort to keep it for myself.

2:42 am

OK I’m awake and thinking of the novelty facebook quiz I took last night, what mental illness are you, that told me I was panic anxiety disorder and so now I have awakened in the middle of the night wondering if that is true.

Maybe that’s why Kendall is always telling me I look confused.

Maybe that’s why I feel like my comments during the chat part of rehearsals are being used as ammunition against me.  I’m thinking of the very first workshop the week I got back from Montana when my head was full of the things I wanted to get done before school started.   I expected agreement from others who also felt odd to be doing something we haven’t done in months.  Instead Kendall said, “Well what do you need to do about that?  Eat better?  Get more sleep?”  I hadn’t thought I had a problem.

Now I thought I had a problem and it was my problem and I needed to fix it.  So I went to the next workshop of the “ensemble building and dusting off old material phase”.  (During the last incarnation of this particular show, I had a small part, I came in during tech week and was assigned to walk around carrying a candle with other clowns behind me as a transitional device.  My memories of the show were of standing in full costume in the dark of backstage watching the backs and shoulders of clowns in the spotlight and waiting for a music cue.  I didn’t have any memories of developing material for that show because I hadn’t taken part in the development process.  After that day in the studio Kendall said she wanted to talk with me.  Now that I think I’m insane, I don’t know what she said.  What I heard was;  “I don’t think you’re trying hard enough and neither do most of the other women in the company.  You need to stop being the way that you are.”

I felt like I was being given notice and that if I didn’t improve, I would be kicked off the team.   That was the Friday before Labor Day.  The next rehearsal was on the evening of the first day of school (traditionally and an emotional day in family life–I felt guilty dragging my kid into Manhattan to do a childcare exchange with her father instead of having a family dinner and talking about her what she thought of her new teacher.  I was also determined to do better because I was on notice, even though I know full-well that is not the mindset that produces funny clown material.

During a musical improvisation where a bunch of us were listening to a song and then the music was turned off and we were supposed to sing something in the same emotional tone, and we’re supposed to make eye contact with the audience and we’re supposed to be truthful and we’re supposed to move around and we’re supposed to make sounds, text even.  The song my group was assigned was “Seventeen”.  I can see how this could produce some very funny things, especially in the context of this show, a way for “Cinderella” to be for example in the moment after the stepsisters have gone to the ball but before the fairy godmother has come.  Instead, my mind latched onto a picture of a very sad adolescent at home listening to her radio thinking she wasn’t chosen and nobody likes her (A melancholy adolescent can be a very funny thing.  I’ve seen it work in Shakespeare.)  Kendall was side coaching me to move more and be louder and don’t forget the audience.  I looked into the eyes of the other clowns and thought;  “You don’t want to work with me.  You don’t trust me on stage.  I got nothing.”  Needless to say, I choked.  Nothing worth keeping came out of that improv from me.

Thank God my puppeteer friend who was in town.  We had a pre-arranged get-together after rehearsal.  We went out for drinks and dinner and she talked me down from my failure place.  She reminded me that I actually am funny and list numerous performances and real life occasions during the past 20 years we’ve known each other when I have been genuinely funny.  She’s a good friend.  We remembered how we actually cried at Clown College because we couldn’t come up with a walk-around gag that could get approved by our gag teacher, Frosty Little.  One night a bunch of us stayed up until the wee hours of the morning brainstorming walk-around gags and stuffed the box with our ideas the next morning.  I’d submitted 5 or 6 descriptive sketches and when one of them was approved to be built by the shop I didn’t even remember coming up with the idea (even though the drawing and handwriting were mine).   I’d become so exhausted and punchy that by the time I’d come up with the idea  (It was  a “play on words” which was something Frosty kept telling us not to do even though most of the examples he gave us of successful walk-around gags were puns and plays on words.  Clown College is a guys world.  Our class began with 54 students and 10 were women.  My approved walk-around sight gag involved a fishing tackle box and a third-arm puppet of a football player.

Lee Metcalf National Wildlife Refuge

My dad really wanted to take the grandkids to the Lee Metcalf National Wildlife Refuge up the Bitterroot not far from Missoula.  It’s a beautiful spot but I’m afraid the kids weren’t impressed.  What visible wildlife there was were birds and ducks.  It was hot.  The grass was dry.

Splash Montana rounded out the afternoon and revived the children.

Leaving Bigfork

8/17/09

I stopped by the theatre to pick up my reunion t-shirt. Then I walked along Electric Avenue and looked at the shops, some that were there when I was a playhouse actor and most that were not.  In the gift shop next to the theatre I heard some people talking about JK Simmons and how he had been walking around town like anybody.
“Yeah, he’s one of us,” said one of the men. 
Then they started to talk about his older brother David, “that big guy with the big voice”. He was a friend of mine when we were both still in Missoula going to school and involved with the Missoula Children’s Theatre and for the record he is the younger brother.  During one pre-production build, I rode out to Lolo in a truck with David to pick up some lumber or piece of equipment for a show and as we drove past the McDonalds I read the sign announcing “Chicken McNuggets”.  It was the first time in my life I’d seen those words and I laughed all the way to Lolo.   Chicken McNuggets.  Who thought that would last.

Who knew that 50 years after some college kids showed up to put on plays in the sleepy town of Bigfork, Montana, that the theatre would be the centerpiece of the town’s vibrant summer tourist industry.  There was much praise for Don and Jude Thompson who have run the playhouse for most of it’s history, but also much praise and admiration for Bo Brown who started the theater company in 1960.  He gave a lovely speech at the gala.   I can imagine how inspirational and charismatic he must have been as a young man.  When he was done after 8 years, he turned the theatre over to DT who with his wife Jude grew it too what it is today.  For several years in the 1970’s when Jim Caron was in the company, actors who didn’t have anything better to do spend the winter with Jim and the Missoula Children’s Theatre Association.  I was one of the kids they worked with back then.  I talked my parents into taking me up to Bigfork to see the professional theater. We would camp and fish and in the evening my dad would row my mother and I and sometimes my sister to the dock at Bigfork and we would get out of the boat and go up the hill and attend the theater in the old building.  (We bought the orange drink Bo Brown mentioned in his speech.)  I would buy the program and ask everyone in the company for their autograph.  Even 5-year-old Gavin Thompson who played the youngest Snow child in Carousel printed his first name over his picture in my program.  He’s married now with children and a career in technical theatre.

The number of Bigfork Alumni still in the business is a testament to the quality of performers and technicians Don and Jude hired.  Others have equally impressive jobs in academics and health care.  At the party one actor was talking to a musician about a successful Broadway musical he had been in which had a group dynamic and creative smart caring people at the helm that had reminded him of the Bigfork Summer Playhouse.