Taking my show on the road
The Outtakes
At 84, when my hour-and-a-half one-woman show was literally taking my breath away, I did my final performance. But just because I couldn’t do stage performances anymore didn’t mean the creative energy that sustained me my whole life suddenly disappeared. I had a problem. My creative juices needed to find a new outlet. My Blah, Blah Blog helped, but when I fully engaged in writing my memoir, Not Yet, I found the perfect expression for my creative needs. Being a few months past 90, my title, Not Yet, is self-explanatory. The process of editing can go on forever. It’s a great place to park author anxiety… ”No one is going to publish this, so I’ll just do another edit.” I do not have forever. It’s time for me to cut the editing cord. My actor roots helped me make the decision to prepare an audiobook of my memoir.
I read as I edit. Some stories that worked in the written form, in the audio version, are losing something in the translation. The audio edit brings new vistas, direction, dialogue, and action to the original edit. I have had to rewrite and cut some stories. It’s just a different animal when I speak the speech trippingly on my tongue. I still like some of the stories I cut. Maybe you’ll like them too. This is why I have decided to create a series of Outtakes From Not Yet.
The Outtake - Taking my show on the road
Somewhere in the mid-eighties, I traveled to London to continue my endless quest to be “discovered.” Hey, if it wasn’t going to happen in Sheboygan, why not London? Personally, I made out well… reviewers hailed my comedic and singing skills. However, my character, Harriet Ferment, to put it bluntly, bombed. The British male population was perfectly satisfied with the status quo and couldn’t handle her American brashness.
I was in rehearsals, working hard to translate my words. Oscar Wilde was right. England and America are separated by an ocean and a foreign language. I needed a break. I made an appointment to get my hair done. So relaxing. My hairdresser knew immediately I wasn’t from England. Amazing! He asked how I was enjoying London. What is not to enjoy? It is a fantastic city. And I could listen to the different dialects from the different classes and sections of the country forever. It really is a foreign language. However, I further explained to him that I had noticed from the newspapers and my dealings with the opposite sex that men in England didn’t seem to like women.
I have never learned to speak sotto voce. From the back of the salon, a woman, her head in foils, walked up to me and, in a very posh accent, put me straight:
Dahling, you have it all wrong. You see, the first thing a male thinks about is his job, then his chum, then his pet. He doesn’t really think about women at all.
Why didn’t I listen to her?
London was a disaster. The British reviewers’, all male, major point was, Thank goodness British women are not like American women. England wasn’t prepared for a feminine revolution.
The eighties were going to finish with a bang. I rewrote and took my show on the road, applying what I had learned in London. First to Atlanta, Georgia where the critics dubbed me Yankee Lady with a big mouth. Both things were true. They were not compliments. Appearances would have you believe that Southern women are retiring and passive. Not true. The expression of the power behind the throne is all about women of the South. Hoop skirts and batting eyelashes covered their manipulations and control. My show was about changing the perception of women as the weaker sex. To the Southern woman, I was a bra-burning feminist who needed running out of town again. Thank Goodness Southern women are not like Northern women.
Your typical powerless, sweet Southern Belle?
First London, now Atlanta??? Before I was tar and feathered, I drove back to New York with suicidal thoughts of ending it all. The usual suspects, my ex-husband, my current lover, thankfully not at the same time, and my sister Marilyn all came to watch the sunset and my show fail.
The question that needed answering was: What was keeping me from pursuing a career at Chick-fil-A? I answered, just like the elephant shoveler working at the circus, “What? And give up show business?”
How much more proof did I need? That show I wrote didn’t work. Why was I traveling to Indianapolis for my next engagement? Delusional? Sadistical? Take your pick.
At the very beginning of the movie The Unsinkable Molly Brown, Debby Reynolds defiantly refuses to surrender to her challengers. She will not holler, Uncle. The human condition is overloaded with fantasists like her and me. What is that “something” inside the human condition that makes some of us not ready to give up? Is it willfulness? Stupidity? Delusion? All of that, yes! Something else, too. Back then, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you. I was much too full of myself. I must have known, as other Alices knew, that the world was getting curiouser and curiouser, and my continued presence was required to keep going from one rabbit hole to the next in search of the mysterious and elusive Jabberwock.
Indianapolis proved to be a much-needed affirmation and a complete vindication of at least some of my beliefs. I had made some adjustments, but nothing big enough to explain the difference in reception.
From the beginning, the repertory theatre was warm and welcoming. The reviews were laudatory. Great reviews… by “men” of the press. The run was almost sold out. Four weeks of laughter and applause almost healed London and Atlanta.
I remember a passage from an autobiography of the great actor and director Laurence Olivier. He wrote he would always be suspicious of any artist who hadn’t experienced failure. Well, Larry, no need to worry about me. I was definitely the star of that show.