Pen and Moon

musings, life lessons & poetry from Theresa Jarosz Alberti

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The Curtain Goes Up*

August 22, 2012 / / 2 Comments

“Fruit Fly, the Musical”… 2012 Fringe Show

Two weeks ago, I was all caught up in the Minnesota Fringe Festival, 11 days of 165 hour-long local theater performances.    Fringe began just before our humongous party and life was pretty hectic, so I didn’t see any shows until Day 7 … but after that, I managed to squeeze in 11 performances.  There’s a crazy, magical energy I get from going to Fringe shows— figuring out which shows to go to, reading online reviews, talking to others while waiting in line, the anticipation of waiting for the show to start.  It’s like the same energy I get from writing sometimes, or participating in National Novel Writing Month (more on that another day), listening to great live music, or reading a well-crafted novel.  A humming, exciting buzz.

The Guthrie Theater

My husband told me last week that the Twin Cities have more theaters per capita of anywhere outside of New York.  Who, us?  I couldn’t help but be surprised and proud of our wonderfully artistic community here.  Other theater facts:  Minnesota is home to the Old Log, one of the country’s oldest continuously running theaters, and has the largest dinner theater (the Chanhassan).  We also have the revolutionary Guthrie Theater, conveniently just up the road from our home.  It’s the largest regional playhouse in the country.  It has drawn in such famous actors as Jessica Tandy, Sir Ian McKellen (who did a nude scene as King Lear), William H. Macy, Frank Langella, Melissa Gilbert, Val Kilmer, David Hyde Pierce, Julianne Moore, and T.R. Knight.

With all this theater around us, we as a family have been lucky to experience some of it.  When the kids were little, I would wait in line to get discount season tickets to the preview performances for The Children’s Theater, so every year we were seeing fabulous shows like A Year with Frog and Toad (which went on to Broadway), The Snow Queen, and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.  Then the schools my kids attended got involved with Project Success, a youth-development organization which, among other things, encourages inner city youth to attend theater performances, and helps make this possible by providing families with free tickets, and babysitting and transportation, if desired.  Because of this generous organization, our family has gotten to see a lot of exceptional theater over the years, performances we never would have been able to afford on our own.  Tons of shows at the Guthrie, lots of Shakespeare, even the Nutcracker Ballet on Christmas Eve, A Christmas Carol, and even The Rockettes!

A Christmas Carol at the Guthrie

And yet… as they got older, the kids would sometimes complain that I was dragging them to another dumb play… why do we have to go? (To be honest, one complained more than the rest.)  Sometimes as a parent, I’ve doubted myself or questioned myself about why I was doing something when I had to fight to get it to happen.  But not with theater.  Every time, I treated the plays we got to see as  important, a treat, something we were lucky enough to get to attend.  And my oft-repeated words to my kids were this:  we’re going because this is part of your education.  There are things that I’ve found lacking in your education through the schools, and seeing these performances is just as imporant as your math and reading classes.  We are lucky to have these free tickets, and even if you don’t like what you see, you’ll be getting something out of it.

(And usually they liked what they saw.  Even if they didn’t, they thought about why they didn’t like it and we had great conversations about it on the way home.)

With my youngest being a senior this year, it will be our last year with Project Success.  After all they’ve given to us, I owe them a donation or several, and I’ll have to start paying for more of our theater experiences.  And I will, because for me, theater is important.  It’s a part of MY education too, and this live and living and literary art form enriches my life, giving me that good creative buzz.  It makes me want to make things.  TV rarely does.  So save a seat for me when the curtain goes up!

*Thanks to Maud Hart Lovelace for the title, which she used in her amazing book, Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown.

Let’s Not Party Like It’s 1999

August 10, 2012 / / 3 Comments

Party in the street

A few months ago, my husband B told me he wanted to have a huge party in August, to celebrate him turning 50, our twins turning 21, and his recent graduation 32 years after starting college.  “Just how big?”  I asked.

“Oh, a couple hundred people or so.  I want to block off the street and get a band to play.”

Gulp.  My first reaction was heart-clenching anxiety.  I was having flashbacks to our last big party, when the twins graduated from high school 3 years ago.  We invited a lot of people but had no idea how many would show.  We deep cleaned and decluttered for 2 months (a big feat, as cleaning is not a top priority for us), I planned and made lists of every last detail, and came up with a Martha Stewart-esque taco bar.  I’ve seen other (saner) people have some ground beef, cheese and salsa and call it a day, but in my drive to make it “Nice,” I made vats of seasoned ground beef, chicken, pork, and vegetarian beans, shopped and cooked for days.  People loved the party and praised the food, but I was totally burnt out. (And we ate leftovers for months afterwards.)

On a smaller scale, this is what I’ve tended to do for all the kids’ birthday parties and holidays over the year.  I plan with detailed lists so that I’m walking around muttering to myself trying to think of everything.  I cook the food from scratch, and bake/frost/decorate the cakes myself.  I clean and shop, and then– as my family knows too well– as we get nearer the party, I become a drill seargent, yelling at them to help me do this or that, because there’s no way I can get it all done (add a heap of my built-up resentment in there too).  And during all this time, I’m in a state of anxiety and fear— afraid I won’t get it all done, afraid of people seeing my imperfect house and judging me, afraid the party will not be Perfect. Underneath it all is despair that I’ve given up myself and my own needs for several weeks because I’m driven by Perfectionism.  Sigh!

I’ve known for a long time that this isn’t a good set-up for me, or for anyone else… but I honestly didn’t know how to change it.  The panic was too great for me to do anything but what I knew how to do.  And I know there are many reasons that I’ve gotten into this miserable way of operating– lots of childhood issues I won’t go into here.  I’ve been working on them, really really hard.  But we haven’t had a party since that overwhelming graduation party… and now B was asking for one, a bigger one than we’ve ever had.

It may sound extreme, but the idea was sending me into a PTSD state.  The anxiety and fear barged their way in, and I just wanted to stand straight still and do nothing.  Luckily, we have two wonderful therapists that we see for couple’s counseling, and we talked it out with them.  As usual, they got us to see things from each other’s point of view, got to us empathize with what the other was feeling.  Also as usual, they said “oh Theresa, what a great opportunity for you to work with your feelings!”  (groan)  And they helped us formulate a plan.  It may sound like a strange one, but it worked for us–

B would be in charge of the whole party.  He would make the plans, he would find out how to close off the street, he would hire a band, he would do the invites.  It was his party, and he’d get to have it the way he wanted it.  He would grill brats and veggie burgers, provide beer and root beer kegs, and then the rest would be potluck and BYOB.  He wouldn’t clean because the party would be in the street.  And my job was to not plan, not worry, and just take care of getting coolers and ice.  Coolers and ice!  Okay then.

This may sound like it was a proverbial piece of cake for me… but let’s just say it wasn’t.  It was hard to let that old party planner in me go… not only a perfectionist, but she has some teensy-weensy control issues too.  But I wanted to make this work for B, and I wanted to not be afraid of parties, and I wanted to try something new.

I wasn’t perfect at letting go–  I still had anxiety about the party, but was better at remembering that I didn’t have to listen to that panicked voice in my head.  I felt my fears and anxieties and worked with those feelings, rather than letting them take over.  B and I had many great talks and were really understanding each other in the weeks before the party.  It wasn’t easy for me, but it was different, and I was acting differently–my family reported I was much better, no drill seargent this time.

I did do more than just coolers and ice– I decided I wanted to make the cakes, since I do like to bake.  I did do cleaning (not excessive).  I did help out with other details.  But it was still a big change for me in giving up control, doing much less, and letting go.

And the party was great!  We had fabulous weather, over a hundred happy people, tables of potluck goodies, fun music and 21 year olds hosting a bonfire. B loved it, and I did too.  I remembered the good parts about having a party– how fun it is to get together with family and friends.

I learned a lot about myself in this process.  I’m sure I’ll still struggle with these same issues in the future… but now I actually don’t mind the idea of maybe someday kinda hosting another (probably smaller!) party.  Whee!

Happy Birthday!

 

A Pinch of This, a Dash of That

July 31, 2012 / / 2 Comments

Last night for dinner, I threw together a chicken salad, after having had a little of someone else’s at a party the night before.  Nothing so remarkable about that, really, making dinner, ho hum, but then I realized when I’d finished and it really was quite tasty– hey, I just threw this together without a recipe!  And that’s the part that amazes me when I think about it… that I’ve cooked enough over the years that I have a pretty large repertoire of things I can cook/bake/make without going to a cookbook or the Internet.

A chicken salad isn’t very difficult, but I played with it, adding halved grapes and apple chunks, celery, onions, cucumbers.  Through trial and error, I’ve learned that I don’t want just straight mayo as the dressing–  after reading labels of other deli salads I’ve liked, I discovered adding a bit of Dijon, some splashes of white vinegar, salt and pepper (I am a pepper fiend, always use it, but not overuse), and a few pinches of sugar.  Just a little sugar takes the acidity of the mustard and vinegar down a notch.  I added water to thin the dressing.  Tossed into the salad, it was great.

I started cooking when I was a kid, the oldest daughter helping mom in the kitchen.  It was the ’70s, the time of the Boxed Everything foods, so I learned to make Jell-0 and pudding and mac-n-cheese and Hamburger Helper.  Mom regularly baked cookies from scratch, so I learned to do that, graduated to baked chicken and chili.  I took some summer cooking classes and learned that I could just try out recipes on my own.  I tried a Baked Alaska that melted some in the oven, and a 3-layer butter cake with chocolate icing.

When I was newly married in my 20s and didn’t want to eat those boxed foods anymore, I started reading cookbooks and learned a lot from Jane Brody and her “Good Food Book,” a bible about cooking and nutrition.  Bulgur?  Lentils? I discovered a whole world of food that I’d never heard of or tried.  I experimented with  all sorts of new things, and wrote notes in my new cookbooks– “Great!”  “We didn’t like.”  “Needs more ___.”

I guess it’s been a long education since I’ve been cooking most of my life, and became the chief chef for my family over 20 years ago.  For the most part I like cooking, but there have been days or weeks where I can’t stand it and it feels torturous to have to think about what to make for dinner all the time.  And certainly not everything turns out–  my family likes to mention “Chard Cheese Pie” to tease me (bleah, tasted sour, despite the glowing recipe intro that said what a favorite it was– not for us!).  And there was “Swamp Soup,” a green zucchini-based kinda slimy soup that only one of us liked– my older son who was about 8 at the time and didn’t like a lot of things.  Go figure.

It feels fun and creative when I can just whip something up, throw it together, use what I’ve learned through trial and error, add a little of this or that to something to change it up.  It’s best when it works and tastes great, but even with the mistakes, at least I’ve learned something.  I still use recipes a lot of the time —  and I’ll give a big grateful shout-out to the Internet, that endless source of recipes, just search any old ingredient, woo hoo!  But sometimes I just get my groove on with my intuition, my Spidey-sense about what I could add to make this taste better, part chemist, part artist, part crazy cook.  And then we get to eat!

 

Living Inside Books

July 23, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Girls playing Betsy-Tacy

This past weekend I got to experience another world– somewhat like living inside a book, immersed with other folks in the imagination of a writer… the people, places and events she created.  It wasn’t a re-enactment, but we were in a little sensory time-warp bubble.  The author was Maud Hart Lovelace, the books were the Betsy-Tacy series, and the world was “Deep Valley” (as she dubbed Mankato, Minnesota in her books) and the years were 1892 – 1917.  I was in Mankato for the Betsy-Tacy Convention.

Betsy and Tacy in the piano box

Maud wrote about her childhood and early adulthood growing up in Mankato in these books– they are based on her life, but she maintained they were ficitonalized.  She changed names and locations and situations; she created stories based on some reality; she embellished.  When I was a kid eating up these books like candy, I wished they were real.  I looked up “Deep Valley” on the Minnesota map and could never find it, so I assumed they were totally fictional.  It wasn’t until I was well into adulthood that I discovered the reality part of the fiction.

These were books I re-read many times over the years.  I loved the world Maud created, and these characters felt like my friends (yes, I did have real friends, too!).  I identified with Betsy, who knew from a young age she wanted to be a writer.  But until the mid-90s, “I thought I was the only one” (a catch-phrase of Betsy-Tacy fans).  For brevity, I’ll keep it short… but I discovered an email listserv of Betsy-Tacy fans, two societies working to promote the books, and I have been a part of all of these groups for 17 years now.

Going to Mankato this weekend for another B-T Convention (we’ve had them every few years) is as much about seeing the many people I’ve come to know and love online, and in the societies, as it is about seeing the actual historical sites.  We have become a close-knit community, and that made the convention extra special.

 

 

 

 

But there are also the actual houses of the real Betsy/Maud and Tacy/Bick that have been bought and restored, and many historical places to visit in the town.  Living inside the Betsy-Tacy books this weekend also meant:  listening to speakers, some of whom corresponded with Maud, a young adult author panel, a costume parade, a legacy panel of descendants of the series’ characters, a sing-along, touring Minneapolis since one of the books takes place here, a trivia contest, socializing and drinking, and much more.

I feel really, really lucky to have come across this community of fans– it’s brought me friendship and fun, shared experiences and many great book recommendations.  People sometimes look at me strange when I talk about these books, the people I meet because of them, and how excited I get about all of this.  But I feel grateful to be able to live inside these books, and have a weekend like this one where it all becomes even more real.  After all, I can whisper to my childhood self, “guess what?  You’re not the only one!”  🙂

 

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