Category Archives: A Woman’s Project

Bye Bye, Annie . . . why’d ya hafta go?

 When I was a green teacher, and my drama club was the system’s fledgling stepchild, I had the great good fortune to meet Ann DeMatteo.  In those days, her beat for the New Haven Register included the North Haven-Hamden schools, and as soon as she heard we were forming the new club, she came out to interview us and to do a story on the program.

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Ann, partying in her usual, youthful way, with newswoman Heidi Voight, Miss Connecticut 2008.

I liked her immediately.  Who wouldn’t?  She was ebullient, sharp, interested, and her enthusiasm for drama was painted across her whole being.  After that, anytime we had a show or a fundraiser or a special event of any kind, Ann was there, and she wrote about it.  Sometime during my years in North Haven, Ann had her first bout with cancer.  She didn’t skip a beat, kept on covering her beat, took on the teen beauty pageant she produced, raised funds for all kinds of causes, especially for her pageant.

Later, when I moved to East Haven, which happened to be Ann’s home town, I learned a lot more about her and why she had such an affinity for drama.  By this time she’d had plenty of private life drama, none of which she would want me playing across the proscenium of a blogsite, and she had beat the cancer.  And she made the realization of our drama program at EHHS her very own cause célèbre.

In an effort to launch a dramatic arts academy at the brand new high school in East Haven, my music director Judy Polio-Webber and I decided that it would be a good idea to open auditions for Bye Bye Birdie, our first show to the community.  I called Ann in hopes that she would spread the word.  And did she spread the word!

She wrote about the auditions, wrote about the program, interviewed the principal, wrote about him, interviewed townspeople and wrote about them and what the new drama program might mean to them.  Then she made phone calls.  In that debut production, at least half the members of our very large chorus were there because Ann had told them to come out for the show; and Ann, proud to be wearing her bobby sox, saddle shoes and a crinoline that stretched to Milwaukee, was the most salient voice among them.

When I moved to New Haven and on to filmmaking, Ann wrote about my company and our efforts to grow.  She sent around our casting notice and was responsible for the huge turnout we had for our casting sessions at Bar.  Then, she managed to come to every theater production and film screening my partner and I mounted.  I knew the curtain could raise as soon as Annie De Matteo was in the house.

Later, when I moved to NYC, we drifted out of touch somewhat, but she checked in with me periodically, and she blogged about my work; when I initiated a NYC Mob Tour, Ann wrote about the tour, and her writing intrigued Jim Shelton,  wrote a feature article for the Sunday Register.

How do you thank such a woman for that kind of lasting fidelity and willing support?  I sent her tickets to come ride the Mob Tour, but she never got in to the city to use them.  I sent her a videotape of Birdie, but I think she gave it to someone else who was in the cast.  That’s who she was.

When I saw on Facebook the other day that Annie had died, I was stunned.  I guess I saw the signs in the most recent rounds of chemo, radiation, hospitalization, convalescence, but I didn’t believe that anyone with that kind of spirit could actually leave us.  I guess it’s true that it’s better that she is out of pain and out of stress and out of the constant struggle.  But it’s worse for the planet, which is a lonelier and less mirthful place for having lost her presence.

I can only hope that her voice is the loudest in the chorus she’s joined in the great beyond, and she’s making the other angels smile.  I like to imagine she’s wearing that crinoline and the saddle shoes, and she’s got her hands all over the hunkiest Conrad Birdie ever.261733_10200293713198698_1527977597_n

Presentarle . . . Adriana Gandolfi

My sweet “little” cousin — she was six years my junior — has been gone for a year and a week, and she’s been on my mind.

Adriana, 1976

I always thought of her as the tag-along kid, a gentle, exuberant spirit with a huge laugh who glided behind or beside us on gossamer slippers, drinking us in, imbibing our heartbeats but never seeking to judge, only to know our rhythms in order to synchronize hers. . . .

At Devil’s Elbow, Portland, OR, 1977.

She wrote poetry, sometimes in English, sometimes in Italian . . . .

What the eyes take in
The heart cannot contain
In contemplation and wonder,
The landscape unfolds
Changes breathes lives
Choruses of wind and sun
clouds and birds
Welcome bless and dance

Colore vibrante sonoro d’autonno
Il Ginkgo
Solare

Vive l’intensità del suo essere
Una manifestazione delle potenzialità innate
Un seme che porta l’energia dell’espressione
Color parlante entenso
Improvviso concerto d’autunno.

Adriana(far right) with my mother Charlotte (center/pink pants) and her mother Ruth(far left, blue dress) and their cousins Kurt (next to Adriana) and Gjenik (next to Ruth) and their daughters Christina and Christa in Vienna. Only Christine and Christa (left of my mother) are still alive.

We miss her.  She lived in Italy in her last years, and I didn’t see her often enough, and when I did see her, she was in the bosom of a family hungry for her presence, so there was never enough time to just be.  And yet she is all around me. . . .

I wrote this the day after she died, and I am placing it here as my tribute to her dynamic anima, to her abiding love, to her immortality.

To Adriana

The email said you’d gone,

But I know better.

You’re still here.  I know you are.

I sense your presence even in this city,

My city, whose weight you long since left behind.

I feel you in the cooler breezes blowing in off the North Atlantic

Tickling my nose, making me sneeze,

Delighting me with reassurance

This awful summer’s nearly done, and

Joy of autumn color’s  close at hand.

I smell your perfumes in the fragrant salt sea air

That drifts through my window when the city rests,

When the churning gases of industry belch a little less,

And the noxious poverty covers itself with the darkness

That spreads like healing balm around us.

And also in the vanilla-honeyed sweetness of roasting peanuts

At curbside pretzel stands.

I hear your laughter among the children playing hopscotch

Riding scooters past my café table

Where I’ve come to write a remembrance of you.

And there you are singing – Puccini, then Verdi and Bizet—in my IPOD buds.

Now I hear you once again in the murmur

Of voices from beyond.  A murmur I only occasionally notice

But one you heard, distinctly, long before any of us

Knew they were there.

I taste the memory of you, of the meals we cooked in Eugene on

That saffron soft sweet savory day we escaped another summer’s brutal heat

And cavorted on the beach

Knowing even then how fleetingly we flew.

Tears of adolescence long since dried,

We reveled in our abundance of joy.

See what I mean?

The email said you’d gone, but you are everywhere around me.

Vibrant in color, light and sound,

As you were but different, freer,

Moving nimbly, lightly past the pleasure and the pain.

You always seemed as light as air to me,

Moving with the grace of one propelled by spirits

And by a joy from somewhere else.

I see you dancing, always dancing

In the sparkling , gentle brownness of my Abigail’s eyes.

You dance divinely, I tell you, and you smile

So patiently at my pedestrian observation.

You smile on, knowing what we all know . . .

Or will . . . soon enough.

Aging Fantasy

You are a cooling comfort

Flickering gently in the pink-golden light

That tiptoes through the half-open window

Thinking to surprise us with the newborn day.

The city blares a welcome home,

The tree-lined sidewalk already teeming – still teeming –

With the blood-forced pulse that has

Compelled us to come back to where we began –

To the city insanity that revives the

Very marrow of our souls.

We’ve just returned from ruddy respite

In the Tuscan Hills.  Our garden has been tended,

And the villa walls are fortified for the season,

The hills around it are secure.

No winter rains, no summer dust will drive

The ancient heart from our retreat

We can always go back, and we shall.

But for now, we sit in silence

Regenerated by the thrumming rhythmic riffs

Repeated refrains humming in the retreating shadows

At the corners of our sight.

In a little while we’ll dash into the subway to

Chase down a film at the Forum or maybe at MOMA.

Or perhaps tonight you’ll have your own plans

As I’ll have mine . . . whatever they may be.

But for now there is only this scintillating

Silence of our intimate sharing.

Each of us immersed in a separate world of words

I at my computer, coffee mug for strength

You on the couch, Espresso tasse for taste.

You clear your throat, and I no longer cover my ears

Your distraction no longer threatens to obscure the words

At the core of my self.

 

I no longer simply see you, no longer simply read you

I feel you all around me, in the wash of my emotion,

In the cooling crepuscule of pink-golden light

Tiptoeing gently thru a now-open window and

Tinkling with the laughter of

Taunting, playful, tantalizing dawn.

A Woman’s Project

I returned to New York City in 2005, long after my “Sell by” date had expired

In 2005, I left the relative comfort of a tremulous marriage and a tumultuous job (drama director/English Teacher) — the details of which are best left to fiction where they will embarrass no one’s children — to pursue my writing career. I knew the transition would not be easy, but having been raised by a Puritan Calvinist father and a mother who’d escaped Europe in 1939, I felt prepared for whatever difficulty might befall me. It seemed that the year’s pay I had vested in my pension along with the portion of my mother’s inheritance that I didn’t give to my children, would, at the very least, get me to a good job in New York, where I would then begin to write in earnest.

New York today is a cleaner, sparklier version of the city I left in my young adulthood; it’s no longer the nurturing artist’s environment I remember from those days. (Photo by Aaron Newman)

It’s a tale, as I think about it, worthy of Flaubert. Except that I was well past young when I ventured out of the provinces into the promise of new life in the city, and I had no idea what incredible bias I would be up against.

In the early days of my wife-and-motherdom, I had taken on a number of jobs (part-time, so long as we could afford to have me home part-time and then full-time as our financial needs grew), had served on boards and managed schedules and even had acted as interim director of a Day School.  I was an inveterate multi-tasker.

As a teacher, in addition to serving as Vice President of the State’s Drama Association and as a member of our NEA (teacher’s union) Negotiations team, et al., I had produced and directed two shows a year for ten years, had run a very successful summer program in one town for 7 then got a grant from the State to operate a Summer Conservatory program in another for two; I had raised and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars and had always brought my programs back to the black. I did my own marketing and publicity, made my own deals with state-wide vendors, hired my own musicians, designers and construction crews. I created dialogue between my students and professional theaters around the country, and I personally arranged at least two annual trips to New York for a performance and a talkback/tour with the cast and crew of the show we saw. For the summer grant program, which required professional theater people to serve in their professional roles as well as to teach, I auditioned, hired and oversaw all manner of talent and crews from New York, provided them with transportation, housing, and meals while I made sure they got paid, and at the same time I produced/directed Sweeney Todd and produced As You Like It in repertory. And in addition to everything else, I had co-authored and produced three short films, two of which had garnered festival prizes

In short, I had taken on many responsibilities — always — and had honed a great many skills. Yet when I began to hunt for jobs in NY, it became quickly apparent that out in the world there are two distinct types for whom professional people have a blanket distrust: older women and teachers. Ooops.

Older women are invisible. They are no longer classifiable. Even though there is a great deal made about the Cougar women men crave, most men don’t even look at most women over 50. Even those who are attractive, fit, vital women get very little attention. And what that means is that women don’t look at them either. Worse, the invisibility somehow makes them less desirable as new hires. Who wants to clutter an office — or, in my case, a theater — with invisible drones? I applied for every possibly suitable job, from education director to personal assistant, posted in America over the course of the two years it took me to realize I was un-hirable. But being over fifty was only part of it.

People in the “real” world believe that teachers go into education because they can’t do. And we all know how easy teaching is! Anyone can do it — so why would you hire someone who “only” knows how to teach? I talked myself hoarse about the various skills I had developed in my various capacities as a “teacher,” but my words fell on deaf ears. One young woman who was interviewing me for a job I could do with my eyes closed effused at me, “Oh, you were a class advisor too? You must love going to proms.”

And the irony was that even for teaching I was now too old to be hired in a new system. When I was shortlisted for a great part-time job in an Alternative High School that would have been perfect for me, the interviewer told me, “I could lose my job for this, but I want to tell you that even though you are my first choice for this position, you won’t get the job.” She went on to tell me that I had “years in”, which required money, and I was no longer “fresh.”

Though guiding is certainly not a dream job, it does pay the cookie bills

So, as my little nest egg began to dwindle — I didn’t fight my husband for what I should have insisted on having after 33 years of marriage, believing I’d find a great job to sustain me very quickly — I took a job in the surreal world of tourism and became a sightseeing guide. Now nearing 65, armed with an arsenal of words, two master’s degrees and a compendium of otherwise useless information collected with my autodidact’s obsession with New York City, wearing my royal blue uniform shirt and a thick coat of sunscreen, I trudge daily down to the place where the tour buses originate. There I endure the abuse by passengers who range from insensitive to moronic, and I allow myself to be ordered around by bosses, many of whom are recently released, convicted felons, and by over-eager ticket sellers, who tend to be newly arrived African immigrants  (priceless few of whom have a shred of empathy for women in general or older women in particular), and then I go home to sleep.

I do this because it allows me every morning to get up before the sun and revel in the knowledge that I have a few hours of precious writing time, and someday soon . . . . well who knows!  I’ve just finished a book, which will be released this month, and I am writing furiously in a way I haven’t since I was a teenager filling journals with self-absorbed ruminations.

I am not alone out here. There are any number of women who have set out to create new lives for themselves, to forge careers in creative endeavors; and I have discovered, after a lifetime of feeling disconnected from women and intimidated by the judgmental, dogged competition friendship with them engendered, that for the first time in my life, I have a true kinship with some of the most remarkable people on the planet. Amazingly, they are women!

It’s been a rough road, and it’s not getting easier any time soon. I know that. I accept it. But I hope to live long enough and to prosper sufficiently to make it easier for someone else. Some day I would dearly love to open a safe house, a home for women like me who have held in their overflowing creativity for too many years and just need a place where they can live and write or paint or study lines or clean their cameras or do whatever they need to do to fulfill the need to DO without fear of eviction and starvation. A fear I carry in my stomach at the end every single month. It’ll be at least a while before I’m where I can even think about making the dream house real. But I want to start the process of providing support right here and right now. In this, my new blog, I will inaugurate a series about some of my most admired, most loved friends, women who, like me, have risked absolute failure in the pursuit of resounding success. A section of this blog will be dedicated to those women who would like to be featured here. That will debut shortly.

My cousin Anna Thea Bogdanovich, one of the women I admire most, seated in a pantheon of creative women at the Museum of Arts and Design

I dedicate my efforts to my daughters and my granddaughters. May they never be invisible. Or disrespected for having lived.