#actorsathome

[kittywildegrrl]

View this post on Instagram

Watching the storm roll into Plymouth. #actorslife #actorsathome #minnesota #thunderstorms (at Happy Cat Ranch)

[wildegrrl76]

Hot Fresh Content!

Right outta the oven. Hey there, cats and kittens and all who otherwise identify! This one’s on the house. Just a cute little something for

[kittywildegrrl]

[kittywildegrrl]

Another Wilde and crazy Friday night's hard rockin' down to Happy Cat Ranch. The suburbs, baby. Outta control.

[kittywildegrrl]

250 likes! I have accomplished this! I would like to thank the members of the Academy for recognizing my contributions to Liking.

[kittywildegrrl]

MAMA CAT AND THE SUDDEN, AMAZING, COMPLETE LACK OF CONTENT

I swear, I thought I had the greatest start to the next post, and then everything went wonky. Good afternoon, darlings, so sorry to have been so very absent. I mean, look at this, what a great start I was off to! What with the optimism and the reflection and all:

MAMA CAT AND THE PAST THREE WEEKS

Good afternoon, darlings. Here I sit with one eye on the clock and one eye on the phone and delicious afternoon coffee, my second favorite coffee of the day. I think I figured out why I was so amazingly tired last night. About five minutes ago, I opened my calendar ap (as opposed to my sleek paper date book), and realized that it was only three weeks ago that I took off for VO Atlanta, partly as an act of professional curiosity, the desire to re-connect with an industry with which I have not participated in a while, the desire for a career reset in the wake of the worst of the pandemic.

I had seen two LinkedIn posts from people whose opinions I value, researched the event, asked myself why I’d never been to this thing before fer cryin’ out loud, and booked a flight. If you’ve been following along, you will be aware that, among other things: an unfortunate sandwich rained on my parade; I contributed the gift of singing improv to a breakout session whether or not that was strictly necessary; and although I missed all of the parties, I did gain great benefit from the sessions I attended, and managed to meet some great people in spite of eating mostly saltines all weekend.

I also did this partly as an act of sympathetic magick.

Don’t worry, we’re not about to go down some weird rabbit hole regarding comparative religions and religious devotions. But just as I still serve my blackeyed peas with collard greens every New Year’s to bring good fortune, I feel like maybe I cast a little bit of something like a spell with this trip. For behold, I was stuck like a truck in the muck, and now I have completed many action items on my list  

************************************************************************Look at that – without so much as a punctuation mark to show its completion. I hopped up to respond to something, be it door or pet or other – and then suddenly it’s been 40 days and 40 nights since Diana Went Down to Georgia. Where did nearly two more weeks slip away to, and how? I had all these exciting ideas to share and whatnot.

We had a great deal of veterinary excitement regarding lovely Domino and her thrilling, original ways of attracting attention to her feline dental needs. There was a bit of a row with the SCOTUS apparently poised to start erasing the rights of American citizens. And I had some profound trouble sleeping, which resulted in a great deal of writing to which you, dear reader, may or may not ever be treated. There were two letters written, one to a service provider, one to a business for which I as an individual had provided services.

MamaCat may have had a breakthrough.

Like I said, I was having trouble sleeping, a crazy unusual patch of it. I had also been having regular heartburn, like clockwork, no matter how gentle and bland my food choices. One morning around 1:30am, I was suddenly sitting bolt upright in bed, wide awake, and feeling like maybe I had eaten five chili dogs (I do not eat chili dogs). Like I had swallowed a basketball. Not like when I got food poisoning, in Atlanta; not like a stomach bug had gripped me; and no, I wasn’t having a cardiac anything. I was just, inexplicably STUFFED.

And I realized I had to write. Right now.

It was like I was stuffed full of Word Tacos and Rage Burritos. I had wanted to be very direct with the service provider (an individual, not a corporation) about why they wouldn’t be receiving my business anymore. I had also wanted to be very specific with the business, because there had been an ongoing dynamic which had more or less forced me out, and it required addressing. And every time I had tried to focus on either of these bits of unfinished business, I had found it far too daunting and blown it off.

I went downstairs to the studio, turned on RadioFreePhoenix, and I wrote for the next ten hours. S.F.D.s, second drafts, revisions, finished work. It was intense. Let us not overwork the symbology of my feeling stuffed, and let us not descend into conjuring images of the icky. Let us merely mention in passing that, yes, my digestion improved throughout the experience. I had not realized how incredibly hard I was working to stuff down my reactions and responses to the persons and incidents I was now addressing to the very best of my vocabulary and abilities.

Not gonna lie… when I read that back, it does sound a lot like Ralphie’s ecstatic daydreams about writing his Red Ryder BB gun essay and thereby thrilling the literary world, or at least his teacher.

Not gonna lie… accurate.

You know, I like to think I’m all cool and evolved and have all the answers sometimes. I know, that’s hilarious, but it’s fun when the feeling comes along. Like when those quiches came out so perfectly a while back, I was Queen of the World for a minute there. So I like to think that I can work out my process stories smoothly and effectively, and look good doing it, too! But these two issues had my body literally doing everything it could think of to tell me, no, no, you have tried to lay these issues aside unresolved, and this is not acceptable. Therefore you cannot rest until you deal. You’re going to feel weirdly stuffed and bloated until you deal. You’re going to eat Tums like M&Ms until you deal.

In both cases, the underlying dynamic was ageism, and ageist perspectives. I fired my massage therapist and walked out on an at-will contract because I was chased away by a combination of stereotyping, ageist language, Othering, unkind words, and all the other microagressions that grow in the culture of ageism like bacteria in a Petri dish. This dynamic was present in both cases -- one where I was paying for services, and one in which I was being paid for services rendered. Both cases involved finding myself treated differently, poorly, because of negative perceptions around what a 64-year-old woman can and cannot comprehend. In both settings, it was shown by word and by deed that those with whom I was interacting hold the preconceived notion that gray hair equates with diminished mental faculties. Both experiences contain humans who would tell you that this is not so, these things did not happen, and that the old lady is projecting (I know this, because it was said directly to my face, but with far less direct language).

Both situations found me walking away, because I can replace both the massage therapy services and the revenue stream.

But my physical body rebelled when I thought that I could ghost either party. That’s when the weirdness started, and I didn’t even associate the bothersome symptoms with my unexpressed truths at first. It took time for me to realize I was feeling so rotten at all, let alone what the symptoms were and where they may have come from. They came on slowly, so a person would just think, well, I’m getting old, stuff like this is gonna happen…

See what I did there, cats & kittens?

Ageist within, heal thyself. 🤣🤣🤣

I slept eleven hours last night and woke up naturally at about 5:45am. I felt refreshed for the first time in a couple of weeks. And if you’re still with me, then get this and get it good: It’s not just an older woman resolving her anger issues with her ageism encounters. It’s anytime a problem with the way you were treated, when you realize that you should have advocated for yourself and didn’t, when you were treated as Less Than and you allowed it to be; when something like this has kept you up or made you nauseous or brought on a headache or distracted you while driving. It’s like the feeling you get when you find out that there are nine unelected monarchs of America, the majority of them seemingly ready to un-do any unenumerated Rights which may be inherent under the 4th and/or 14th Amendments.

It's the absolute necessity to realize you’re in a midterm election year, and that you absolutely must advocate for yourself and your liberty now. Liberty which strips rights and creates second-class citizenship and denies bodily autonomy is not liberty at all. The freedom to be chattel, the freedom to be closeted, the freedom to be underground and hidden away… those are not freedoms. Check your voter registration. Volunteer for candidates who make sense. Be a part of the solution.

So that’s where the better part of two weeks went between that super start to my regular posting, and today’s update. MamaCat promises to be a better correspondent. We were really cooking for a minute there and I’d love to keep up the momentum.

Oh, also, I’m going to Hollywood in six weeks because I have a film coming out.

Did I forget to mention that?

Old people. Honestly. 😎🎭🛫🥂🎉

Meow, darlings.

[kittywildegrrl]

[kittywildegrrl]

MAMA CAT AND THE VERY BEST COMPLIMENT EVER

Picture it: Del Rio, Texas, 1985. Classic border town. It’s 1985 inside our New York City tour bus, but it’s 1955 out there all around us. Nevertheless, the food and the weather are fantastic! A completely unprepared young ingenue finds herself on tour...

It was the glamorous and exciting mid-80s. Not even kidding, this was an amazing time to be a young artist in New York City. Ed Koch was the mayor, people were wearing a lot of black with neon, you could still afford to go to the movies on the Upper West. Starbucks didn’t exist yet and the City was littered with Greek coffee shops and Chock Full O’Nuts shops. Please, in the name of sweet bleeding Stephen Sondheim, stop me before I get down to reminiscing hardcore. “I found it at the Colony!!” Lordy, those were the days, hipsters.

(There was also an awful new emergent disease, taking from us some of our brightest and best young gay theatre artists, while in Washington, D.C., the Reagan Administration turned a blind eye. This is not that story. But I was there for that story.)

Among the crazy things that happened in 1980s Manhattan, was that time that some people cast me in a non-Eq national tour of “They’re Playing Our Song,” as leading lady Sonja Walsk. In a Hollywood-generated storyline, or at least a Hallmark-generated one, this should have led to incredible stardom, marriage to a total hottie with money, and my own Emmy-Award-winning TV show. It did not (as far as I can tell). It did, however, lead to some adventures, including the night I got the best compliment I have ever had in my life.

Our tour bus – or rather, the airport van that is being used as a tour bus, because this isn’t a big cast and our producers may not be the most lavish spenders in terms of cast comforts -- pulls up to the local high school, where we move ourselves into the Girls Cloak Room and the Boys Cloak Room, and prepare to perform our professionally-touring two-act musical comedy in the cafetorium.

The cafetorium.

Like, they had to move the Texas flag and the U.S. flag and the podium out of the way before we took stage. We were lit only by oldschool red, white, & blue striplights from above and a pair of follow-spots from the front. The follow-spot operators went to school there and were legit seeing the show for the first time ever as they lit it, an epic feat of intentional theatre. It was also at times hilarious, at times frightening, for the two of us onstage. One false move and we’re dancing in the dark! Then the light! Then the dark!

(TPOS has 2 leads and 6 backup singers. It’s a terrific show to produce in a city where everybody has other gigs besides the show. Out on the road, it’s a big fat BORE for the backup singers and an all-night workout for the Vernon and the Sonja. It is also a super cute show that deserves more love.)

Anyway, cats and kittens, you have to remember that way back in the last century there was no internet and precious little cable tv. People needed entertainment, same as always, but compared to what is available to stream now (if you have decent broadband), we were closer to being medieval bards, traveling town to town with our loadbearing animals and our colorful outfits, to do our Passion Plays for the townsfolk and perhaps receive coins and food. When we came to places like Del Rio, the house was always sold out and we felt kind of like Elvis. Or the Beatles. Or Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, featuring me as Annie Oakley. We were the only show in town that night and it felt like the whole city had turned out to the cafetorium.

So I’m backstage after the show, removing my Act 2 wig & toweling off sweat and like that, when someone told me that there were a couple of people there who would like to speak to me. I threw on my robe or something, and stepped out to meet this couple who immediately just touched my heart, simply by existing. They were clearly poor as dirt. They were careworn from years of hard work. This husband and wife were not familiar with Zabar’s, H & H Bagels, West Side Dance Project, or anything else from our fancy NYC milieu. And that’s when the husband gave me the greatest compliment I have ever known in my life, before or since. Don’t laugh. It’s not a punchline.

The man took his hat in his left hand, and shook my hand with his right, and said, “Ma’am, we ain’t never seen no shows or nothin’, but you’re the best thing we EVER seen.”

Cats & kittens, I could have died on the spot. I have never felt more like Dolly Parton in my life. We had a few minutes’ chat, I thanked them so much for coming, and there were doubtless some of those little cliches: “How you remember all those lines?” and so forth. But it was the naked sincerity of his statement, the unvarnished honesty of that moment. Holy Toledo. I do wish I could have internalized it better at the time. Life is a journey, not a destination; sometimes we carry a lesson with us like a good-luck charm, a pebble to remind us, and this moment has been one of those for me. “…you’re the best thing we’ve ever seen.”

Not gonna lie, I truly wish that the depth of their admiration had been enough to propel me with confidence into a hotter next chapter. But the biz is tougher than anything, and lots of really good performing artists never make it even as far as I did, so this isn’t regret, that’s not where I’m going with it. Someone else can write that book. This is about appreciating that little moment, from over forty years ago, and how it has come to matter more and more to me over the years.

Let me share this pebble with you: You don’t know it, you don’t know who, but you are in all probability the best thing someone has ever seen, or perhaps heard, or read, or met. Yes. Even you. Stop it. Look at me. OK? OK.

This re-invention phenomenon I have been observing? Well, isn’t his part of it? After this period where life itself lost meaning for so many of us, it feels like maybe, just maybe, Springtime is actually coming for us. And maybe, just maybe, if you’ve had those times of “WTAF am I here for anyway?”, sometimes known as Existential Dread, sometimes diagnosed as Major Depression, always a bummer; maybe you just keep shining your light and being your best available version and you will be the best thing someone else ever saw. Heard. Read. Was inspired by. Whether they tell you or not.

We may live in times of darkness, but maybe you and I are part of the Light.

Recently, a couple of friends have said things to me that tell me I’m not far off. That I’m kind of nailing some of the things they are experiencing in their own lives and paths. I do not pretend to hold a medical degree, nor one in clinical social work. If you need help, you go get you some. MamaCat is nobody’s shrink. I’m just this plump granny doing the Reinvention Tango on the regular, same as you. But I am also, and cannot help but be, your cheerleader.

I know perfectly well that there are those who do not wish to grow, change, help, benefit, share, etc. This is not for them. They’ll never find this blog and read this post anyway. And I think we all know that some day there will be some obstacle past which you cannot get, and one past which I cannot get, and that’s just how it goes. But in the meantime, while we’re here, I want you to know that I don’t have to define what good you and your story are doing for anyone, to know that you & your story ARE doing good.

And I’m very proud of you.

Meow, darlings.