My father has certainly led an interesting life. He grew up in northern Wisconsin--his father was the town mayor and his mother was a nurse at the local hospital. He has one younger sister Jean. When he was in his twenties, he enlisted in the U.S. Airforce and was a weather observer in France. Thus began a life-long love affair.
He enjoys telling stories about his wicked French teacher on base. She would fire questions at them so rapidly, the students would buy time by saying "ca depends..." (that depends) while frantically searching for the answer.
One time, when he and his friend Ken Poetzel, had some time to travel, they went to the island of Majorca. That evening, they were at a bar, and some men led them into a back room, where there were men with machine guns that led them to prison. Apparently, there had been a bank robbery the day before and the theives were Americans. Lucky, they were able to convince the police that they had tickets in their motel room that would clear their names (as they were on a boat at the time of the robbery.)
When most kids had their parents read them Dr. Suess or other picture books, I was read The Adventures of Asterix and also Tintin. My father would get these comics in French and then translate them for me. I also remember attending a French majors' dinner at University of Wisconsin-Madison and rehearsing "Je m'appelle Katie" over and over again in my head.
My dad ultimately got his masters in Geology and his Ph. D in Earth Resources. But he instilled me with a love of the French language for life. I studied it all through high school and college, and it even helps to this day when trying to decipher a script of Moliere.
I imagine my father, going to bed at night with his cocktail of arbor mist and gatorade, drifting off to sleep and travelling back to France....
Monday, December 28, 2009
Sunday, December 27, 2009
Madeline, How We Miss Thee...
"She is one of the most talented people that ever lived. I mean, either in stand-up comedy, or acting, or whatever you want, you can't beat Madeline Kahn."
-Mel Brooks
I miss Madeline Kahn. We have just passed the tenth anniversary of her leaving this world far too soon. So here's a bit of a tribute:
Kahn was born September 29, 1942. She went to Hofstra University on a drama scholarship. While she attended the university, she studied classical opera, but ultimately majored in speech therapy. Her first professional gig was as a chorus girl in Kiss Me, Kate. Her first feature was What's Up Doc, starring Barbara Streisand and Ryan O'Neal.
She was nominated for two Academy Awards and three Tonys, winning for her portrayal of Dr. Gorgeous in Wendy Wasserstein's The Sisters Rosenweig.
I love Madeline best for her roles in Young Frankenstein, Blazing Saddles and Clue.
Elizabeth in Young Frankenstein.
Who can forget Elizabeth, Dr. Victor Franken--SCHTEEN's high maintenance fiancee?
"Not on the lips....Taffetta, darling, TAFFETTA!!!"
And then, later in the film, the operatic "Oh, sweet mystery of life, I've found you!" during her first encounter with Peter Boyle's creature...
This marked the first collaboration with Mel Brooks. Three other films (Blazing Saddles, High Anxiety, and History of the World: Part I, would follow)
Lili von Schtupp in Blazing Saddles
It's hard to imagine anyone else playing this role. An obvious send-up of Marlene Dietrich, her performance won her an Oscar nod. And was recently ranked number 74 on Premiere's Top 100 Greatest Performances of All Time...
"I'm tired of love uninspired...."
Mrs. White in Clue
"Yes. Yes, I did it. I killed Yvette. I hated her, so much...it-it-the-f-it-flam-flames. Flames, on the side of my face, breathing-breath-heaving breaths. Heaving breath..."
Really, need I say more?
I will leave you now with some words from Madeline herself:
"It's acceptable for men to act the fool. When women try, they're considered aggressive and opinionated."
Saturday, December 26, 2009
The Marc Pease Experience
I love Jason Schwartzman. My love affair with him started with Rushmore and went on to encompass such films as I Heart Huckabees, Shopgirl, The Darjeeling Limited, and now, most notably, The Marc Pease Experience.
I also adore High Fidelity. It's always been one of my favorite films. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that Todd Louiso, who played Dick, directed and co-wrote this film. And that it co-starred Ben Stiller?!?!?! I had certainly died and gone to comedy heaven. To push it over the top, musical theatre numbers abound, featuring several full production numbers from The Wiz.
The story? It starts backstage, opening night of a high school production of The Wiz. Marc Pease (Jason Schwartzman) is playing the tin man. And he's freaking out. Music teacher and director John Gribble (Ben Stiller) gives him a pep talk and pushes him onstage. Marc screams like a little girl and runs off into the night, ruining the performance.
Fast forward 8 years--we find a 24 year old Marc who now runs a limo service and is selling his condo to raise funds to record a demo with his accapella group. And the madness unfolds from here.
This movie is insanely funny. If Glee, High School Musical and Waiting for Guffman got drunk one night, had a threesome and produced a love child, it would be the Marc Pease Experience.
Stiller and Schwartzman are two of my favorite comedic actors. Louiso definately challenges them to raise the bar past the typical roles we see them play. The directing is fantastic, and both actors give multi-faceted performances. And the singing! Both of them rock out on musical theatre numbers. (Stiller's performances are more comedic, in the same vein as Will Ferrell's Robert Goulet, but you can still tell that he's got pipes).
I'm sure that my musical theatre geekdom informs my great love of this film. But I'm sure it does have a more universal appeal. Check it out.
I also adore High Fidelity. It's always been one of my favorite films. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that Todd Louiso, who played Dick, directed and co-wrote this film. And that it co-starred Ben Stiller?!?!?! I had certainly died and gone to comedy heaven. To push it over the top, musical theatre numbers abound, featuring several full production numbers from The Wiz.
The story? It starts backstage, opening night of a high school production of The Wiz. Marc Pease (Jason Schwartzman) is playing the tin man. And he's freaking out. Music teacher and director John Gribble (Ben Stiller) gives him a pep talk and pushes him onstage. Marc screams like a little girl and runs off into the night, ruining the performance.
Fast forward 8 years--we find a 24 year old Marc who now runs a limo service and is selling his condo to raise funds to record a demo with his accapella group. And the madness unfolds from here.
This movie is insanely funny. If Glee, High School Musical and Waiting for Guffman got drunk one night, had a threesome and produced a love child, it would be the Marc Pease Experience.
Stiller and Schwartzman are two of my favorite comedic actors. Louiso definately challenges them to raise the bar past the typical roles we see them play. The directing is fantastic, and both actors give multi-faceted performances. And the singing! Both of them rock out on musical theatre numbers. (Stiller's performances are more comedic, in the same vein as Will Ferrell's Robert Goulet, but you can still tell that he's got pipes).
I'm sure that my musical theatre geekdom informs my great love of this film. But I'm sure it does have a more universal appeal. Check it out.
Friday, December 25, 2009
Mistletoe is a parasite...
Strange but true. The etymology may be related to the German words for "dung" and "branch," since bird poop can transfer mistletoe seeds. Who knew? Merry Christmas.
My mother bought me a small potted Christmas tree that has five ornaments and some tinsel haphazardly thrown on it...it does the job, though :-)
We attended two wonderful Christmas Eve parties last night and two more Christmas parties today. All filled with wonderful, warm people...at one of the parties, I even got to tell stories about my best friend growing up, Julia.
Julia Hanaway is one year and eleven days older than me. She is African-American and adopted from the state of Georgia at an early age. We met when I was five and she was six. We were backyard neighbors and she quickly gained the upper hand in our friendship by declaring that my house was built on what used to be a graveyard and the ghosts would come and kill me in my sleep if I didn't do everything she said.
We didn't play well with Barbies. In fact, we shaved their heads and melted their noses. We had more important matters to deal with than playing with dolls. We had to fight aliens or pirates or help our friends the Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers or the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (who lived, of course, in the drain that lead to the sewers beneath the Lutheran church we passed on our walk home from school.
One day, we were playing with swords (aka sticks) in the front yard. A man in a truck pulled over and reprimanded me for "beating up the little black girl."
"But we're just playing Power Rangers!"
As we got older, we would play different games. One summer afternoon, we were digging for gold in the backyard. A squirrel fell, dead, from a tree, and immediately, we became paramedics and the hole we were digging for gold became the squirrel's shallow grave. (The squirrel, which we joklingly named Chucky, would some back in a blood and dirt-cacked incarnation to attack Julia in her dreams. I took this as retribution for saying that my house was built on a graveyard.)
We would play tag, just the two of us, and whenever we would tag the other person, we would scream "HATE CRIME!!!!" at the top of our lungs, then fall over laughing.
My mom would take us to plays all around Madison. I always wanted to get the actors' autographs after the show. Julia knew this, and one night, she ruined my plans by feigning a stomachache. As my mother walked ahead of us, Julia stuck her tongue out at me, which prompted me to kick her in the shin. The old ladies behind us gasped audibly, as I was again, obviously, beating up this poor little black girl.
Our senior year of high school, in social studies class, the new student teacher was introducing the civil rights movement. Our friend, Chris, started glaring jokingly at Julia as the student teacher started a schpeel about the "struggle of the BLACK PEople..." Julia started laughing maniacally and asked the student teacher if he could hear how ridiculous he sounded. Then he made it worse by saying "Ok, class, don't look at Julia. I mean, don't NOT look at her, I mean..."
Then another girl in the class, who was 1/16th African-American piped up with, "Don't not look at me, too. I'm black!!!"
I now live thousands of miles away from Julia, but to this day she remains a friend that I can call up anytime, day or night, and we'll inevitably pick up exactly where we left off. Her mother still sends me rice krispie treats and a calendar at Christmas, which I am currently looking forward to getting.
So, Tofu (one of Julia's many nicknames), if you're out there, Merry Christmas and I love you.
xoxo
Kiki
Sigh...
As I munch on cheese and crackers and sip on hot spiced wine that are the spoils of one of my many holiday parties, I'll leave you with this song I performed on Christmas Eve. And with the reminder that mistletoe is a parasite.
The Galaxy Song (by Eric Idle)
Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving
And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour,
That's orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it's reckoned,
A sun that is the source of all our power.
The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see
Are moving at a million miles a day
In an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour,
Of the galaxy we call the 'Milky Way'.
Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars.
It's a hundred thousand light years side to side.
It bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand light years thick,
But out by us, it's just three thousand light years wide.
We're thirty thousand light years from galactic central point.
We go 'round every two hundred million years,
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding universe.
The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whizz
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know,
Twelve million miles a minute, and that's the fastest speed there is.
So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth,
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space,
'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth.
My mother bought me a small potted Christmas tree that has five ornaments and some tinsel haphazardly thrown on it...it does the job, though :-)
We attended two wonderful Christmas Eve parties last night and two more Christmas parties today. All filled with wonderful, warm people...at one of the parties, I even got to tell stories about my best friend growing up, Julia.
Julia Hanaway is one year and eleven days older than me. She is African-American and adopted from the state of Georgia at an early age. We met when I was five and she was six. We were backyard neighbors and she quickly gained the upper hand in our friendship by declaring that my house was built on what used to be a graveyard and the ghosts would come and kill me in my sleep if I didn't do everything she said.
We didn't play well with Barbies. In fact, we shaved their heads and melted their noses. We had more important matters to deal with than playing with dolls. We had to fight aliens or pirates or help our friends the Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers or the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (who lived, of course, in the drain that lead to the sewers beneath the Lutheran church we passed on our walk home from school.
One day, we were playing with swords (aka sticks) in the front yard. A man in a truck pulled over and reprimanded me for "beating up the little black girl."
"But we're just playing Power Rangers!"
As we got older, we would play different games. One summer afternoon, we were digging for gold in the backyard. A squirrel fell, dead, from a tree, and immediately, we became paramedics and the hole we were digging for gold became the squirrel's shallow grave. (The squirrel, which we joklingly named Chucky, would some back in a blood and dirt-cacked incarnation to attack Julia in her dreams. I took this as retribution for saying that my house was built on a graveyard.)
We would play tag, just the two of us, and whenever we would tag the other person, we would scream "HATE CRIME!!!!" at the top of our lungs, then fall over laughing.
My mom would take us to plays all around Madison. I always wanted to get the actors' autographs after the show. Julia knew this, and one night, she ruined my plans by feigning a stomachache. As my mother walked ahead of us, Julia stuck her tongue out at me, which prompted me to kick her in the shin. The old ladies behind us gasped audibly, as I was again, obviously, beating up this poor little black girl.
Our senior year of high school, in social studies class, the new student teacher was introducing the civil rights movement. Our friend, Chris, started glaring jokingly at Julia as the student teacher started a schpeel about the "struggle of the BLACK PEople..." Julia started laughing maniacally and asked the student teacher if he could hear how ridiculous he sounded. Then he made it worse by saying "Ok, class, don't look at Julia. I mean, don't NOT look at her, I mean..."
Then another girl in the class, who was 1/16th African-American piped up with, "Don't not look at me, too. I'm black!!!"
I now live thousands of miles away from Julia, but to this day she remains a friend that I can call up anytime, day or night, and we'll inevitably pick up exactly where we left off. Her mother still sends me rice krispie treats and a calendar at Christmas, which I am currently looking forward to getting.
So, Tofu (one of Julia's many nicknames), if you're out there, Merry Christmas and I love you.
xoxo
Kiki
Sigh...
As I munch on cheese and crackers and sip on hot spiced wine that are the spoils of one of my many holiday parties, I'll leave you with this song I performed on Christmas Eve. And with the reminder that mistletoe is a parasite.
The Galaxy Song (by Eric Idle)
Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving
And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour,
That's orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it's reckoned,
A sun that is the source of all our power.
The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see
Are moving at a million miles a day
In an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour,
Of the galaxy we call the 'Milky Way'.
Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars.
It's a hundred thousand light years side to side.
It bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand light years thick,
But out by us, it's just three thousand light years wide.
We're thirty thousand light years from galactic central point.
We go 'round every two hundred million years,
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding universe.
The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whizz
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know,
Twelve million miles a minute, and that's the fastest speed there is.
So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth,
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space,
'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth.
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
Jules & Julia and Katie & Deana
Ah, Christmas is almost upon us...
I had drinks with my good friend Deana last night and I was musing (aka whinning) about being 24 and not knowing what to do with my life, etc...
So she made me promise to go home and start blogging about my life and that eventually it will turn into a book and perhaps a movie and I could be the next Nora Ephron...
I appreciate the sentiment, but believe we may have a long road ahead of us.
I don't really cook, so there won't be recipes, but there will be entertaining exploits about me as I try and form my philosophy and ruminate on my life's purpose.
Cheers to the holidays and the new year...Right now I'm working on writing two plays and a proposal to direct The Mystery of Irma Vep at WICA next season. It feels good to be creative. And while I may not know exactly what my next acting or directing endeavor is, I'm sure something big is right around the corner...
I had drinks with my good friend Deana last night and I was musing (aka whinning) about being 24 and not knowing what to do with my life, etc...
So she made me promise to go home and start blogging about my life and that eventually it will turn into a book and perhaps a movie and I could be the next Nora Ephron...
I appreciate the sentiment, but believe we may have a long road ahead of us.
I don't really cook, so there won't be recipes, but there will be entertaining exploits about me as I try and form my philosophy and ruminate on my life's purpose.
Cheers to the holidays and the new year...Right now I'm working on writing two plays and a proposal to direct The Mystery of Irma Vep at WICA next season. It feels good to be creative. And while I may not know exactly what my next acting or directing endeavor is, I'm sure something big is right around the corner...
Saturday, July 25, 2009
Back from brushing up my Shakespeare...
Just got back from Ashland, Oregon and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. MacBeth was phenomenal--loved that the director pulled a lot from modern horror films. Much Ado was good--LOVED Benedick! Paradise Lost was ambitious and for Odets, I found myself engaged for most of the evening...
Bought the most fabulous dress for my Disney Cruise Line audition...woot! It's dark blue and kind of shimmery...
And now, I will leave you with how Gracie starts her day...
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