The Thelmian Chronicles

My mom, my aunts, my cousins, my oldest friend’s mom, my foster mom, my mom where I did live-in babysitting, my moms-in-law — wow!! What an amazing cross-section of women influenced my life.
Despite the fact that, after my dad died, she and I were pretty much a diad living in a city at some distance from other relatives, my mom instilled in me a strong sense of family. Several times a year we hopped a Greyhound bus, rode the “rolly-coaster hills”, and went “down home” to visits aunts, uncles, and cousins on the farms of central Ohio. As a city kid, I was not fond of outhouses, spiders, geese that chased me, chickens that defended their eggs with their beaks, or dung that required careful navigation of the fields and barnyard. But, oh, I loved the people! And sheep! And dogs and cats! When my mom, widowed and thus a single mom, needed a break, I had warm and welcoming places to go.
My mom encouraged my interest in drawing, designing doll clothes, pretend play, singing and reading. She made sure I went on school field trips to orchestral concerts and took me to a few plays. These events fed into my lifelong love of the arts.
When my mom had bouts of illness and mental health issues, a whole cadre of women stepped in.
My friend from Belgium (the Brussels sprout) had a mom who was friends with mine. She took me in on a couple of occasions when my mom was hospitalized. I learned to love rare steaks and garlic. And to parle francais un peu.
An aunt who lived half an hour away in another town took me in for a number of weeks and drove me back and forth to my high school daily. (I learned twenty years later that her daughter, my dear cousin, had begun to make plans to adopt me should it be necessary.)
Eventually, arrangements were made for me to live with a minister and his wife in a mansion that would later be razed to construct a nursing home. So, for much of my junior and senior years of high school, I lived in a 28-room mansion on eight acres of property with two ponds and a stream. (The minister and his wife were to become the administrators or the nursing home later on, so were living in the mansion and showing a sample room that had been built on one of the porches.) These folks had been missionaries in Egypt for a number of years, and the woman’s elderly father lived in the home as well. I learned a lot of elephant jokes, a teeny bit of Arabic, saw “Lawrence of Arabia” with them, and fell in love with camels. (In fact, I can do a rather impressive camel imitation — facial features, vocalization, the whole works!) My “foster mom” encouraged my writing and had me enter poetry contests for the two years I stayed with them. I won a third place prize and an honorable mention! Wow!
I began to do babysitting my senior year for a family with five kids, and became a live-in babysitter for that family for about a year. The mom was a librarian and fostered my love of reading. She also introduced me to the music of The Weavers and Bob Dylan.
Mothers’ Day has certainly dredged up the memories for me. And they are precious.

As Mother’s Day approaches, my thoughts go back to my mom.  She passed away when I was 25, and there was so, so much that she missed.  I wish she could have been here to share in all that I am proud of.  She only knew my son until he was five so never got to see the ornery all-boy rough-and-tumble kid growing up, the motorcycle racer who eventually raced the Grand National dirt track circuit, one of the best motorcycle racing motor builders in the country, and eventually the multi-talented entrepreneur managing apartment rentals, planning and implementing construction and design projects, owning  and running pizzerias, and fathering five sons.  Mom never got to meet her bright, handsome, wonderful great grandsons and her superhero great great grandson.  And, sadly, they never got to know her.  My mom always supported me, the shy kid, and prodded me to get my education, have friends, and create; yet she never got to be involved in my adult life of theatre, racing, writing, social work, and more.   

She worked hard as a single mom (my dad passed away when I was a little over a year old) to ensure my needs were met.  She had a unique sense of humor that I keep tucked away in my heart.  She was renowned for her indecisiveness over major purchases (e.g. had me take piano lessons from 4^th through 6^th grade but couldn’t make up her mind on which piano to buy until I was 14).    My mom loved fashion and glamour.  She taught me to love the color blue (almost exclusively, actually, until I finally figured out there was a rainbow out there).  She taught me basic morals and values – don’t lie, cheat, steal, etc. – to the point that I was pretty much a goody-two-shoes back in the day.  She taught me to be kind to people. She respected me, and I in turn respected her….at least insofar as obeying rules.  Being an only child, I was also a spoiled brat and believed that tantrums were the way to go.  They always worked with my mom.  With others, not so much.  I learned that quickly! 

My mom had some wonderful recipes!  I wish I had kept up some of those traditions better over the years.  She would bake fruitcake bars (NOT to be confused with yucky fruitcake) at Christmas time along with gingerbread cookies, rum and bourbon balls (I didn’t eat those), and stuffed dates (of which I ate a lot!).  Her recipe for chocolate chip oatmeal cookies with semi-sweet morsels was the best, an amazing blend of salt and sweet that was so delicious that I consumed a lot of cookie dough back in the day.  (Hint: be careful with that – not so much due to salmonella as to the fact that raw cookie dough will expand inside a human stomach just like it does in the oven and can produce a bit of a tummy ache.)

Because my mom, in her later years, had many health and emotional health issues, she was unable to attend my high school graduation, and that broke my heart.  She did, however, get to attend my first college graduation—although we nearly missed it due to a flat tire on the way to the university.   Mom, I miss you and love you!!

With my mom’s health situation and a number of hospitalizations, I was fortunate to have a string of “second moms”:  my aunts, my older cousins, the mom of my closest friend (the Brussels sprout), a foster mom found through our church, the mom of the five kids for whom I lived in and babysat, and a couple of mothers-in-law.  These women were instrumental in my life at the times when my mom was unable to be, and I thank them wholeheartedly.

Once upon a time my husband and I were fortunate to be cast in a local production of Amadeus. I was cast as Teresa Salieri, wife of the protagonist, a non-speaking role which allowed me to wear an elegant blue gown and to attend the opera. (Admittedly, my ADHD tendencies came into play at one point and I, along with several other performers sharing a lively chat in the green room, was UNfashionably late for the opera. Oops!)

My husband was cast as one of the two Venticelli or “Little Winds”, whose job it was to keep the story moving through narrative and whispers which took them from past to present in the action. (We lovingly referred to them as the Vermicelli, of course. How could we not!)

Salieri took the audience through the chain of events with a series of lengthy soliloquies which also alternated from present to past to present. This vacillating chronology required several quick costume changes for the Venticelli, who had to go from foppish 18th century court attire with satin, lace, knickers, wigs, and makeup to everyday 18th century street clothes. And, at the time of this production, the theatre’s dressing rooms were located on the second floor — with two long flights of stairs and no elevator to help. Timing is everything! During a long monologue in one performance, as the Little Winds were upstairs halfway between street clothes and wigs, they heard on the monitor as Salieri jumped ahead two and a half pages in dialogue (did I mention l o o o n n g soliloquies?) which indicated an imminent entrance for the Venticelli. Somehow, they managed to scramble to come up with the costume change and fly down the steps without injury, hoping to arrive in time for their entrance. Just as they prepared to go onstage, they were brought to a screeching halt (amazed they didn’t leave skid marks!) as they heard Salieri loop back two and a half pages in his dialogue to the very place from which he had jumped ahead a few minutes prior. Whew!!

Another aside regarding Amadeus, during the run of the show one of the Venticelli (not my husband, thank goodness!) had managed to fall off his icy roof while cleaning gutters and broke his wrist. Luckily the costumes involved very long, lacy sleeves, so his cast was obscured…although his hand gestures were just a bit stiffer than usual.

Well, as they say, the show must go on….

Dominic was telling his brother Luigi about his honeymoon trip:
Aah, Luigi, the wedding was-a beautiful. And for our honeymoon-a, we scheduled a train trip down-a the east-a coast-a to Florida. My beautiful bride-a Virginia, she pack-a a beautiful picnic-a basket with a delicious lunch-a and a nice-a bottle of wine-a and a big-a cigar for me. We get on-a the train and ride-a for awhile. Then my beautiful bride-a Virginia, she take-a out the picnic basket and start-a to fix our lunch-a. And the conductor, he come-a by and clap-a his hands and say, “No, no, no! You can’t-a eat-a in this-a car-a. You have-a to eat in the dining car-a”. So Virginia, she pack-a the lunch-a back in the basket, and we go-a to the dining car-a and have our delicious lunch-a. After lunch-a I start-a to pour-a the fine-a wine-a, but the conductor come-a by and clap-a his hands and say, “No, no, no! You can’t-a drink wine-a in the dining car-a. You have-a to drink in the club-a car-a”. So me and my beautiful bride-a Virginia take-a the wine-a to the club-a car-a and enjoy a nice-a drink-a. After the wine-a, I take out my big-a cigar and start-a to light it up. But the conductor come-a by and clap-a his hands and say, “No, no, no! You can’t-a smoke-a in the club-a car-a. You gotta go to the smoking car-a”. So we go to the smoking car-a, I smoke-a my big cigar, and-a we decide we are gonna go to the sleeping car-a. So we go to the sleeping car-a, and just as we’re about to consummate our marriage, the train-a stops-a suddenly, and the conductor yells-a on the loud-a speaker, “Norfolk-a, Virginia!” Next-a time-a, I’m just-a gonna drive down.

Lucy and Ethel,…what can I say?
Not that I’m paranoid, but I live in a world where skirts are devious creatures, trees are aggressive, and chairs conspire to trap me. Embarrassing moments abound!

We’ll start with skirts…and come back to skirts.
If they’re long and flowing (some of my ill-advised favorites), skirts will, at the very least, trip you on stairs. But there’s more…. At my husband’s high school reunion, I wore a lovely 2-piece outfit with a wide flowing skirt. So elegant! As I stood to the side of the dance floor, a kind and gentle fellow I had never met tapped me on the shoulder to alert me that the bottom of the back of my skirt was tucked into my waistband and I might want to pull it out. (I had come just come from, guess where, the restroom!) Years later, I again felt oh-so-elegant in a long flowing skirt when I attended at workshop at the university. I left the workshop, chatted with the instructor, made a comfort stop, walked to my car, drove to a coffee shop where I would be meeting a friend — all the usual. Somehow I kept feeling rather drafty. As I toted my belongings into the cafe, that feeling became even more pronounced. I went to smooth my skirt to sit and realized with horror that it was not there…behind my legs…where it was supposed to be!!! Yikes!!! Slithered as surreptitiously as possible to the ladies’ room where I (again) had to untuck the skirt bottom from the waistband. (Sigh…) I have no idea how long it had been that way. As I said skirts are devious creatures. Short skirts can be embarrassing in soooo many ways (apply imagination). My skirt issues began when I was quite young. At the age of five, I had the most lovely white organdy dress with a wide hoop skirt. I could not understand, at that tender age, why my mother would not allow me to create a wonderful arc with that hoop by sitting on the back of it while riding home from church on the bus. Predating that, another church story actually, was the Bible School 3-year old class’s performance in which we were all singing “The B I B L E, oh that’s the book for me”. Clad in my cute little red plaid pleated skirt with jumper straps over a charming white blouse, I became very nervous and began rolling the skirt up to the waistband as we sang (front row, of course), with my poor mother trying to signal me from the third row to put it down. (The worst case skirt scenario will be described later on in this blog…)

Moving on to trees. Be very careful because trees can attack. Case in point — Christmas Eve a year ago. While my husband was running a last-minute errand, I was fiddling with the decorations on our real live dead tree which was perched, in its water-container base, on the library table by our front window. One decoration too many on the front side, and the tree, twinkling in glee, lurched at me! What to do??!! I could not let it topple, so I grabbed the trunk and held on…for 45 minutes until my husband got home. My arm was not long enough or strong enough to push the tree upright. My phone was, of course, in the other room. I yelled as loud as I could, thinking the neighbors would hear. And they did! They thought my TV volume was turned up very loud and that I was watching a program wherein a woman was yelling for help. For a long long time. Regarding aggressive trees, we have also had two of our 50-plus-foot oaks fall on our house during a storm, and twenty years later had a neighbors’s 50-footer fall in our yard due to saturated ground. (Don’t want to say much about this, as just yesterday, a huge tree fell over — the saturation phenomena again — a couple of blocks away. So shhhhhhh…..I don’t want the trees to know I’m talking about them….)

Chairs are next. During a speech tournament awhile back, when I was judging, I was called upon to judge a semi-final round of Duo Interpretation, an event where two students portray one or more characters each in a 10-minute cutting from a play or novel. Because it was semi-final round featuring six of the twelve top Duo teams, it was held in a huge study hall room so that the competitors who had been eliminated could sit in as spectators. Because Duo is great entertainment, by the time the other judge and I arrived at the room, all except two seats had been taken, and students were even standing around the walls and sitting on the floor. So we had the choice of the two quite small combination desk-and-chair units that were left. I am not a small person, but I had to sit. And, being a role model for the students, I had to somehow manage this gracefully. So I inhaled deeply and wedged myself into the larger of the two options. Not large enough! Pain! And, to complicate matters further, I was the “starred” judge, which meant that I was the one designated to introduce the competitors and call them up to speak…which, given the crowded conditions of the room, would require standing for each speaker. Not a chance!! So the other judge, my friend Sam, bless his heart, realized my predicament and volunteered to do the honors. Had to wait for the crowd to disperse afterward for me to be able to pry myself out of the desk and resume breathing! Whew!

So, continuing the chair-trap theme, I take you back to attack skirts. Let me just say that you should not allow chair traps and attack skirts to conspire with one another. It does not come out well. While at work one day, in my long flowing skirt (why did I like these so much???), I was busily moving from task to task wheeling around in my office chair as I pulled charts and paperwork from the various file cabinets around the room. I had to stand up at one point, only to realize that the hem of the rather sheer skirt material had become wrapped around the caster of the desk chair. Uh oh!! So I tried to unwind it…but it seemed to wind further around the caster. The door to the hallway was wide open, so I was hesitant to try to pull off the skirt lest someone should happen along and look in. Yikes!! What to do??!! So I tried rolling. And tugging. And no one came along, so….I figured I’d try to slip the skirt off over my hips so I could crawl under the chair to free it. No dice! The drawstring waistband had a knot in it. Oh, no. (Did it occur to me to try calling someone to come and help? Of course not! On my own, I was!) Well, then, to get at the bottom of the skirt and the caster, my next clever step was to stand up and lay the chair on its side. So…there I was, sitting on the floor by my overturned chair, stuck to it!! And along came our psychologist, Ralph. He glanced in the doorway and did a double-take. Red-faced I explained my dilemma, and the noble man came to my rescue. He finessed the hem from the caster, freed me, and was sworn to secrecy.

Watch out for trees, chairs, and skirts! They are evil!