In Which MamaCat Admits That She is Only An Egg

Here I sit at the very wonderful Ike’s Clubhouse at MSP, every traveler’s dream of why we arrive early to the airport. Having a delicious breakfast and traditional pre-flight Bloody Mary, to calm the nerves and fuel the day ahead. They have the good taste to include a great deal of David Bowie in their music service. Steve the bartender is the soul of Minnesota Hygge. My flight boards in 45 minutes. That’s right. They held an election two days ago, and HusbandCat has already sent me to our nation’s capital to represent. Look out, y’all.

Wouldn’t it be great if that had literally anything to do with me going into Government? Hilarious.

Nope, I am off to be about something even scarier than the United States government. I am on my way to Washington to meet strangers, and talk to them, and learn from them. To explore strange new worlds, to boldly go where no MamaCat has gone before, the Mid-Atlantic Voiceover Conference. That’s right. It’s my second-ever voiceover conference and the peculiar mixture of excitement and social anxiety is a genuine thrill ride.  When I attended VO Atlanta last spring, it was like stepping out onto a new planet. Planet VO. A huge multicultural planetary system of genres, formats, and styles; techniques and tech… and from what I can tell, a lot of fresh, nourishing oxygen in the form of wisdom, wit, and joy. Yes, frikkin joy!

And if you’ve been following along for the past eight months, then you know that this is high praise coming from Food Poisoning Girl. If you haven’t been following along, I decided to kick-start myself last spring by going to VO Atlanta, to find out what the industry of voiceover had morphed into while I was off doing theatre and we were all off doing Pandemic. It completely changed my life, no big deal, even though I missed half of what I signed up for due to the aforementioned gastrointestinal dealio. Since then I have actually started building out my little production room, launched my own little podcast (“Granny Has A Podcast”), initiated a new playlist on my YouTube to practice inflicting my own content upon the public (“Granny Has A YouTube”), met a lot of really interesting people on LinkedIn, and shed layers of Pandemic Depression like so many unattractive scarves.

So this weekend I’m going to learn as much as possible and meet as many MORE interesting people as possible. From theatre to radio broadcasting; from radio broadcasting to theatre; a movie here, a movie tvoicehere, and now I’m just this student practitioner. At 64.

I know. It’s only rock and roll. But I like it. Like it, yes I do.

Part 1, A New Yorker Goes West

Good afternoon, darlings. Here I sit with delicious afternoon coffee, my second favorite coffee of the day, as we have established previously. I kept wanting to start the blog post about the trip and the movie and all like that there, but you know how I get when there’s all manner of Supreme Court madness and hideous gun violence and whatnot in the news. I stop writing for you and I go write to my Senators and my congressional Representative. I tweet politics. I also draft email content on various issues for a campaign now, too. My inner Sam Seaborn is well pleased.

First of all, I can’t break all of my four days and four nights in California down into one blog post. There’s too much. It was so dense, so educational, so magnificent, so humbling. So many adjectives, so little time. So there will be multiple stories. New York has always made sense to me; California is another country entirely. Many of those who dwelt in the City of the Angels in the Land of Cali made me feel welcome, but I was definitely not entirely in a land I understood. The adventure held highs and lows, literally and figuratively, and I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

I mean, come on, how long have you, personally, waited to say, “Yes, I have a film screening in Hollywood Friday night at the Dances With Films festival”?

Not real sure it matters how long or what age or any of those constructs, but I will share this much: You know MamaCat has had some very rough challenges in life. You may not know that I started acting literally 50 years ago, at age 14, when I got to play Winnifred the Woebegone in the summer school production of “Once Upon A Mattress”. Like so many teenage people playing a fun role in a fun musical for the first time, I felt like I had found my destiny and would surely have my own TV variety show just like Carol Burnett inside ten years, tops.

It wasn’t that I didn’t try.

And it isn’t that I’m not good at this stuff.

But life throws stuff at you, and there are many stories to mine, and some of them are pretty horrific.

The Very Brady 1970s didn’t guarantee a Very Brady existence – in fact, watching the Brady Bunch was about as close to experiencing healthy family life as I got. Poor home life leads to poor decision-making skills upon reaching chronological adulthood, and poor decisions have a way of layering up like phyllo dough, narrowing one’s options and damaging one’s progress into actualized adulthood. As I’ve said before, I’m no therapist, I’m just someone who has benefitted a lot from therapy, and I can see how one thing led to another in my own world.

So, scattered across the deserts and mountains of my life story, you’ll also find a couple of marriages, some inappropriate entanglements, overly dramatic and unstable parental units, and sheer exhaustion from surviving it all. Still I kept going. You’ll find that’s a theme with me. I rep strong women, I admit when I’m wrong, I survive and keep going. Life is difficult for most of us. I encourage you to keep going, keep taking positive action towards the good. And this is a story of positive action towards the good, a dream trip come true, the sweet experience of actually seeing a little personal victory.

No wars are ended, no diseases cured, no tragedies prevented in the larger scheme of things in this story. It’s just a story about how I finally got my fifteen minutes. I don’t even star in this thing, I’m just a supporting character w-a-a-a-a-ay down in the credits on IMDB. But I’m obsessed with my own work in it, and I think that if the Indy film community really focuses, they’ll see how I can be the campy Batman villain they’ve been dreaming of for [Name of Project].

I also think that if you’re someone who struggles with body dysmorphia and other self-image issues, I would like to let you know that, yes, you can grow up to see yourself onscreen and not hate the sight of yourself. You really can. That younger me in the mirror was wrong about everything when she insulted me, and if you know someone like that in your own mirror, please know that you can definitely remove their powers of hurtfulness. Keep going, keep taking positive action towards the good. Your mileage may vary, but I’m telling you, the road to self-healing is worth the trip.

That said, California was so many contradictions at once, I could barely absorb it. I’ve only been twice in adult life: once very briefly on my first honeymoon in the late seventies; and once very briefly about twenty years ago, on what I thought was a date but that’s another story never mind. My primary memories of California come from the very groovy sixties, when I was a little kid, and California in the summer was the escape route from the usual abuses and nastiness of life at home in Phoenix. There were maybe one-third as many humans on the planet, and at the beach. It was a time when having neglectful parents had an upside, because the beach life of 1960s Southern California was a safer environment for a little kid to wander around in unsupervised. I knew, of course, that “my” California had long since vanished, but like the changing face of an old friend or a favorite performer, you still want to see the changes for yourself in order to understand the time that has passed.

So part of my trip was all about the movie premiere, part of it was about the full-circle experience of revisiting, and part of it was the usual judgmental cultural observations my inner critic makes all the time anyway. And the hidden agenda was, this is the kickoff source material for “Travels with Granny,” which is a planned segment of “Granny Has A Podcast,” which will feature on “Granny Has A YouTube,” which is all an outgrowth from me getting home from VO Atlanta and saying to myself, “Traveling as a sixty-something woman in a post-pandemic environment is a whole new ballgame,” and “I am good at travel advice,” and “ALL I REALLY WANT TO DO IS TRAVEL.”

Which is a whole ‘nother story, as the saying goes.

So I have things to edit, and things to tell you about, and a whole new sense of personal momentum in a world gone mad. My coffee is cold, the kitchen wants cleaning, and I’ve still never finished the soundproofing in the studio. But mostly, what I have for you today, is this photograph of the actual Brady Bunch house itself. For behold, I found an awesome vintage lodging place in Studio City, and not five minutes’ drive away, I truly came home at last. For lo, I had come unto Mike and Carol and Alice and the kids. You could almost hear Tiger barking.

Meow, darlings

Good morning, darlings. Let the record show that here I sit, in the airport, yet without a delicious Bloody Mary. Lordy I love me a Bloody Mary before a flight! It’s brunch and a tranquilizer, wrapped in tomato juice and love. It’s my special travel treat to keep me from weirding out about going way up in the air in a big old tin can full of strangers. But not today, my loves. Let the record show that even conjuring up the image of a delicious Bloody is kinda nauseating yet. But the food poisoning didn’t defeat me. Courage!

So in a few hours, I will be home with HusbandCat and the actual cat Domino & Amy Farah Howler the Beagle, and that is a good and beautiful thing. Home. Big word, one syllable. Home.

When I was a little girl, and a teenager, I longed to go home… my own parents were so effing insane that I wanted to go home FROM THEM, to my real home, where I was a real girl and everything! Where the nice mommy and daddy who weren’t drunk and didn’t hit were waiting for me… geez, this sounds like “Maybe” from Annie. Barf me out to the max. But seriously, a lot of us come from backgrounds where we never had “home,” even and especially at home. It’s damaging and our shrinks are all paying off cabins & boats because of it.

As we grow and learn, we form our own ideas of Home. Chosen family. Finding your people. We heal, we try new things, we live our adult lives, we make Home for ourselves somehow. I went through two husbands and most of a pretty good radio career before I found HusbandCat, and we celebrated thirteen years of marriage last fall. Pretty good outcome, if you ask me.

But the thing that was always missing for me was, any sense of identity at all. I never heard many family stories, my questions about our family and our history went unanswered (“Oh, you don’t need to know that” was a common refrain). It took some time after my mother’s death to confirm what she had made clear all along: I was not a wanted child and therefore was made the family joke. I don’t bring it up to ask for pity; I bring it up because I knew nothing about our past or where we came from and most of the family is dead now. It’s creepy. So I went looking.

The long and the short of it is that I started researching, and so far I have found we have ancestors on both sides of my birth parents’ line that go back to pre-colonial America. I have a 5x great Grandmother who was born in Scotland, we know not where, just five years before Culloden. And the thing that floored me completely: Absolutely not Irish. All these years – 64 of ‘em so far, cats & kittens! – I thought we were of Irish stock. I wasn’t really surprised to find out that I’m 35% Scot, although I would have thought that percentage would have been higher. But the shocker?

I’m mostly English.

I’m mostly English and I have distant relations and a family history is coming together and the thing is…

I finally feel at home.

Gotta fly, cats & kittens. We’re literally boarding a plane here in a few & I gotta fly. Home to HusbandCat.

Here I sit, in my room, finishing off my tea and catching up on Family Guy, while just a ten-minute walk away from here a magnificent cocktail party is going on without me.

Well, crappity crap crap.

On Thursday, my travel day into the VOAtlanta 2022 conference, I ate two chicken sandwiches. The one at the Minneapolis airport was overpriced and fantastic. The one my door dasher brought to the hotel ten hours later in Atlanta was undercooked and/or bearing tiny life forms. Personally, I think I’ve been Smote -- or is it Smitten? -- by a vengeful Creator who knows I broke my personal boycott on Thursday night by Eating Mor Chikin. Anyway, about an hour after I went to bed, I was rudely awakened by the good ol’ fever & chills & the sensation that my tummy had turned into an adobe brick, kiln-fired and hard as mahogany. Further details will not be provided, as you know perfectly well that it was all yucky.

Thank me for sharing!

So, here’s the thing: Challenges, amirite? Yes, I am, and we both know it. Challenges.

I had a challenge on my plate (and nothing else except saltines). I had every right in the world to just lay in the room and groan, and I most definitely did some of that! And yet… ALL these amazing voiceover and audiobook production professionals, right over there at the other Hilton, and I came all this way to hear and see and meet them. The challenge, as I see it, was to find the balance between the self-care I needed, and the things I came to experience: Connecting, Learning, and the inevitable Networking (hence the awesome cocktail party I’m not at, and yes you are very proud of me for staying in).

The thing is, when you’re sick, you’re sick. You have to get well. Right? Of course. But are you like me, do you have that leftover childhood trauma where you feel stupid for getting sick because there was a parent who really disapproved of children coming down with colds? I know, good candidate for therapy and don’t think I haven’t gotten some. I freely admit it, I am a terrible patient. Almost as big a baby as your typical American HusbandCat*, for example. I always like to spend part of the first day of any given cold, flu, injury or minor owie, complaining that it’s just my fault for being stupid. I’m pretty sure this Woody Allen level of neurosis is the secret to my great acting abilities.

But then there comes the moment when you have to try to pull yourself up, and get the flock out of that door, and that’s not just for this conference or me & my little big ego. It’s all of us, all through life, when we have something in our way, some obstacle, which stands between us and the thing we want. One of the kids gets sick. The car keys accidentally got flushed. A pet destroys the gift you were about to wrap while you’re looking for another roll of tape. That doctor’s appointment didn’t go well. You forgot you can’t eat hot chili peppers anymore. Whatever. You want to bury your head in the sand, or under the covers, or perhaps in Tahiti.

MamaCat is not here to give you the formula for how to face the things and get out the door and do the things. There is no formula. We’ll probably have a long post about that sometime, too. I think it’s best expressed in the wisdom of Kung Fu Panda, “There is no secret ingredient”.

I want to speak for what happens when you do go out the door and do the things.

For me, right after the Feeling Stupid phase of getting sick, comes the Not Moving phase, and some of that is good for recuperation. But Not Moving can also turn into procrastination, self-pity, and eventually, Newton’s First Law of Motion. Inertia kills the joy of life! Bad Inertia, no dessert for you.

It took me forever to get ready to set foot out the door, both Friday and today. And I mean, seriously, crazy stuff like my left eye insisted on watering – but not the right one. I looked like the opposite of a makeover, one eye lovely and one just came out of a bar fight. So… I had to re-do the makeup on that eye like four times, because one eye done prettily and one eye crying isn’t a business look, it’s a photo shoot for a tragic PSA. And please, if you do shoot a tragic PSA using this imagery, all I’m asking is 10% off the top, thanks. Contact my representation to hammer something out.

Both days I missed all the morning sessions; both nights I skipped the parties where the real networking gets done.** But both days, I managed to get to the place, take in a few breakout sessions, meet a few people, maybe get a few laughs. Not mega-fun super-networking like I had planned, no. But I did get to meet at least three of the people I specifically came to meet, and I made a few friends. I got some amazing resources and information on the changes in the business. I learned things. None of that would have happened if I’d stayed in the room.***

I may or may not have also improvised a little rock and roll singing about Living on Ginger Ale during a breakout session, to the tune of “Livin’ on Tulsa Time,” that the world might celebrate my poor wretched tummy. Word to the wise: Never, ever, put a hot mic in my hand in front of live people and expect Normal Granny to come out of the speakers. You’re only going to get Eccentric Granny in those situations. Fair warning.

The experience was Oxygen.

I want more.

I’ll write more about this weekend, about the opportunities and the people, about the things I learned, about how amazing this VO community is. But tonight, while the soup & tea & crackers & ginger ale and I are spending a little time trying to wind down and feel better before the plane tomorrow, I wanted to get these thoughts down and send them to you: you can get past the obstacle. Maybe not the way you had originally intended. But you can do it, one way or another. It will be worth it. I can, you can, we all can. Especially if we help each other.

The tea is gone, the soup is almost finished, the ginger ale is warm. Thanks for spending the evening with me, cats & kittens. I’ll write again soon. Please tip your servers, they’re working hard for you tonight.

Meow, Darlings.

*HusbandCat is not the world’s worst patient. He’s arguably a better patient better than I am.

**And all the fun, from what I am given to understand. Remember fun? How cool is fun??

Good Lord, darlings, where the actual fuck did over a year go since I wrote? Let they who write say Amen, for we all know this happens. And my, what a year it has been! Our third great year of 2020 has just been so eventful, what with much of the earth’s population currently spending the afternoon wondering, will it be a nice weekend? Or perhaps a nuclear war? Either way, let’s get treats!

I honestly feel like we’re on the way to the dinner party in Don’t Look Up about half the time, but what of that?

So I was working on my bio for MN Women in Film & Television, and I decided to post it on Linked In, just to see what might happen. Probably nothing, is my best guess. It's LinkedIn. Then I decided to come here and say it in this venue too. I mean, this is supposed to be Women's History Month or something, yes? And I am a woman who has been around for quite a bit o' history. So here’s what I had to say:

"It's hilarious to be 64 in an industry where women die of old age at 30.

Perhaps you are familiar with the second-to-last episode of Boston Legal? In which Union member John Larroquette addresses the lack of programming for older people, while being paid beautifully in a fair contract? But, the script has Carl Sack, not Shirley Schmidt, take the case. Larroquette delivers the speech, not gorgeous Candace Bergen. It was 2008. She was 62. SHE. WAS. 62. Oh, well, at least we got extra Betty White with that episode.

But yeah. Content for, by, and about older women. Let's generate some. I'll be in touch."

Well, you know, existential dread notwithstanding.

Meow, darlings.

www.dianawilde.com

Hello, darlings, it’s been simply days, I know.

And no, I did not take the 12-hour drive each way for those auditions, but I would have. I’m still going to send them something. I figure if I make enough noise and attract enough attention, eventually, something will click -- and it must have, because I was too busy working to get to those auditions.

The lucrative bit was a 2-day booking as an extra in a Minnesota Lottery spot. It should be pretty hilarious. I hope I show up in the finished product. I worked with such lovely people and had such a positive experience, and got paid for it. And got PAID for it. I remember this feeling. Much more of this, please. I didn’t even mind getting soaked by the rain on the second day, really. It’s part of the adventure – nobody was in danger and the moment was real. People get rained on. It’s lovely. What if it hadn’t been raining when Holly put Cat out of the cab? And then found him again? Exactly.

Yeah… you won’t notice any of that in the finished product, but I sure do bring a rich, full inner life to the project. Whether I want to or not.

The rainy-day shoot was quiet and strictly business. The night before, though, at a Well-Known Sports Facility, was almost a party atmosphere. We were maybe two dozen actors, getting paid to hang out and act like we were having a good time at a sportsball game, complete with zany props and pretend beers, so it was a huge stretch. The differences between the background talent on that shoot and a real party was (a) sobriety, and (b) an off switch. Because we were at work. And doing our jobs.

The most exciting bit of that weekend was a master class taught by Bob Cline. Mr. Cline is this amazing casting director, director, coach, teacher, and generally awesome and positive human being. Here, look at this: http://www.bobclinecasting.com/#!bio/c1adp I was so scared, just terrified, at the prospect of singing in front him. Even though it was a class I was paying for, it felt like a huge risk. What if I totally suck in front of him and all the other musical theatre actors in the room? What if I drool on myself and forget all the words and pee? What if the bomb finally falls and we are nuked instantly?????

It was the single most instructive, happy, safe, focused, useful, and motivational classroom experience ever. That’s all. Just the huge validation plus concise personal direction plus good advice. It was like having him as one’s own private coach for a few minutes. I really hope that everyone felt that way; to my eyes, he appeared to be giving 100% to each participant and making a difference in each one’s performance, on the spot.

The next day, I sat in on casting sessions for an indy short film I’ll be shooting later this month. I read and read with several different actors. It was so good to get to know the director better, to be a part of this process, and get a feel for what our team will be like on-set. It was also good to get outside for a tremendously long walk in the middle of the day, as this was one beautiful June Sunday afternoon in the Twin Cities. I missed almost all of those last year, when I was out of town doing summer stock.

So sorry I put off writing, dears. But you can see, one has been up to one’s fine ass in Busy. Which is part of the plan, isn’t it? Feast or Famine? Git the werk while the gittin’s good. Before the parade passes by and like that. Life-->Banquet-->Starving.

Meow, darlings. Xoxoxoxo