Channeling our Mothers

Our rehearsals are in a gorgeous studio that feels like a tree-house at the top of Bernal Heights. Three women, Marilee, our Stage Manager, Ashely, and yours truly, perch high above San Francisco, watching a dark sky dotted with lights from the city and the Bay Bridge. In the foreground there's an old grand eucalyptus tree, framing our view.

Marilee's grandmother planted the tree 40 years ago. And here we are, looking out the window, three young women together in one room, as Marilee's mom, Lucinda, slowly takes shape before us.

In Marilee's body, Lucinda walks with a slow deliberation, holding her arms stiff, her chest out. She looks the other characters in this play directly in the eyes, and she gently (and almost imperceptibly) touches the walls as she walks to orient herself.

Our Lucinda is sharp and fierce.
"I'm just toughening your up for the real world. The world is a cruel place for people like us," she tells Marilee.

And then Lucinda sings the most beautiful lullaby you've ever heard. It makes me ache to hear it.

It starts to rain. Hard. In the break Ashley tells us a story about her mom, a fraught moment of tension in the distant past. I think of my own mother -- the way everyone says we have the same gestures & mannerisms. The way she knows me to the core; the way she can see through my brave fronts of indifference. The way she says, when I have worn myself out with care taking for others, pretending I don't notice how it's affecting me, "I don't know Riss, I'm afraid you inherited that from me."

...Here is an image of our beat up actress after a long night of wrestling with her mother character (just kidding, she's trying out a series of different gestures)