But Call Me Betsy

When I lived in Chicago, my friend Becky Wittenstrom (who I worked with at Northwestern), suggested out of the blue one day that we take a trip to Italy. I'd only ever been to Germany, and had never taken a trip with a friend, but she was a go-getter and found us tickets for a long weekend to fly to Rome and then take a train to Florence. Or maybe it was the other way around. She was an excellent travel companion, organized without being too bossy, un-fussy, and interested in both seeing the important sites (the Uffizi, the Colosseum) and walking the streets to just see what was happening. Here is a picture that represents one of the happiest moments in my life, because all of my favorite things converged at one time--a shop dog named Crisso (I wrote his name on the back of the photo), a gelato, and an adventure in a foreign land with a good companion.

I don't have any photos of my community theater days--I mean, I have a bunch more from when I worked in children's theater (see previous posts)--but none from some of the shows I did at the Royalty Theater Company in downtown Clearwater or with that one group of actors who did these mystery theater events. Maybe I did just one play at the RTC, A Pack of Lies and I played Julie, the naive young daughter. If I recall, I was allowed to use a British accent (I excel at accents). Before each performance, the woman who helped me get the acting and teaching job at Ruth Eckerd Hall (Kay Campbell--she was a veteran actress and looked quite a bit like Carol Burnett) always did these vocal exercises to prepare. Deep breaths and inhalations and trilling of the lips, teeth, tip of the tongue, roof of the mouth.  I found this to be completely embarrassing. I know that you have to do these things to warm up your instrument, as they say (your body, your voice), but then another part of me say...

Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter. When I was in undergrad at Florida State, I lived with three other girls in an adorable house on Tharpe Street. The exact address was 1734 Tharpe Street (I think??). The house had three bedrooms and two bathrooms, a big kitchen and living room, a yard, and driveway also large enough to accommodate four cars. I think the rent per person was something crazy like $150 per month. I shared a bedroom with Lauren and we actually had bunk beds--I don't know who gave us those--but she slept on the bottom and I slept on the top and only once did she have to tell me to get rid of the guy I brought home. I think we lived together for three years; maybe two with Michelle, and then she moved to Chicago (where I later went--see a previous TBT post); but while we were all together, we got along very well and were able to throw an annual Halloween party for our various friends and theater majors. In the photo above, we have dressed as the four seasons. God kn...

I've been working on a story recently that centers around a waitress in Chicago and so have been thinking nostalgically of those days, though I have not gone so far as to revisit my journals from that time, because I'm certain they would be full of depressing anecdotes; probably me obsessing over some guy whose name I no longer remember. What I do recall about Chicago is that the winters were dastardly cold, Lake Michigan was beautiful, they had great thrift stores, I was incredibly lonely most of the time, and I had a lot of really funny and talented friends. Here's Hancock Tower (thanks, Emily!). I don't think I ever went up in it and there were also entire neighborhoods in Chicago that I never visited.   My first apartment was a garden apartment in the Belmont area--pretty close to Wrigley Field and Gingerman Tavern. The apartment itself was okay, though it had a mushroom-y smell and clanking radiators. Below is my cat on the left (Gretel) and my roomm...

Did you ever do that thing where you decide to just check in on your old crushes on Facebook? Because aren't we all friends with these guys who ripped out our hearts and stomped on them in college and high school? And don't we even sometimes "like" their stupid family photos or the baby photos and wonder if we should leave a pithy comment that might make him realize that we're the ones who got away? I never do that. Hardly ever. But the other day, while we were watching the Beatles tribute show, I did a quick search for a guy I had such a crush on in high school, Rob D. I found his page, and he's still married to the girl he dated just out of high school and they have three gangly children  and she's still very beautiful and thin. I was getting all nostalgic for those days and wondering why we never ended up together, (the Beatles were playing "Yesterday" in the background, so I had the perfect medley going) and then I clicked on a link to a ...

We watch all these cop shows of married people killing each other and then lying about it or Dr. Phil , where the daughter hires someone to kill her entire family, and it seems unfathomable that you can go from having all these days with someone, you know, like Christmas morning, and every single meal that you ate, or your partner--you loved that person at one time, you thought you couldn't live without her, and then one day, you decide that you've had enough and the only escape is murder. Usually, they're not very good at it either--like, this one guy killed his wife and daughter, and then brought their bodies into work in cardboard boxes and his co-workers saw him pushing these heavy boxes into the dumpster and said he was in a really bad mood. Don't bother me! I'm trying to dispose of these bodies. It's my lunch hour! And then this other guy who killed his wife and then cut her up and boiled her in giant pots to get rid of her corpse bit by bit (he was a ch...

I must apologize because I don't really know how to use the scanner on Dan's computer and so these old photos are really photos of photos; hence the crappy quality.  I guess they were all taken some time close to when I graduated from Florida State; so, like 1992? 1993? Decades ago now. Anyway, after graduation, I moved back to Clearwater and lived with my older boyfriend in an apartment complex off of a major highway. I also worked as a hostess at TGIFriday's and was a member of a children's theater group through Ruth Eckerd Hall, the performing arts center in the area. I didn't have any illusions that this would lead to fame. After just one or two shows in an elementary school cafeteria (smelled like spoiled milk) or gymnasium (smelled like sweaty feet), it was clear that I wasn't on the path to being discovered by like a visiting movie producer who would whisk me away to become Hollywood's darling.  But it was still fun, for the most part, and the kids w...