Middle-Aged Ham
Notes from getting up on stage for the first time
A week ago in Seattle, I sat around my friends’ dining room table swapping containers of carry-out sushi rolls with two professional actors and a director. It was the night before a performance festival that we were all a part of, and we had just introduced ourselves.
I was a writer, sure. But I wasn’t an actor like these guys, flying in from Chicago and Los Angeles, with their credits and portfolios and reels and stage directions and suitcases full of props. I was one of those things that didn’t belong — or at least that’s how I felt as we popped edamame from their shells and squirted soy sauce from foil packets. They knew what they were doing, surely. Not me.
As a cookbook author and cooking teacher, I’ve done plenty of public speaking. But this time was different. This time I was about to bare my soul. Tell a story from my life, as we say in memoir workshops, and not just the ‘and this happened’ bits. But share how thirty-year-old KOD learned to mise en place a life — and why that still matters today, nearly thirty years later.
I know, I know. Writing a memoir is also baring my soul. But while still being written, it’s behind closed doors. Acting — well, that’s just putting it all out on the line to dry.
During our run-throughs on Zoom, Billie, my director, encouraged me to feel the words course through my body as I uttered them and worry less about ‘performing” and melodic turns in my voice. Every time I rehearsed, I better understood what she was trying to teach me. Experience the words, she told me.
Then I got to the set. A long-narrow space on the balcony of the main ballroom meant to look like a speakeasy. High-top stools upholstered in blue velvet and two-top cafe tables. Moody lighting. Shit got real.
Billie, who was juggling four other things, introduced me to Ian, the nice young man assigned to tech my show. I had no idea what ‘tech’-ing a show meant, but I was about to find out. Testing the mic. Going over the script and reviewing the stage directions. Where in the space I’d start and end the show. When I’d eat the pickle and the cookie. Toothpicks for the pickles. Cues for entering the stage. What kind of cocktail did I want for the cocktail scene? A Mount Gay & tonic, please.
Josh, who wrote the music to accompany the piece, was in the house. He would narrate the open, then strum his guitar to cue me to begin.
As I took my place, I looked at the script. The words wouldn’t come out.
“I’m gonna cry,” I said to Billie, standing next to me.
She stood right there and let me feel the rush of anticipation and whatever else my adrenaline was doing, like a shower on a late summer afternoon, fierce and quick, while the sun peeked through, a rainbow surely on the way. I looked at her, teary, but I was okay. I was as ready as I would ever be.
I sat on a couch behind the curtain thinking of what my friend Grace told me: Tongue to the roof of the mouth and hum.
“It’s grounding,” she said.
I closed my eyes with my tongue up on the roof, James Taylor style:
On the roof it’s peaceful as can be
And there the world below, it don’t bother me
No, no, no
Grace was right.
The people filled the room. Josh began to play. I stepped through that velvet curtain and life was never again the same. I made them laugh, I made them cry, I made them root for the young woman who took fourteen years to find her purpose. And my list of firsts — date, kiss, fuck, overseas flight, college diploma, love, marriage, Russell, published book, cross-country move — had grown longer.
I did the thing, Eleanor Roosevelt. The thing I thought I could not do.
Begone, imposter. We got more work to do.
xokod
I just couldn’t love this more.
Oo loved this recap - keep going Kimba!