beauty and the beast

Many folks don't know that Minneapolis often gets previews of shows that move to Broadway. The Lion King previewed in Minneapolis before it became a blockbuster in New York City.

My Katie was always interested in a career as a performer (until she switched to The Hotel School at Cornell where hospitality is considered a performance art). I spent beaucoup dinero on theater tickets over the years. Minneapolis, of course, is a great theater town. I took her to tons of stuff.

She applied to High Mowing, a Waldorf boarding high school (she got in but she wouldn't go). On the application, they asked the prospective high school student, to list the theater productions the student had seen. Just for fun, we tried to make a complete list. We got several pages into the attachment before we gave up. I still think that was an interesting question to ask an eighth grader applying to a Waldorf boarding school. Any kid looking at High Mowing came from a family that, um, cared deeply about the kid's education.

We had season tickets to the Children's Theater while it was still age appropriate. We went to everything at The Guthrie. We caught a smattering of every theater season, all over town. Plus music. Plus dance. Like for a couple years, Katie thought she wanted to be an opera singer. She discovered opera and boing! She was in love. So we had opera season tickets for a couple years. I even sent her to 'opera camp' one summer. Katie used to go to one of those summer camps for gifted students and one year they offered a stream called 'opera camp'. She found out that she loved the pomp and emotion of opera and she loved to perform but, alas, she was not a singer. After that, for many years, her career goal was to win three Tonys on Broadway. Margot, a Waldorf classmate, used to ridicule Katie for that goal. Margot, who also aspired to Broadway, some of the time, had taken tap dance her entire life because her mother believed you had to tap to get on Broadway. For Margot, in those days, Broadway was all about big show tunes and tapping. For Katie, the theater was more Tennessee Williams and William Inge.

Margot and Katie were the smarted kids in their Waldorf class. Everyone, really everyone, agreed. The girls were fiercely competitive with one another.

In Waldorf schools, each class puts on a class play in the spring. The 8th grade play is the biggest deal. For their 8th grade play, Margot got her wish to do Arsenic and Old Lace and to be the sister with the most lines because Katie had gotten her wish to be Titania in Midsummer Night's Dream in the 7th grade. Margot, of course, had also coveted Titania but Mr. Maier gave the role to Katie. Margot's mom was always frustrated with David, Mr. Maier. She believed that he favored Katie. Well, Jennie, if you are reading this (I am sure she isn't), I have news for you.

Waldorf classes always go on camping trips in the spring, too. For the 6th grade campout, the class had camped on the St. Croix River, up by Taylor Falls State Park. You could rent canoes at Taylor Falls and paddle down to Stillwater, an easy, beautiful way to enjoy the river. Katie had ended up in Mr. Maier's canoe and she had suggested that their canoe sing Broadway show tunes, challening one another to see who knew the most. At age eleven, Katie knew more show tunes than anyone, including David. After the trip, he told me about that day in the canoe with Katie, how much fun he had with her. And then David gave me a prescious gift. How I love me David Maier. "I probably shouldn't say this," he said, suddenly getting emotional as he recounted the singing game in the canoe, "But Katie is my favorite student. She is such a whole person, multi-dimensional. I forget sometimes that she even is a kid. She is right there with me, emotionally, no matter where I go. How did she come to know all those Broadway songs? She's not old enough to have that much history." I don't exactly know how she came to know all those songs. I didn't, like, play that kind of music around the house. I did expose her to movies. Maybe she picked up the lyrics from movies. My Katie has an awesome capacity to memorize and to mimic.

One summer, after her first year in college, she had a marketing internship at Jacob's Pillow, the first and most prominent modern dance festival in this country. The interns got to stay in cabins that were just like going to summer camp. Plus they got to see tons of the best modern dance on the planet, day after day an extravaganza of art.

One aspect of the marketing intern's job was to give tours. There were three marketing interns and each of them were supposed to take turns giving the tours because that was not the most thrilling part of the job. All the girls wanted to interact with the artists and their companies, to talk to the New York Times to place reviews of the shows. Nobody wanted to give tours to little girls who showed up with their mother's to dream about being a dancer.

The tours weren't exactly scripted but Jacob's Pillow's archivist had written out the tour. He was very concerned that the tour presented an accurate history of Jacob's Pillow. I guess if you are an archivist for an arts organization you, like, care about its history.

So. All three marketing interns had to learn the tour information and then the archivist had each of the girls take him on a tour. Katie had memorized the whole thing. By then, Katie had been in many plays so she was accustomed to memorizing. Plus David Maier had the children memorize many poems in grade school. To this day I am pretty sure Katie could recite Poe's Raven.

I miss her so much.

In her freshman year in h.s. (I know, my mind is rambling all over the place, weaving in and out of time), between Christmas and New Year's, I splurged and got tickets to see Beauty and the Beast, previewing in Minneapolis. It was her first 'Broadway' show. To me, it was just another night at the theater but for her, it was a romantic thrill. Broadway. The play we would see would later be on Broadway. It was just like going to Broadway, right mom? I was so glad I had bought those tickets. I had no idea it was going to thrill her like that. The tix were a Xmas gift.

Katie got all dressed up. My daughter was born to be glamourous. She came out of the womb caring about clothes, I swear to goddess. Over the years, every friend I ever had and all my relatives poked fun of us. How did I get a fashion hound for a kid? Where did she get it? As soon as she could speak, she had definite opinions about clothes. Basically, when she was around two, she declared that she would only wear pink and purple. And she wouldn't. Just before she made that pronouncement, the pink and purple thing, I had bought her an adorable pair of Oshkosh by Gosh blue overalls. Powder blue with a floral trim. There was a teeny tiny smattering of pink in the floral trim. Over and over I pointed out that pink in the floral trim, trying to coax her into wearing that outfit. She would not.

Another thing she did, from her earliest days, was she would try on all her clothes. As soon as she learned how to get clothes on and off, she could get untold pleasure out of trying on all her clothes.

And my Katie was always very fussy. She really is obsessive compulsive but when she was two, we didn't think of it like that. We, well, I, thought it was cute that she fussed. She could easily go through all her clothes, trying them on, discarding them, trying more. And then, get this, she would refuse to wear them again until they had been laundered.

'But honey," I implored, "you only had this jumper on for two minutes. It doesn't need to be laundered again. I won't waste the water or the electricity."

My Katie had an iron will. Always. That's why I know she isn't coming back to me.

I would haul her discarded clothes to the laundry room. Then I told her that I laundered them while she was asleep.

I miss her so much.

The night we went to see Beauty and the Beast, she got dressed up in a brown velveteen dress, knit and clingy. She put on darker, more dramatic makeup than I had ever seen before. She make little spikes in her hair, which was very short. The spikes did not have a punk/goth effect. The spikes were hot, grown up. In the dark eyeliner and eyeshadow, the richly dark lipstick, the dramatic rouge on her cheeks, she was a woman. A very attractive woman. During the intermission, as she walked through the lobby of the ornate showplace theater lobby, almost every head turned to watch the beautiful young woman. How did she know how to make herself look like that? And how had I failed to notice before that evening that my little girl was gone.

In 2003, as my fiftieth birthday approach that August, I decided I did not want to turn fifty, not without my kid. When she was a baby and I was still married to her father and I was very, very depressed, I got some therapy. Over and over, back then, my therapist asked me 'where do you see yourself when you are fifty, what will your life look like?'. It's a standard shrink trick. He couldn't get me to see happiness in my short-term future so he was trying to lift my thoughts to the horizon, to rise above my present misery. At this time, I was legally separated from her father and we were locked in a custody fight. I could not see beyond the custody battle. If I lost custody of Katie, I could see no future for me. So Dr. Engler tried to get me to see some kind of future. Why did he pick fifty? Everytime he asked me about what my life would be like at fifty, I said "Katie will be twenty one then, safe from her father. When I am fifty, I want to be dead." Gosh, I was so miserable.

Then, in 2003, I was turning fifty and Katie was twenty one, safe not only from her father but safe from me. Over and over in that summer of 2003, I replayed those sessions with Dr. Engler. Over and over I told myself that the time had come to end my life.

I was still in touch with Katie, just a bit. She said to me that if I was going to kill myself, would I send her my books? And I did. I sent her my books and every photo I had. I thought it made simple good sense. I was living, at the time, on Whidbey. I had only been living there a short time. Nobody around me would know what to do with my belongings after I was found dead. I thought it made perfect sense to ship everything off before hand. Now I can see that what I did was gruesome. It must have been really awful to receive that stuff. Plus I sent her all mementos, all my jewelry. Box after box, I grimly packed and shipped. In my suicide note, all I said was please mail my laptop to my daughter and I gave her address