My brushes with greatness...

I have to confess. I am in a bit of a slump these days. Just got a lot on my plate and feeling a wee bit low. But I read my friend Paul's blog today. It was all about women who love the Three Stooges (which I still think is a myth!) and he had a couple of anecdotes from readers about times they actually met or spoke to one of the Stooges. This got me remembering my own "brushes with greatness"! No, I never met one of the Three Stooges but I did meet a handful of great actors back in the day - John Cusack, Aidan Quinn, Tom Cruise and Robert Deniro, to name a few. Let me tell you about meeting these four.

Awhile back, I lived in Chicago and I was acting and working with a theatre company called, igLoo, the theatrical group. No, that's not misspelled. We were cool like that. LOL Anyway...

We did some very avantgarde stuff and it started getting the attention of the local press which then got the attention of other actors that wanted to come and work with us. One of these was a great broad named Elizabeth Bracco. She is the sister of Lorraine Bracco and the wife of Aidan Quinn. Through her I met Aidan. Lizzie and I were in a few shows together and occasionally we would pal around. One Monday night, Lizzie called me and asked me to come over to her apartment and hang out making jewelry and ordering in sushi. Aidan was watching the World Series and she wasn't interested in that. So, I went over. Now, at this time, the movie "The Untouchables" was filming in Chicago. Many of my friends are in that movie as extras. I can spot them sitting in the train station and lying face down in pools of blood throughout the film! But I digress...

So, I go over to Lizzie's. She lets me in and we go to the dining room where all the jewelry making stuff was laid out. Then she takes me into the living room where Aidan is watching the game with a buddy. I look up as Lizzie is saying "this is my friend Mary, Mary - this is Bob" and I am met with the enormous smiling face of Robert Freakin' Deniro! Deniro was in town shooting the movie. He was playing Al Capone to Kevin Costner's Elliot Ness. He shakes my hand and says, "nice to meet ya" and goes back to the watching the game. I'm sure I mumbled something but I honestly don't remember what I said! What I remember was retreating to the kitchen where I chastised Lizzie! I mean, she could have warned me that I was about to meet one of the greatest actors to ever live. You can't just spring Robert Deniro on someone like that!! Sheesh!

At this time, when we weren't doing our own shows, we would rent out our theatre space to other companies who needed some place to rehearse or perform. One day, my friend who ran the company asked me to meet with a new potential renter because she and her husband were going to be out that day. So I waited at the theatre for about an hour. She didn't tell me who the potential renter was. So imagine my surprise when John Cusack walked in! He was the nicest guy in the world too. I showed him the space and he ended up renting it. Unfortunately, some of his people got into our costumes and pretty much trashed them which ended the rental relationship badly. But oh well...

The one day Lizzie invited us over for Aidan's birthday party. We went out and bought an old bowling trophy and wrapped it up for him! The apartment was packed! People everywhere! My friends and I were pretty much stuck in the living room but we were thirsty so I volunteered to squeeze my way into the kitchen to get us some beers. I pushed my way through the crowd, down the hall and into the kitchen. I grabbed 5 beers to take back to my friends. When I turned around to start back through the crowd I was face to face with Tom Cruise. He laughed and said, "Those aren't all for you, are they?" I laughed and said something really clever, "no". And that was that. By the way, Tom Cruise is short. Seriously short. Shorter than you can even imagine he would be. I had a good two feet on him.

So, those are some of my brushes with greatness. There are others - Elizabeth Taylor, William Windom, and a few more. But those four all happened at a very good time in my life and with the mood I'm in lately it did me some good remembering. So, still not a Three Stooges fan but there ya go! LOL

A blast from my past...

Next week a very dear friend is coming to Kenosha to visit with family. We've decided to get together with some other dear old friends and that means there will be much laughter, liquor and stories from our not so recent colorful past. To remind me of said past, my friend Gary sent me some stuff he had held onto for all these years.

Let me explain...

After I attended university I decided to move to Chicago which is about an hour or so from where I live. While there, my friend Maria and her then husband Chris moved there from New York and decided to start a theatre company. Chicago is a pioneer city for small store front theatre companies, many of which have gone on to great things (think Steppenwolf). Back then, late 80s, early 90s, there were companies popping up all over the place. Some were good, some were very, very bad. We were good. We were good in spite of operating on no budget, pillaging set pieces and costumes anywhere we could find them (a ton of broken concrete taken from a demo site became one set!) and adapting obscure literature or writing our own plays when needed. We had no money for royalties so we looked to old, avant garde writers who's work was in the public domain most of the time. Most of the cast/crew actually lived at the theatre which was a second story space that once housed a paint factory. I had the luxury of having an apartment near by so I was hostess to many a home made dinner to those who existed on Ramen Noodles and bags of cheap rice from the Mexican store up the street. It was all very Bohemian, very crude, and very exciting to be there at such a creative time. We were all about process and product and less about the take at the ticket counter.

And, lo and behold, Chicago took notice. We quickly became the "darlings" of Anthony Adler at the Chicago Reader who once called us "the avant of the garde". I clearly remember one review where he expounded on the wonders of the use of blue kool aid instead of wine as the perfect metaphor for the show we were doing. The truth is...we were broke, no money for extras, and blue kool aid was all we had at the time! Once Adler took notice the other papers started coming around. We got reviewed in the Chicago Sun Times and Trib and Chicago magazine. All on a shoe string and all for the love of doing theatre.

Anyway, Gary dug up a nugget that I hadn't seen in a long time. That is me up there as Tina Stromboli in a show called "Journy To Destiny" (incorrect spelling intentional). The show was meant to be bad. It had broad stereotypes that in today's world we would never get away with but back then political correctness had not yet soured what used to be just good old comic relief. Those critics who got the joke loved it. Some did not but then they just didn't get the joke either. Here's what the Sun Times had to say about it:

Actors score hit,
but 'Journy' doesn't
THEATER
By Dave Hoekstra
Somewhere along the line the igLoo Theater has confused
art with tart.
IgLoo co-directors Chris
Peditto and Maria Tirabassi
cooked up a rather compelling theatrical
premise in "Journy to Destiny"-
a mindless, MTV-ish kind of
soap opera. But the few genuinely
funny moments in the two-hour
frat party are overlooked because
the audience is engrossed in throwing
whipped-cream pies at the actors.
Pies' are an integral part of
American humor, from Lucy and
Ethel on the assembly line to Milton
Bede's. first pie in. the eye,
thrown somewhere near the dawn
of time. I suppose if igLoo had
employed a mere handful of welltimed
pies, the joke might have
worked.
But I counted at least 150 tossed
pies during Tuesday's openingnight
performance, with the direct
hits getting the biggest cheers of
the evening.
At least the aggression was well
deserved.
"Journy to Destiny" occassionally
works if you view the play in
the context of a bad cartoon. Jamey
Barnard's costume design imd
Kathy Hall's set construction all
are in bright, neon-colored cardboard,
while actors assume the
roles of caricatures instead of characters.
I suggest the pies are channel
changers of sorts.
Action revolves around the
House of Stromboli,' a kind of
Trapp family of tuned-out punkers.
The family patriarch, Big Sal
Stromboli, is offed early in the play
and wife Cookie crumbles under
the pressure of single parenting.
Played engagingly by' Cynthia
Orthal (in the program she's Scarlet
Monkeyflower), Cookie finally
falls for the family .dog, Beaurigarde
(Beau O'Reilly), and she is
committed while the dog is shot.
The rest of the play follows the
wanderings of the Stromboli
daughters: Nancy, Maria, Tina and
Little Anna; as well as lone-wolf
brother Bumbus.
Of all these madcaps, the two
performances worth noting are
Mary Kelleher's Tina, the burned-
out black sheep who approaches
her character with just the right
amount of cynial aggression, and
Maria (Stephanie Barto), the family
brain who winds up working in
the Pentagon.
What makes Barto and Kelleher's
work important is that they
are the only two players who are
believable-an essential aspect of
comedic farce.
But there's just too much excess
that detracts from the actors' work.
If the audience isn't throwing pies,
they're being prompted, to throw
pies by narrator Chris Peditto, or........
they're worrying where they're going to get their next pie, which I
guess is why the igLoo Theater bills
"Journy to Destiny" as a "creamfilled
catastrophe."
At least that's one direct hit.

I was known as Mary Kelleher back then. So, even though this guy hated the show, he liked me! I'm not sure that in a play filled with bad jokes and flying cream pies being one of the stand out performers is a good thing! Hahah! Hmmm, I wonder if I should give acting another go. I recall I was pretty good at it and it was a load of fun to boot.