Memorial Day weekend is four days of no day. Friday, May 25, was like a Sunday. My husband had the day off so he hung around, a mixed bag of his neatness dogging my desire to just hang out ( in my robe) on the big chair in the living room, while he traipsed by heavy-footed with a few loads of laundry. The footsteps were to let me know that he was the only one doing household chores.
We both had meetings late in the day, separately. But at night it felt like Sunday because we had no plan. We grazed on leftovers. We'd had plans with family that fell apart when it turned out we'd all said "yes" without checking our calendars. Getting 6 people together for a family gathering is not like the old days when you knew that Sundays were for family. On Saturday, we did one of our favorite things--- viewing, not buying, fine antiques in the Stamford group antique shops on Canal street. We congratulated ourselves for not spending a penny, but I did wish we were just starting our lives togethet and could absorb a whole new collection of mid-century modern into our ecclectic but over-filled house.
In the evening we sat under the awning at Sunset Grille with friends for whom it took six months to clear this date. We walked Washington street in Norwalk after dinner looking for a vibe' and much to our dismay, it doesn't feel like it's thriving. We did manage a dance at a BBQ place with a band in the back, but that really needed more people on a Saturday night to call it a happening. Even Compo Beach was marginally sparse on Sunday. Quatro Pazzi in Fairfield was packed at 6:30. Great buzz there. Mother-in-law with us. Enough said.

Monday, my husband drove the Hippie Van for WPKN for the Westport Memorial Day parade. Afterwards he came home and slept. I read the newspapers all day thinking it was Sunday. I nearly forgot that I had our radio show--- fourth Monday of the month. Look for the archive www.wpkn.org later this eeek. At 11pm up in the studio, and finally for me, I knew what day it was. Bill Bosch and I had never done radio together before and as usual we were an easy team. Steve di Costanzo, our host on Radio Base Camp is a terrific programmer, avid listener too.
It's Tuesday, but feels like Monday of the first day of summer and after four Sundays, please recommend how to start my day with weekday verve.

Leave Town & Country for an Evening

Repost with addendum. We have been playing to capacity at TWO BOOTS of BRIDGEPORT. Now, coming, other programs using real life experiences as their core. http://thebijoutheatre.com/blog/

MAY 23, 2012

Today is an important day for Mousemuse. We are hitting the streets of Bridgeport's ambitious revival district at Bijou Square. Once upon a time, Manhattanhites winced about attending cutting edge arts events in what was called "alphabet city." Now, they have to lineup for tickets to cutting edge entertainment or theater that doesn't cost $175 a ticket like Broadway, but is just as thought provoking.

Yes, in Westport we've embraced the arts. But the emerging artists have little or no center to simply gather. Restaurants are sprouting again in Westport. Gorgeous women and magazine men. Good hype and vibe at the Spotted Horse late at night. Then where to? A rock band at the Duck? Maybe. A little upstairs music at a couple of places. Jazz Jam at WAC in folding chairs with a plastic glass of wine? No ambience, but sometimes exciting if you could walk there and feel the "club" vibe.

But how about a little culture? Are the art galleries planning to stay open. Is our town Madison Avenue? Is Westport ever going to properly develop a venue with a stage. Town Hall has the auditorium, and a black box theater that's privately run, but budget constraints are real as Westport focuses in on our gem of an educational system.

How did Brooklyn and SoHo and Alphabet City develop into vibrant places? Cheap real estate and someone with vision. Lots of someones. Youth could afford to live there and work there. Later they'd move out to the burbs and wonder why they felt "dead."

We are so insular we've forgotten to look a few (metaphoric) blocks up the road. That's where Bridgeport has, for the past ten years, been quietly putting its future in the hands of artistic visionaries like Phil Kuchma. The Kuchma Corporation has put its money and passion behind the redevelopment of Bijou Square. Kuchma and MouseMuse are meeting on Friday, May 25th. MouseMuse and Kuchma's team are heading into a momentous time. If you stop thinking of Bridgeport as if it is Hell's Kitchen, (and you know that Hell's Kitchen is now unaffordable) you will realize that it's a city much closer to you than New York, some of the best places like Two Boots and the Bijou were recruited by Kuchma to start up a quality arts community. It's an opportunity for our fans to not only dine out with the swells, but an opportunity to get real, and to generate ideas.

Remember those lightweight aluminum fold up chairs with plastic mesh web strips we used to hang on a hook in the garage?  Every summer we'd drag tme out to either a lawn event or to the beach. Sure they used to fray at the edges and then rust, but with a new roll of webbing they were as good as new.

Enter the first generation of snazzy chairs that were sturdy enough to hold not only our widening bottoms but bottles and glasses fit in the side pouches or tray tables on the  arms. Only a tornado could blow away those new chairs introduced into the leisure market in the 1980s.

They came in their own cases and packed up as small as a full sized beach umbrella. You'd sling the case over your arm and trek uphill or downhill until you settled on your patch of land and began to reassemble them? Sturdy little buggers they were. Taut and tough like an army cot. After low back-breaking sling-ass evening at the beach or Tanglewood, the engineer types helped the non-mechanical people fold and slide the chairs back into its own nifty neat sleeve. They only weighed as much as a few golf clubs, but they weren't unsightly when not in use like the cheapo, low-tech old chairs were.

Thirty more years of portable chair engineering has taken us to every convenience you'd want in a chair. Canopies, tables, footrests. Every year another chair item to make a trip to outdoors a pleasure. Before we knew it, the chairs had gotten almost as heavy as carrying a sailboat boom on your shoulder.  I secretly craved my mother-inlaw's ten dollar aluminum rusted chairs from the 1950s. She gave them to me when she moved.

We gave away our high tech chairs and went in search of something lightweight, ugly and low tech. This 2012 summer scene at Compo Beach?  Mostly aluminum plastic webbed chairs?  Maybe it's not necessary to put engineering minds into creating a luxury portable chair with so many bells and whistles, ones that by sheer weight alone could deter you from taking them out of the car. Maybe those chairs are better off in an RV.

 

See " Ina's Story"  for how salt became my passion in dressings.

Cooking for an army is easy. Thanks to Siobhan Powers who started me on frozen tenderloins. Who ever knew? So much of this kind of cooking is about not being nervous. If you leave out an ingredient, remember, only the salt, acid and oil, matter.

Ingredients and Guidelines

1 bag of frozen chicken tenderloins (Costco or Trader Joe's---TJ's bag is half the size) 

2 cups of home made Italian dressing ( this is for the 6 lb bag)

Several tablespoons of Kosher salt

3 to 4 freshly squeezed lemons

3  large cloves of garlic minced

Let the salt and garlic sit in the acid for an hour or so

Add olive oil so that the container has a little less than half in acid as it does in oil.

Shake it up, blend it, do anything you like with it, including throwing the lemon rinds into the marinade.

Pour into the 6 lb bag of frozen chicken

Shake the bag around a little. Distribute the liquid.

ADD

1 jar of Tamarind sauce

1 cup of Worcestshire Sauce

Let it sit in the resealed plastic bag in the refrigerator for at least a day. It will defrost.

Fire up the grill to high.

Put the tenders on until they get grill marks, flipping only once. DO NOT OVERCOOK. Just grill marks.

Heat oven to 225. Place the grilled tenderloins in an open roasting pan in one layer, spoon some of the marinade over the chicken and cook for about 15 minutes.

SALAD DRESSING

4 tablespoons of Kosher salt

Juice of 2 lemons

1/8 cup of white vinegar

1 tablespoon Poupon Mustard

Splash of Worcestshire Sauce

About 1/2 cup Vegenaise Mayonnaise (This brand is the only non egg brand that tastes like Hellmans. Buy it at Whole Foods)

1 small can of anchovies

Put all of this in a blender and throw in 1/4 cup of parmesan cheese. Keep tasting. I don't measure, but you will learn to judge by eye and taste.

 

 

 

 

A couple of audience members approached some of the mouse volunteers and asked for the recipes from the Landmark Academy event. It's ironic that Siobhan Powers who runs the Landmark Pre-School gave me the basics of this very simple chicken dish that I'll detail in Mouse News.  The salad dressing? Well, my mother was a maniac for garlic and salt. While other mother's in the 1950s made Celestial Seasoning's dressing pre-mixed, my mother fell in love with a dressing we were served in a restaurant in small town in the Berkshires. The restaurant was called the Hillside Inn. We ate there at least one day out of every summer weekend. We had to order our food a few days in advance because they brought in fresh beef, and they picked their own lettuce and  tomatoes which they served in a dressing with fresh cut up garlic, wine vinegar and what was probably a trough of salt.

We loved it. As the years went on, I became known as the Salad Dressing Queen. I'd grown up on real dressing. No bottle dressing ever passed muster in our house. Although my mother didn't really cook, the dressing we her signature contribution to my repertoire.

To this day there is no mystery even though I have added and subtracted many ingredients over the years. The three things that remain the primary taste in all of my dressings are olive oil, some sort of acid like lemon juice or multiple types of vinegar and excessive salt. The recipe will post on Mouse News.

BTW. I never use Balsamic except to cook with. The taste overwhelms greens, I feel. I traveled in Italy many times with a cook and they don't use Balsamic on salads often.

The Mouse house is abuzz with youth and talent this summer. Evan Streams whose has been maintaining our lists and organizing computer files, will be sharing the desk chairs and computer screens with Zachary Wheat, an Emerson College communications student, and Kafesha Thomas, a Wilton High School intern. We are so lucky to have these three bright, willing, young minds keeping us current and efficient.

Bill Bosch is counting down the days until his early retirement from being an educator. He's chronicling his 55 years in school, including his own schooling, until "School's Out." Read his columns each week here: http://goodmenproject.com/?s=Bosch.

Steve Di Costanzo's "Radio Base Camp" on WPKN, 89.5 FM on the dial and www.wpkn.org streaming or on iTunes will air or 3rd show on Monday, May 21, 2012 at 11pm. The hour-long segment  Mouse in the House is hosted live by both Chadwick and Di Costanzo. A compilation of four pre-recorded stories from previous shows.

The current issue of FAIRFIELD COUNTY BUSINESS JOURNAL features MouseMuse Production's business profile on the FCBuzz Page. "To Make a Long Story Short" summarizes the entertainment and community highlights of Storytelling programs.

 

I guess the right thing to say is "If you Build it They Will Come." That was a movie about "energy fields" and belief.

Today is the day we unveil our new website. The trip to this "reveal" has involved energy sources that seem to have landed in my mouse field as if they were UFOs. I'd started MouseMuse after I'd dissolved a company where I bit off more than I could chew (which if anyone knows me, they know this mouse is allergic to cheese) by starting with a metaphoric very big cheese wheel, and getting burned out too fast trying to produce shows that required filling 120 audience seats every time, and get the word out without a functional website.

Social media needs careful administration. Without it what I wanted to do was undoable. However, the Fairfield Theatre Company where I first started gave me a chance to try. Then, after some extremely good shows, and some pretty bad ones, I stepped back. But not for long. There was energy all around me. Good energy. Rozanne Gates, Gabi Coatsworth, Debra Coleman, Diane and Bill Effros, my husband, Richard Epstein. Soon it was an energy field that crackled with support and ambitious plans.

I had to reevaluate how much creative control I needed.  A lot, I learned. But I also had to rely on people who are expert in other areas and who question me. I need to be questioned or I could be delusional and try to propel my mouse self into a faster-than-the-speed-of-light-tizzy. I had to try be a good boss, but solo for where the buck stopped. The mouse is a replacement of the MGM lion. I wanted to roar, but not to scare myself and others either.

Each step along the way since July 2011, when I incorporated, has been both scary and exhilarating. I built the first website myself (with some tech help from Kevin Newcomb) and continued to add to it as each program grew. Starting with the Westport Arts Center to Fairfield Museum and History Center to the Gaelic Club to Landmark Academy to Matt Davies' barn, and now Two Boots of Bridgeport, there have been amazing people who have reached out to hear the full house of mouse squeaks, sharing the visions, but never a roar. I wanted to imitate the mouse that roared but certainly shook things up.

When my programs needed my attention, the website needed to be clearer. I had not known how fast I would grow. Robert Steven Williams, www.againstthegrain.com sat with me one day and said, "Your website is so 20th Century and this is the 21st Century." He pointed me toward WordPress designers who would not destroy the image I wanted to convey when I build the site, but who would enhance it and make it splashy, and fun, I hope.

We are still beautifying it and it is always a work in progress. Thank you to Mark Standish at CarlMarx designs for forcing me to put copy in categories and pictures in boxes. I couldn't have done it without him.

He landed in my energy field. If you read today's news on Mouse News, you will see that quite by date coincidence, new people started working with mouse muse this week, and even today.

We have show today. Stay with us, and send me any ideas you have to guest blog. This space has to be filled with bright energy sources. That means all of you.

 

One of the biggest hurdles I had to overcome when I started MouseMuse productions Storytelling was the fact that I didn't understand why certain storytellers who were very polished and proficient, including my then company partner who was Julliard trained distanced me from listening and relating rather than engaged me.

While my background is not in theater, I come from a long line of very entertaining people. My father was labor union mediator. It is said that his ability to tell a story was what kept New York City's building and construction trade unions from warring with one another to the point of crippling the City. My father would tell me stories of how strikes would be averted by severing underground power lines so that the electricians contracts would be ratified and the City would get back to work. Same with almost every service needed.

My father was not dramatic. He was more like an Irish storyteller when he did speak. He always got to the point, but he took you there visually and emotionally.

My mother, on the other hand, was a torch singer with Big Bands and it was only when she was on the stage that she communicated with others.  Her elocution alone made you say, "Actress."  She never told stories. She recited things.  She let my father do the casual storytelling. All of my father's brothers and sisters were hilarious, characters whose roustabout lives or memories of the past were shared at the Sunday family table. As is often the case in families, I considered myself much closer to my father's family. I knew who they were from their stories. With professional actors I never know who they really are, only what they are delivering to me in a form that is meant for stage.

The first storytelling I ever attended was Stoop Storytelling in Baltimore. Seven Storytellers for seven minutes. The ladies who ran the program shared some of their secrets with me. Neither one of them had a theater background. They were both published authors and one was a newspaper editor and lifestyle writer. The caveat I learned from attending Stoop Storytelling was "Watch out for the standup comics, and watch out for the actors, and more than anything , watch out for the writers who memorize. They will take seven minutes that feel like seven hours." That was what I learned, but didn't always practice. I had no confidence in what I was doing. In my Insider Arts columns for www.westportnow.com I never take an academic approach because I am everyman's audience. I have never studied drama and cannot dissect a play other than to say how I felt. I did take two three day workshops with Robert McKee at the Directors Guild. McKee is the foremost storyteller in the world. He is also someone that playwrights, screenplay writers and fiction writers flock to. Susan Granger, the film critic, told me if I was going to study that form there was no one better than McKee to study with. He made me a better prose writer. I understood character, story, connection. I didn't write a play.

What I didn't  understand in my own producing beginnings was I was bored hearing a story that had been told and polished up so many times that there seemed to be an insincerity.

One of the things we do at MouseMuse is coach. For free, for our show. What's the difference between rehearsal and coaching? In less than 30 minutes after you tell us your story extemporaneously,  you will receive written road map of where we got on your "highway" of words. Your vibe. And where we got off because you went astray or stepped out of your story.

We give you that road map on a piece of paper. Almost all of our storytellers now spend less than 15 minutes with us. They learn how to be their own GPS system in storytelling. We'll only need to spend 10 minutes with you and your ten minute or less story. No one on our troupe has serious expectations of doing this for a living, or evening earning a few bucks. It's the love of story that brings them together. There are no actors on our troupe, though we are open to hearing them all of my alarm bells go up when someone says, "I've been on stage a lot." That means they've been on script. Getting out of that pattern is tough.

We choose six storytellers each time. We usually have a dozen to choose from for each themes. We like to have three new ones, and three seasoned ones at each show. That way the audience will feel the new voices, the textures of human emotion as new storytellers go further out of their comfort zone, and old hands at the format meet prior expectations.

MouseMuse has grown so much that we separating  our Flagship Storytelling program that takes place in large venues and uses  one common theme for the six storytellers, ten minutes, no scripts,  into a second program during the summer months.

Our new "Storymaster's Jam " will have four of our best storytellers appearing in a unique pub setting with a stage and pizza and bar and cajun food: Two Boots of Bridgeport. Just like a speakeasy, the atmosphere matters.

There, our well-travelled storytellers, will have playoffs for merchant donated prizes. That will begin on June 12th. You will find all of the necessary information soon on our newly designed pages (I hope they'll be done by the end of this week.:)

What is the difference between storytelling, acting, standup comics and writers who memorize? You'll know it when you hear it. Actors often think they don't need coaching from non-actors, standup comics have a hard time keeping the narrative together because they need to deliver the one two punch as they've been trained, and, when you come to our studio, if you bring writing, I'll take it away from you. That's the deal. Previous experience doesn't matter. That's my great divide.