Know Thyself, or Why You Should Definitely Come See Listen To Your Mother

Photo courtesy of Balee Images

Those of you paying attention to everything I do (Hi Jenn! Hi Laura! Hi Aunt Genocide!) already know that I'm in the Chicago cast for Listen To Your Mother this year.

I have to tell you, I am SO excited! I'm thrilled!

About everything except one teeny tiny thing...

Pictures.

I have unfortunately inherited my mothers total inability to hold still for a photograph. It's not self-loathing or poor self esteem, it's just fact. I take TERRIBLE pictures.

Truly, amazingly bad. My wedding photographers had a HUGE job, and accomplished MIRACLES.

This gets worse every single year, as I'm sure my mother will attest. The two of us understand what happens when a camera comes out. As they say, "Know Thyself." Well, I know myself. And Grandmommy knows herself, too.

My mother is a lovely, charming, beautiful woman. She is not the most graceful person on earth- she did manage to break her wrist pogo-ing into a car once. But in pictures, she looks like either she's a deer caught in headlights, or like she's being chased by a cement mixer.

Likewise, I know that I am an engaging, emotive, and dare I say moving public speaker and performer. But I know myself. I know that in real life, I don't look like somebody standing behind the camera just tore open their chest to reveal that instead of organs, they have a collection of doll shoes.

And I assure you, I do not REALLY look like this when I perform:

You know what? That's not true. I TOTALLY look like that. Pretty much all the time.

Suffice to say, I catch a lot of flies.

I don't just take ridiculous, open mouth photos either. I have an amazing array of really dumb expressions caught on camera.

Okay give me a minute- I'm going to pee my pants laughing.
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Moving on.

At each Listen To Your Mother rehearsal, there are an AMAZING duo of photographers from Balee Images immortalizing the magic. And I assure you, it is magic in the room with these fifteen incredible writers baring their souls together for all to see.

But no amount of talent can make me stop doing things like... well...

Courtesy of Balee Images
I believe the word I'm saying here is "whole," but it could be "beluga," or, "Help me I've choked on my own tongue."

Keep in mind, I was dressed like a pirate gypsy an hour before this picture. So yeah, I'm a delicate flower, yo.

The fact is that I'm a performer. I perform when I read, when I speak, and that means abandoning all sense of self consciousness and just GOING FOR IT. And that means that I look like I'm utterly unhinged when you take still moments of it all out of context.

And it's not just me. I promise you, a google image source for the phrase "actors making ridiculous faces" will have you in stitches for the rest of the day. It's facial aerobics. People who perform, they stand up and they perform, and that means running the risk every single second that somebody is going to snap a picture and make you look like you got a quick lobotomy on your lunch break.

At any rate, I THOUGHT no amount of talent could keep me from looking like every muscle in my face moves independently from each other while I talk. But I was wrong. Those rock stars from Balee Images made some magic happen.

Don't be distracted by the remarkably photogenic brunette with the green glasses.

Really what I'm getting at is this. You do NOT want to rely on pictures alone to experience Listen To Your Mother in Chicago. Because I will foul up those pictures with a vengeance, regardless of the brilliance of our photographers. If you rely on pictures, you'll have a series of funny faces that represent tiny moments of comedic or emotional brilliance, without the context of... say... a gesture.

It's like Ani Difranco says, "It took me too long to realize that I never take good pictures 'cause I have the kind of beauty that moves."

So true, everyone. So true.

I'm incredibly grateful there will be pictures of this process. I will look back on them for years to come, and no doubt feel the same pride and humility to share a space with these women, and tell stories, and experience the family of a cast. I will look back on every goofy face with love and joy. But nothing will convey the experience of being there like being there.

So make sure you buy your tickets soon- don't rely on pictures. Don't trust me, or any performer, to have any ability to convey the humor and honesty and rawness and most importantly beauty of this show in a single moment, frozen in time.

Get your tickets and come see it live. Because live? I rock. And so do the other fourteen ladies in this cast.

Come and feel the magic.

World Water Day #WorldWaterDay #waterstory

I've never gone without water.

I've contemplated it. When you grow up in the great lakes region, talks of climate change matter. They have immediate, real world consequences.

I remember the day I learned about global warming. It was my freshman year in high school, and our teacher did a segment based on a series of studies about the rising global temperature. Being a experimental, holistic learning school, we did more than study the science. We also used the science as a basis for sociological, historical, and literary learning. In Western Civilization, we talked about the history of human beings going to war over access to resources- including fresh water.

"In fifty years," my high school science teacher told me, "it's likely that half the world could be at war over water."

Because rising coastlines don't just drive people inland, they also contaminate fresh water sources with salt water. And de-salination is costly and difficult.

But we lived in Michigan, surrounded on nearly all sides by fresh water. Lake Superior, all by itself, has enough fresh water in it to cover North and South America in a solid foot. Which meant that if you were looking for a good long term investment, real estate in northern Michigan was a decent plan.

I sat on the deck of my parent's house, dipping my toes in the spring fed, potable pond where I swam all summer without having to think twice, thinking about people fighting every day for water.

I looked at the lush, green trees. I thought about the ducks and herons and frogs and turtles and fish and even snakes that shared my lake, and thought about the charts we made in Creative Problem Solving, of what parts of our ecosystem would be destroyed by a raising temperature.

I thought about all the fluorocarbons from the sixties and seventies, still eating up our ozone.

And I sponsored a child in Ethiopia with the last of my bat mitzvah money.

I did it to alleviate my own guilt- because it seemed so unfair that people were already living with drought, and famine, and they couldn't even get water. Water. And I was completely surrounded by the stuff.

In the last fifteen years, not a lot has changed. Those same flurocarbons are still up there, we're still making more, and the global temperature is still rising.

And there are still people all over the world without access to safe, potable water. 768 million of them. A tenth of the world population.

2,000 children die every day from drinking tainted water, the only water available to them.

And, as with nearly every problem in the developing world, it's even worse for women and girls. The lack of access to water also means fewer toilets. In fact, in many regions of the world where water is scarce, schools have no gender segregated bathrooms, and this causes girls to leave school as soon as they start menstruating.

And it falls on girls to provide water for their families. Each day, women in developing countries without adequate wells walk an average of four miles to carry water to their families. Instead of getting educations, they're carrying water.

Only one in three people on our planet has access to a toilet. To a toilet. And lack of access means that women in places like India have to travel through incredibly dangerous areas to find a toilet. Women risk sexual assault just to find a place to relieve their bowels.

So what can you do, right? What can you do to help?

First of all, you can donate. Just $25 is all it takes to provide a person with access to water and sanitation. That's all it takes.

And you can help raise awareness. You can call your congressmen and tell them to support the Water for the World Act. And on Saturday, World Water Day, WaterAid is hosting a social media to raise awareness. On Saturday, take a selfie with a glass of water, and use the hashtag #cheerstoH2O. Share your stories of a time, any time, when you didn't have access to water. When you knew how it felt even just a little to be without.

With awareness, we can start to bring about change. So let's all start there.