Connections

I have just returned from four weeks performing in the show "Church Basement Ladies" at a small theater in Macon, Missouri. I had never heard of the theater or the town before I went there. Instead, the show found me. When casting the show, the artistic director called other directors for recommendations of people he might cast. He asked a director in Illinois that I worked with three years ago if she knew any comedic singers who could pass for a Minnesota Lutheran. She said that she actually knew a Minnesota Lutheran. After a short conversation and submitting my reel, I was offered the role.

I got the job through connections, but the connections did not stop there. I had multiple connections with other actors in the show, one of whom had been doing the show for two years at various theaters. I had connections to the Minnesota Lutheran culture of the show, and connections with the Lutherans who came to see the show. At each performance, we could gauge how many Lutherans were in the audience by the amount of laughter we got as we all said, emphatically, "This is most certainly true" (an important phrase for Martin Luther). If we got a big laugh, we knew we had a connection. If not, people still enjoyed the show, but on a different level.

I even had connections to the props. The show has so many props that the company that created the show rents out the props. We received 10 big bins of shellacked krumkake, lefse, bars and jello molds, among other things. We also received recipe boxes that reflected the personality of each character. An actor friend from a previous production emailed to ask if I'd found her recipe in her recipe box. As it turns out, many of the people who do the show write a recipe for the recipe box, and those recipes continue to travel around to future productions of the show. I wrote my recipe for red jello with bananas floating in it (the secret: refrigerate for about an hour before adding the fruit so that it doesn't all sink to the bottom). In that small way, I will remain connected to the show as the props travel to the next theater.

This is Most Certainly True.