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kittywildegrrl · 2 years

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MAMA CAT STRAYS TO HOLLYWOOD

Part 1, A New Yorker Goes West

Good afternoon, darlings. Here I sit with delicious afternoon coffee, my second favorite coffee of the day, as we have established previously. I kept wanting to start the blog post about the trip and the movie and all like that there, but you know how I get when there’s all manner of Supreme Court madness and hideous gun violence and whatnot in the news. I stop writing for you and I go write to my Senators and my congressional Representative. I tweet politics. I also draft email content on various issues for a campaign now, too. My inner Sam Seaborn is well pleased.

First of all, I can’t break all of my four days and four nights in California down into one blog post. There’s too much. It was so dense, so educational, so magnificent, so humbling. So many adjectives, so little time. So there will be multiple stories. New York has always made sense to me; California is another country entirely. Many of those who dwelt in the City of the Angels in the Land of Cali made me feel welcome, but I was definitely not entirely in a land I understood. The adventure held highs and lows, literally and figuratively, and I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

I mean, come on, how long have you, personally, waited to say, “Yes, I have a film screening in Hollywood Friday night at the Dances With Films festival”?

Not real sure it matters how long or what age or any of those constructs, but I will share this much: You know MamaCat has had some very rough challenges in life. You may not know that I started acting literally 50 years ago, at age 14, when I got to play Winnifred the Woebegone in the summer school production of “Once Upon A Mattress”. Like so many teenage people playing a fun role in a fun musical for the first time, I felt like I had found my destiny and would surely have my own TV variety show just like Carol Burnett inside ten years, tops.

It wasn’t that I didn’t try.

And it isn’t that I’m not good at this stuff.

But life throws stuff at you, and there are many stories to mine, and some of them are pretty horrific.

The Very Brady 1970s didn’t guarantee a Very Brady existence – in fact, watching the Brady Bunch was about as close to experiencing healthy family life as I got. Poor home life leads to poor decision-making skills upon reaching chronological adulthood, and poor decisions have a way of layering up like phyllo dough, narrowing one’s options and damaging one’s progress into actualized adulthood. As I’ve said before, I’m no therapist, I’m just someone who has benefitted a lot from therapy, and I can see how one thing led to another in my own world.

So, scattered across the deserts and mountains of my life story, you’ll also find a couple of marriages, some inappropriate entanglements, overly dramatic and unstable parental units, and sheer exhaustion from surviving it all. Still I kept going. You’ll find that’s a theme with me. I rep strong women, I admit when I’m wrong, I survive and keep going. Life is difficult for most of us. I encourage you to keep going, keep taking positive action towards the good. And this is a story of positive action towards the good, a dream trip come true, the sweet experience of actually seeing a little personal victory.

No wars are ended, no diseases cured, no tragedies prevented in the larger scheme of things in this story. It’s just a story about how I finally got my fifteen minutes. I don’t even star in this thing, I’m just a supporting character w-a-a-a-a-ay down in the credits on IMDB. But I’m obsessed with my own work in it, and I think that if the Indy film community really focuses, they’ll see how I can be the campy Batman villain they’ve been dreaming of for [Name of Project].

I also think that if you’re someone who struggles with body dysmorphia and other self-image issues, I would like to let you know that, yes, you can grow up to see yourself onscreen and not hate the sight of yourself. You really can. That younger me in the mirror was wrong about everything when she insulted me, and if you know someone like that in your own mirror, please know that you can definitely remove their powers of hurtfulness. Keep going, keep taking positive action towards the good. Your mileage may vary, but I’m telling you, the road to self-healing is worth the trip.

That said, California was so many contradictions at once, I could barely absorb it. I’ve only been twice in adult life: once very briefly on my first honeymoon in the late seventies; and once very briefly about twenty years ago, on what I thought was a date but that’s another story never mind. My primary memories of California come from the very groovy sixties, when I was a little kid, and California in the summer was the escape route from the usual abuses and nastiness of life at home in Phoenix. There were maybe one-third as many humans on the planet, and at the beach. It was a time when having neglectful parents had an upside, because the beach life of 1960s Southern California was a safer environment for a little kid to wander around in unsupervised. I knew, of course, that “my” California had long since vanished, but like the changing face of an old friend or a favorite performer, you still want to see the changes for yourself in order to understand the time that has passed.

So part of my trip was all about the movie premiere, part of it was about the full-circle experience of revisiting, and part of it was the usual judgmental cultural observations my inner critic makes all the time anyway. And the hidden agenda was, this is the kickoff source material for “Travels with Granny,” which is a planned segment of “Granny Has A Podcast,” which will feature on “Granny Has A YouTube,” which is all an outgrowth from me getting home from VO Atlanta and saying to myself, “Traveling as a sixty-something woman in a post-pandemic environment is a whole new ballgame,” and “I am good at travel advice,” and “ALL I REALLY WANT TO DO IS TRAVEL.”

Which is a whole ‘nother story, as the saying goes.

So I have things to edit, and things to tell you about, and a whole new sense of personal momentum in a world gone mad. My coffee is cold, the kitchen wants cleaning, and I’ve still never finished the soundproofing in the studio. But mostly, what I have for you today, is this photograph of the actual Brady Bunch house itself. For behold, I found an awesome vintage lodging place in Studio City, and not five minutes’ drive away, I truly came home at last. For lo, I had come unto Mike and Carol and Alice and the kids. You could almost hear Tiger barking.

Meow, darlings

It's the story. 💖

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