Friday’s Odds and Ends

I’m so excited. I received my first ever written review for a performance for my role as Big Mama in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” The entire review is by Terry Mathews, the Arts Editor of the Sulphur Springs News-Telegram, has some wonderful things to say about the entire cast, especially the actress who played Maggie the Cat and the man who played Big Daddy.

The headline read: Cast brings life to ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’ – Leah Conner and John D’Avignon lead with brilliant performances

And the section about me:  Maryann Miller as “Big Mama” is to be commended, too, as the wife of a rich and powerful man. The play was written in the mid-1950s, so Big Mama is drawn as a woman who ran the house and her family with little concern for the rest of the world. She fusses, stews and frets about Big Daddy’s health and fawns over Brick, to the dismay of Gooper and “Sister Woman,” who have their eyes set on the future – when they’ll be running things, along with their six children. Miller brought just the right balance of confusion, devotion and denial to the part.

This is the scene in which I get the “news” about Big Daddy

I know I’m supposed to be humble and all that, but I just love reading the last line of the review, especially since Mathews, who rumor has it is very hard to impress, came to last Sunday’s performance when I did the last two acts so sick I wasn’t sure I was going to make it through the play. 

This  wouldn’t be Friday without a bit of a rant, so…. I’m wondering if the rising gas prices are a result of the oil companies pressuring President Obama to approve the Keystone XL Pipeline. “Of course not,” the spokesman for EXXON Mobil might say, but we all know the power of the oil industry.

Since I am still sick, I will keep this post short and end with a joke, courtesy of Funniest Clean Jokes :

One evening I went to visit my elderly grandparents. When it started getting late I asked my grandfather if he had the time, as I didn’t have my watch with me. “I don’t have a watch or clock around here he tells me.”

“Then how do you tell the time?” I asked.

“You see that trumpet in the corner? That’s how!” He picks it up, and thirty seconds later an angry neighbor shouts, “2:30 in the morning and your playing the trumpet!”

Finally, I’m pleased to announce that Doubletake, the first mystery I wrote years ago with a collaborator, Margaret Sutton, has been updated and re-released. It is now available in paperback and as an e-book. It was first released by a small publisher who did no marketing and the book languished until I got the rights back.