Chicken Little

"The economy is falling! The economy is falling!"

The Matron sort of feels like squawking about and looking for cover as financial behemoths collapse, all around her. (and everybody else, but she is generally accustomed to crisis being all about her)

Her baby brother is the Senior VP at the Federal Reserve Bank in New York, conveniently in charge of "Risk Management." She hopes he's gotten some sleep in the past six months. Matron to brother: "Please don't let Earth's economic structure collapse, throwing us into utter despair and ruin!"

That sort of pressure makes her reconsider the stress of teaching at the Community College, where the job's decisions are all: C or C+? Instead of utter global ruin.

Speaking of falling (and she was), the Matron hopes she can successfully navigate some of these tonight





while attending the Iveys. The Iveys are kinda the Oscars for Twin Cities theater, and guess who got herself invited?

That would NOT be the Matron.

No, Little Miss Helen Keller Ramona Von Trapp got a juicy ticket, thanks to the upcoming blind and deaf shuffle, with The History Theatre and Torch. Her mother and father are riding their daughter's coattails for the celebrity, free food and drink. And dress-up! The last time the Matron attended an event encouraging floor-length gown, she was at her own wedding (and was the only one thus encouraged).

But no matter how gussied up she gets--no matter how those heels shine and hair sparkles and Matron pops --there is one thing about tonight's presentation that is impossible to change and mostly horrifying.

She's the MOTHER of the child actor, in a building full of professional theatre folk. Decades of well-developed and deployed Stereotype follow in her wake. There is nothing worse than being introduced, as an afterthought, as the MOTHER of a child actor.

The father gets to be the proud parent. The mother is instantly dismissed as pathological. Trust her. Sometimes the director, choreographer or actor to whom the Matron is being introduced, will visibly recoil. It's that bad.

Sigh. What she'll do for a free gin and tonic--before heading to bed in a fallout shelter, with the family's life savings (Ha) in a mattress. Well, tucked in a small corner of a twin size.