The Selkie Sings the Blues

I got the script for Selkie: Between Land and Sea

To my amazement the play is set in Orkney Islands, North of Scotland! Between work and my uncontrollable need to sing Proud Mary, Summertime, Work Song, Billie's Tune, Unlucky Woman and Preacher Man (and the like) throughout the day and into the wee morning hours, I've been unable to feign an interest in suppressing a Scottish accent and its spontaneous monologues that have been busy birthing themselves through me from out of the ether, like Spring flowers on the vine or mushrooms in the woods. I had remained in a strange artistic limbo for at least a month before this story rolled up and crashed over me. Since the day of my birth I've pined for the sea, and had a inexplicable fascination with cliffs. The sand and shore only chaffed against my skin. Restless, staring into the horizon, I found beaches almost repugnant at times.

As a teen, my family took a trip to to San Francisco and we brought my vintage-wearing cohort. As so many girlish bosom besties do, we jointly experienced psychic phenomenon together in both the portal of Muir Woods and the ruins of the Sutros Bathhouses. During our trip to the latter, I fell hard and tumbled down an impossible rocky bower on the cliffs of San Francisco with not a peedie of dirt or muck, nor a bruise or scratch, a concussion neither. During that fall, everything went black. I saw a birds eye view of a green grassy isle with bits o' rock like playful oblisks jutting up from the sea. Walking along, a quarter mile in from the cliff, freshly married on my way from church with my Honeybee to meet my mither-in-law for the first time. I had all my worldly goods in a small luggage bag. My hat blew in the breeze, and in running to catch it, I slipped and playfully rolled like a child down a slope. The cliffs were terraced. Instead of stopping at the first ledge, my momentum surprised me and I rolled clear off into the next patch of grass and off the cliff. I watched my self, caught in a crevice of water, surrounded on three sides by rocks, before I realized it was me. Turning to my screaming, crying love, I realized fate and the sea had stolen me away.

How often do you get to play a magical creature that sings and moans and calls you into the deep? Aye, this is perfection. And, if all goes well, we will be doing in next summer as a full production! The brilliant writer is an award-winning playwright and young adult fiction author, Laurie Brooks. I feel playing the mother is an initiation. I am honored that I have graduated from playing an ingenue! I stopped being carded last week, and now I get to have a fifteen-year-old selkie daughter. :) I've earned my forehead wrinkles/stripes. As a child I felt myself at least 200 years old. It put me into a state of shock that I didn't get called back for the part of Claudia, for Interview With a Vampire. Don't you know who I am? I thought somberly...half old woman, half child. Now, I'm a mom of a teen! A daughter no less. It must be symbolic.