On The Stage With Pam

It was many years ago... Well, if I'm going to be honest, I cannot even recall how long ago it was. I've hit forty years old since then, and it seems that my mind is intent on getting a head start on forgetting things, misplacing things, and not understanding the things being said by "kids these days". Let's just go with- Long and ago, I first met Pam. It was when I was in the play "Dracula- The Musical?" And, at the time I was sharing a stage once again with Tonya Rudick and for the first time with Pam Leptich. She was playing the character Boris Renfield, a madhouse patient. And, she did so unabashedly and with much aplomb.

She really was, and still is, quite striking. A gloriously tall woman who somehow commands a room simply by being in it. She was costumed in an orange jacket that screamed to be assumed a straight jacket. A fantastic coif of curly hair adorned her head. And, unbeknownst to me at the time, the ever present Converse kicks tied neatly onto her feet. Sure, she's incredibly beautiful to look at on the stage as well as off, but where she shined, and continues to do so, in my eyes was the myriad mannerisms that accompanied her voice- a voice that demanded to be heard. Fantastic facial expressions, hand gestures, how she walks and moves around the stage, from the incredibly minute to the largest of movements- it all just seems to happen without thought being given to it. It is always so natural. There is no need for the "suspension of disbelief". That has never changed and is as true today as it was then.

When she takes the stage, she takes it, it is hers, and you aren't apt to get it back until she is no longer on it...and even then it can be iffy. The best part of it? She doesn't actively do this. It just happens. There is never even a touch of "diva" to it. No intentionally going out of her way to upstage anyone. She just has a... a presence. And for the most part, I don't believe she is aware of it whatsoever.

I recently had the opportunity to sit and speak with her- just the two of us. She had agreed to help me by sharing the stage in a small vignette in an equally small and unassuming production. Perhaps my wording there is a bit too flowery. She agreed to take part in a skit about Mayahuel, the goddess of fertility, agave, and Tequila…you know, the goddess with four hundred breasts…in a short skit filled with as many innuendos as possible written by one of our other Playmakers. Yes, flowery sounds about right.

Anyway, I'd known that she had written a play, but apart from that I knew little else. So, when she brought it up after agreeing to help me by being the titular character (no pun intended) in the Mayahuel skit, I was eager to hear. She handed me a manila envelope that clearly contained a small stack of paper. I pulled the papers out of the envelope as Pam stated that it was the current version of the script she'd written. She asked if I'd be willing to read the part of Betty in a cold reading for a small group as a kind of introductory look. I said yes before I even looked at what the script was. Persnickety Or The Ironic Passion of Carlicious by Pam Leptich. I had no clue as to what the plot might entail, but with a name like that I knew I wanted to find out. I was looking forward to the read through.

A few chairs for the "actors" found their way as far downstage as possible, a small group of people were seated waiting for things to get started. Things finally fell into place and so we read. It was the strangest thing...I knew the characters. I'd grown up with these people...I was reading a script about a fictitious group of people that were almost exactly like many of my family members. After the reading was over, I wanted to see the play on the stage in front of a full house of theatregoers. Carlicious, her family, her friends, and her "history" were very intriguing to me.

I kept thinking about this play. If you know me, you know that I have a habit of overdoing things, and this was probably going to be no different. I had questions… Oh, did I ever have questions. I knew I needed to tone down my excitability and pare down the amount of questions. I knew if I didn’t I’d sit there rapid firing them at her. “Where’d you get the idea? How long did it take to write this? Will you write more? How did you decide on names? Was anyone based on someone in real life? What size shoe does Carl wear?” Yep, I’d do well to calm down. Mainly, I wanted to know how long Pam "was aware of Carlicious and all that revolved around her". And so... I pestered her about it. Eventually, Pam agreed to answer a few questions for me. So, I prepared myself to conduct a short interview, and decided that when writing it, I wouldn’t stop myself going off on wild tangents of my own...

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Me: How did you meet Carlicious? Did she come to you all at once? Or in bits and pieces?

Pam: Carlicious started in my mind three decades ago as an eccentric aunt. She had a secret. A curious niece discovered secret writings in an attic. She was quite vivid to me. Would you like to "meet" her? Here. This is the earliest "version" of Carlicious:

Me: Oh, wow. She is fantastic. If anyone were to be named Carlicious, it would be her. No way this sweetheart could keep a secret! Especially for three decades. I can only imagine what hiding any secret that long must've done to her over the course of that length of time.

Pam: Oh, absolutely. That could be the majority of a lifetime. And, Carlicious declined or grew, however one might determine, into an angry old lady with numerous grudges against society as a whole. Then her anger dissolved into a gentle lady who told stories about elephants to young people on the beach. But, Carlicious always had a secret.

Carlicious always had a secret. That's...well, that's something to which everyone can relate. Look at Carl's funny photographs, take away the idea of a hidden secret, and what do you see? A stereotypical eccentric character that you can expect in any one of the exhausting romantic comedies that litter community theaters. You know the one, the character that really only exists as someone the main character should strive to avoid becoming. Overly charming, begins most sentences with a laugh in her throat and a grin on her face, and has graying doilies on every single surface in her living room...which has a very, very large overstuffed sofa in the middle of the room and is zippered in clear plastic.

Now, look again. Give Carl a secret, doesn't matter which one. Perhaps she was the one who took the diamond ring out of her friend's handbag when her group was playing bridge, or maybe she was the one who kept subtracting from the offering plate, or she was the cause of her elderly mother falling down the stairs that day. She put her hand lightly on her mother's frail shoulder as if to steady her, but instead she propelled her forward to her fate. Can you see a secret hiding there inside of this smiling woman? The funny thing is... I'm far more apt to believe in the version that has some skeletons in the closet. I mean, don't all of us? That's NOT to say that I think Carl is "villainous" and is hiding something exceptionally sinister. And, I get the feeling she loved her mother deeply and could never do anything like that to her. This secret is far more hinted at than anything else. Something inside of her peeking out when she smiles as if to say, "Don't push me. There is so much more to me than you know." That’s not only something to which that everyone can relate, it’s also something that makes for an incredible character.

Me: What about the plot line to Persnickety? Was that a process or were you one of the lucky writers who had a nearly complete plot from front to back bloom in your mind one day? Or was it more along the lines that snippets of Carl, Betty, Robert slowly revealing themselves to you?

Pam: The plot of Persnickety always revolved around a secret and around Carlicious. What the secret was and how it would or would not be revealed did not occur to me all at once. In fact, I have added scenes, deleted scenes, added characters, deleted characters, added conflicts, added resolutions, and played with words throughout the process of writing.

I can easily vouch for that. It was an incredible thing to watch Pam take ideas from the actors around her, mull them over for what looked like a fraction of a second, and then actually begin to incorporate those ideas into her work. That's Pam though. Always happy to try and see things from a different perspective. I believe that each time she would stir in ideas from others they would take that as quite the compliment and shows just how much she trusts those she turns to when making decisions...

Pam: Lines and scenes come to me in the shower, in the car, in bed. One thing I have learned…write everything down as it comes. Sometimes I don’t even bother to towel off until I have written down what came to me in the shower.

To top off this impromptu "interview/Q&A session"- given by someone who probably has little to no business whatsoever being behind a computer screen and in front of a keyboard- she shifted in her seat, leaned forward, and pointedly said, "No work of art is ever really finished."

And with that, she rose to her feet, flashed that lazy grin of hers, and she and her pink Converse tennis shoes walked out of the theatre into the orange fire glare of the setting sun.

No, Pam, no work of art is ever really finished.