At my mother\u2019s funeral I stood and spoke of music.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When your mom dies nothing makes sense. When she died I was working in a prairie, and when I was told, I collapsed among the tall grasses. My burly 6-foot coworker had to search for me amongst the goldenrod and sumac because he could no longer see me. He cradled me to his chest and showed me the baby birds that were born that morning, in hopes to soothe something that had broken within me. He spoke to me of grief, but I wasn\u2019t listening because I was too busy thinking of what to say at my mother\u2019s funeral. When your mom dies nothing makes sense.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I learned to love my mother as I watched her create and animate. On Chicago theatre stages, the woman who I knew to be my mom disappeared. The loving, imperfect woman who had created me was now someone new every night. Lady Macbeth and her famous \u2018out damn spot\u2019 monologue. The woman whose child had died at the age of four. The scientist who was slowly losing everything she knew to dementia. The toxic and venomous Imogen of Shakespeare\u2019s Cymbeline<\/em>. She was all of these women, but when she came backstage to kiss me during intermissions, she was always my mom. <\/p>\n\n\n\n As time persisted, I became accustomed to sharing my mother. She was Lia Mortensen\u2013 well-loved and famous in Chicago before I was even a thought in her mind. Her name held weight in an industry\u2013 albeit an undeniably niche industry\u2013 and nobody viewed her as a mother. She was first and foremost an actress. But, when she swept through the door past midnight to make a post show snack of nachos\u2013 she was my mom: someone nobody else got to see. At night, she sang lullabies I thought she had invented herself. And as I fell asleep to songs of horses and stars, I would think to myself that no one else got her voice. No one else got her music. That part of my mom was only seen in the dark corner of my childhood bedroom. That part of her was only for me. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In 2016, she was cast as Joanne in Stephen Sondheim\u2019s Company<\/em>. She had a solo: Ladies Who Lunch.<\/em> A wickedly bitter song about a woman unhappy in every facet of her life, thinking about the women who do nothing but lunch together. She spent hours and hours researching different renditions, mirroring her voice to fit Meryl Streep, Patti Lupone, Barbara Streisand, finally landing on Elaine Strictch\u2019s haunting and furious version.<\/p>\n\n\n\n