Ordinary Time

Curt Lund and  Laura Bidgood - What Happened? Productions
Slow Jobs:  Servicing America for $12 an Hour
U of M Rarig Center, Arena Stage
330 21st Avenue S. Minneapolis, MN

Friday, July 31; 8:30pm Sunday, August 2; 4:00pm Tuesday, August 4; 5:30pm Wednesday, August 5; 10:00pm Saturday, August 8; 8:30.  http://fringefestival.org/2009/show/?id=1105

In 2000, my daughter Maggie, then in the 8^th grade, took a barrage of career aptitude tests. They were same ones I had taken the year before during my midlife career crisis, after spending ten years in the automotive industry, writing abstracts of technical articles for Ford Motor Company – a decade of my work life I prepared for by obtaining a doctorate in Victorian religious literature.  There is an art to titling the thesis, just as there is an art to titling a Fringe show.  Mine was “Remythologizing the Bible:  Fantasy and the Revelatory Hermeneutic of George MacDonald.” In the era of deconstruction, speech act theory, and dime-a-dozen doctorates, not exactly an academic hit. I had not taken career aptitude tests in the eighth grade.  I had taken Home Ec. 

How do these things happen?  Why do we end up where we do?

When her results came back, I asked Maggie what those tests said she should be when she grew up.  She did not hesitate for a moment.  “A Nobel Prize-winning author.”  You do not have to be a product of the Repository for Germinal Choice to aim high.  We were unable to find any colleges where she could major in Nobel Prize Winning.  But both her father and I believe that a strong liberal arts education is necessary to the development of critical thought and the exercise of imagination. These qualities create favorable conditions for finding right livelihood. That, at least, was an opportunity we could provide.

This May she graduated from Hamline – Phi Beta Kappa, with a double major in history and religious studies and an honors thesis with the impressive title “A’isha and Fatima:  Matriarchs and Sectarian Identity in Medieval Islamic Literature.”  The hits just keep on coming. She was the Multifaith Alliance Coordinator at Hamline from 2005 to 2009, and the Inaugural Steven and Kathi Austin Mahle Scholar for Progressive Christian Thought.  She won the Eliza M. Drew Award in History, the Senior Religion Major Award, the Alfred D. and Hazel Stedman Writing Award and the Louis Parish Award for Service to Religious Life, the latter two years in a row.  Am I proud?  Not a little. She spent her junior year abroad in Ghana, has three years of Japanese under her belt, a year of Spanish, and a smattering of Twi. She’s also a crackerjack web designer and an aspiring artist with a show opening up at Cosmic’s Coffee on Snelling in St. Paul Friday.

And unemployed.  And living in my home.  Yes, I can send you her resume. 

At the moment she is interviewing for jobs teaching English in Seoul.  Hamline has good ESL connections.  Apparently half the 2009 graduating class is heading for Korea, because there are NO JOBS here. They have national health insurance.  She is learning Korean. I never thought I’d see the day when I would have to send my daughter to a foreign country to improve her standard of living. Stay away from the border, I tell her.  If Bill has to bring you back, I will be very upset. 

How do these things happen?  How do we end up where we do? 

I am glad Curt Lund and Laura Bidgood have ended up here. Their show is a Recovery Act of its own. Go see it.  Not only are they funny and intelligent, thus fitting my Thinking Woman’s Fringe filter, but they clearly enjoy working together. Two people who have known each other since childhood and are still a creative inspiration to one another – this is a rare and wondrous thing.  Worth growing up in North Dakota for?  I’m guessing yes.

I don’t know Laura well (though I did once know a Loretta), but from our production of Saving Pagan Babies together with Ann Reay and Loren Niemi, at the Spirit in the House Festival in February, I know it is easy to enjoy working with Curt. He is an openhearted, unpretentious artist who manages to integrate that vocation into his day job as Marketing Director for the Minnesota Center for Book Arts. I am pretty sure he is hiding tights and a spandex suit somewhere. (We already know he has a cape.) Because that’s my idea of a superhero. It should definitely go into his – ahem – donor profile. Such qualities are a lot more important being six feet tall with blond hair, blue eyes and good muscle tone. 

Or, for that matter, winning a Nobel Prize.  Even at the Repository for Germinal Choice.