On lessons lost and found
Spit Like a Big Girl’s Clarinda Ross on stepping up, being kind and being human
By James Scolari 05/21/2009
It’s a big wide world channeled into in a one-woman show this month with Clarinda Ross’ Spit Like a Big Girl at Ventura’s Rubicon Theatre. After the untimely death of her father, Ross accidentally discovered new dimensions to his wisdom, captured in his voluminous journals. That wisdom carries down to inform the care of her own daughter, whose disability rendered the lives of her entire family in the hues of the extraordinary.
VCReporter caught up with Ross for this Q&A on the eve of the play’s world premiere:
VCReporter: I was struck, in thinking about Spit Like a Big Girl, and also with your last show, From my Grandmother’s Grandmother Unto Me, by this idea of the legacy of what the past leaves us. In this case, you had the terrible unexpected loss of your father, but then you found something he left behind.
Clarinda Ross: I know! There’s a theme throughout Spit Like a Big Girl, of happy accidents, of making plans that are upset by some accident, and what happens as a result. So, yes, after the unexpected death of my father, I found that he had kept journals; it was so wonderful, such a great and unexpected gift. Daddy used to say he was an educated redneck, and there’s nothing more dangerous than that, ’cause you got book learning as well as “walking around sense.” He had such people skills, he had a sense of everybody – he could talk to heads of state and the janitor; he was just comfortable in his own skin. I think many of us spend a lifetime chasing after that, just trying to get comfortable in our skins. The first act is about me being Daddy’s girl becoming a Big Girl, and the second act is all about my daughter Clara, who’s disabled, about her becoming the Big Girl . . . and the idea is that if you have children or really any special person in your life, you have to be your bigger self. They need you to rise up, to become your biggest girl, or biggest boy, for their sake. You know, one day, sooner or later, everyone is going to know a disabled person, is going to have to learn to become a caregiver. There are accidents, illnesses, or just simply, eventually, old age. You’re going to have to have a kind word, and empathy — and deal with people on a really human level. It just happened to me younger.
VCR: The playwright David Mamet wrote, “We’re all put to the test, but it never comes in the form or at the point we would prefer.” Maybe we’re enriched in that process, though. Maybe it’s life’s tests and losses that yield the true riches.
Yes. We take our experiences from childhood and our upbringing, and that supports us in how we maneuver throughout life. There’s this picture that we put up on the screen during the show, of this road, this red Georgia clay, and I talk about how I’m still on that road. There’s something we get from who we are and where we come from, stuff that we carry; but sometimes it carries us, too.
VCR: In acting school they’re always telling you that the heart of acting is in being a great listener – in being really present with the person you’re working with. But you’re up there all alone. Perhaps you’re hearkening to voices from other times, which are still speaking to you…
Yes! I am hearing voices of my ancestors — but also the voices of these people, who come to this play every night. I look out there and say “Does that happen to you, too?” Sure, I love being in a great play with lots of other people. But I’m actually playing about 40 different characters up here, so I’m not really alone at all! And the audience is so great, they’re my real acting partner. We interact at a bunch of points during the show — so they become my ensemble, and it’s different every single night. It just really feels like it’s me and them, in it together. That’s how it all started, you know, just me reading pieces of Daddy’s journals to small handfuls of die-hard patrons. I still do some film or TV now and then, but I keep coming back to the theater, where I just feel like this with the audience (crosses fingers). It just has always felt like if I can just get together with my people, we’ll all be just fine.
Spit Like a Big Girl runs through June 7, at the Rubicon Theatre. 1006 E. Main St., Ventura. 667-2900, www.rubicontheatre.org.
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