Making Connections:

You Be Mimi and I’ll Be St. Louis

Kathleen Kehoe Ruhl

May 16, 2011

My sophisticated granddaughter four year old Anna, early moved beyond children’s classics such as Margery Williams’ sweet ”Velveteen Rabbit: or How Toys Become Real” and Shel Silverstein's “The Giving Tree,” which both stress the importance of giving self to others until one’s fur is stroked away or one’s glorious branches reduced to sticks. Anna is a musical comedy fan--”Singin’ in the Rain” and “Sound of Music” are favorites. To distract Anna as soon-to-be-born twin siblings were about to cause major discombobulation in her life, we showed her a bit of “Meet Me in St. Louis” before bed one night. The next morning, Anna said “Okay, Kaki (my grandma name), let’s play. You be Mimi and I’ll be St. Louis.” “Oh, Anna,” I said. That’s not quite right. There’s no “Mimi” in the movie; ‘meet me’ just SOUNDS like Mimi and St. Louis in the movie is a city, not a person.” “Oh, no, Kaki. You are wrong. This is the way to play. You be Mimi and I’ll be St. Louis.” We did it Anna’s way. I was Mimi; she was St. Louis; we improvised a fine story; just not a story having anything to do with the movie on which it was supposed to be based.

Like many of you, I was asked for a title for a literary club paper before knowing what the paper would be about. I have long thought of the work of writers and teachers as “Making Connections,” and I’ve enjoyed telling the “Mimi and St. Louis” story. I hoped, combined in a title, these phrases might be funny, provocative AND give me a range of options, so I submitted “Making Connections: You Be Mimi and I’ll be St. Louis.” Then, over the last year, I have tried to figure out what the paper could be about.

I should have anticipated my own major discombobulation when last spring I decided it was more important to travel, to spend time with loved ones, and to act in plays (while I could still memorize lines) than it was to continue in my adjunct position in the English Department at the University of Illinois at Chicago. I retired effective May 2010. Either recently enjoyed Alison Lurie novels had inordinately tickled my fancy or some more primal force was at work, because, immediately and aimlessly, and, then, systematically, I read works about academia. Not that my academic work life had had much in common with what Saul Bellow, Mary McCarthy, Randal Jarrell, Zadie Smith, Richard Russo, David Lodge, Edward Albee, Bernard Malamud, Jane Smiley, Philip Roth, James Hynes, Kingsley Amis, and Lurie herself write about. I got a Ph.D. during my fifties for personal satisfaction, not as launching pad for an academic career. I was never burdened by and obsessed with publication, tenure and committee work like the pro- and antagonists of the novels I was reading, which satirized both the professors and the ideas that were fashionable during their lives in the academic world. Since these novels didn’t reflect my experience as an adjunct who didn’t depend on university paychecks to pay the bills, I decided my interest in them was somehow a response to my “retirement.” Even though I don’t have a single retired friend who isn’t busier and more engaged in the world than ever, and even though my varied interests suggested my experience would be like theirs, I was apprehensive about losing my identity as a university teacher, as well as losing the structure and stimulation of teaching.

My first months of retirement didn’t count because they were during the summer when, as a teacher, I have always felt out of my element anyway except when working on school materials for the fall. I had plenty to do that first “retired” summer in any case: moving to a new condo more than replaced the work of course preparation. Travel, being in a play, and thinking about writing this “Mimi and St. Louis” paper would take up my first “retired” fall so I was not without tasks. Nonetheless, discomfort clouded the summer and autumn air, then the winter air, and finally, this spring air. Who AM I without my university job and public self, without deadlines, without students and colleagues, without a workplace to go to? Who AM I NOW, I asked, as I continued to gobble up novels of academic life. One book stood out for me because it was more gently satirical and more affirming of academic life than the others: “The Department” by Gerald Warner Brace, copyrighted 1968, bought secondhand at some point but never opened til the summer of 2010. The narrator, a soon-to-retire relatively undistinguished professor of English, composes “farewell speeches” to his department to help him fall asleep at night. Toward the end of the book, he DOES retire and DOES give a speech. I didn’t do that; I snuck away from my department, avoiding “good-byes,” because I didn’t like to think I was RETIRING, just being away for the summer or taking a semester off. Not acknowledging my departure: another symptom of discomfort with the concept of retirement.

To give myself a “task” other than reading academic novels and avoiding writing this paper, I kept a journal during the rehearsals for and run of Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” (in a translation by my daughter Sarah) at the Piven Workshop in Evanston. I played the servant and nanny Anfisa. I have been a now and then actor, depending on other claims on my time, since my mother enrolled me in Children’s Theatre at the age of ten. During the last twenty years, I have been cast mostly as servants, teachers, and professors. What would novelists of academia make of that, I wondered? I hoped the “Three Sisters” journal might illuminate my reaction to retirement and lead me toward this paper. And it did--both--focusing my attention on the theatre and the school or university as the two workplaces I have alternately experienced throughout my life. No wonder; the characters in “Three Sisters” don’t long only for love and Moscow. As they try to answer the question of why they live, some of the characters look to “work” as their salvation. Most of the characters who actually DO work, however, are exhausted drudges. In any case, concepts of work permeate “The Three Sisters.” I began to ask myself : How are theatre and university workplaces the same and different? How is the work of acting like and unlike the work of teaching? Why are both so satisfying for me? What do I even MEAN by “workplace ”? What do I even MEAN by “work”? It was becoming clear to me then and is probably dawning on you now that writing this paper has been, for me, an exercise in adjusting to retirement. I hope my journey will feel relevant or at least entertaining enough to keep you awake after a good dinner.

Unlike probably most of you, I haven’t worked for pay steadily throughout my adult life. Sometimes I have taught only part-time. My most rewarding work has often been unremunerated as it was when I designed and ran a drama program at my children’s school; when I act as a mock patient for medical students at Rush; or when, for several years, I turned my pleasure reading into presentations for my sister-in-law’s book club. When I work as an actress, I am paid perhaps enough to cover parking my car. When I say “workplace,”then, I don’t necessarily mean a place where people are paid much or even at all. When I say “workplace,” I do mean a place where people come together in purposeful reflective activity even if much of their work is done alone or at another location. My workplaces have always extended themselves with “home”work; preparing for classes as most teachers will tell you is work that never feels “finished.” Actors learn lines alone and think obsessively about their characters and the implications of their lines. Teachers and actors have workplaces, but their work is with them everywhere.

Because of travel and moving, family weddings, and being in “Three Sisters,” I didn’t fully experience the loss of my university workplace til after the holidays last year. I spent January reading or staring at my computer, playing endless games of word twist, reading the New York Times, organizing my e-mail inbox or knitting while watching reruns of “Law and Order.” Having almost unlimited time to read should have been a wonderful gift, but, instead of relishing this gift, I began to question the whole proposition of reading as primary activity. What is the point of stuffing my head with new experiences and ideas if I’m not going to DO something with them? TEACH the books, arrange them in a syllabus, write about them? Intellectual activity wasn’t what I was missing, but intellectual activity by ITself and by MYself didn’t suffice. What I HAD been missing are the kinds of connections with ideas and people that occur in the workplaces I was used to. Without those connections, I wasn’t sure I was Mimi or St. Louis or even whether I was still in a movie at all. Giving up my university job made me lose my bearings. The solution to this problem? Consult books, of course.

In “The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work,” Alain de Botton offers a quick and enlightening history of attitudes toward work. De Botton says Aristotle saw a “structural incompatibility between satisfaction and a paid position.” Work was for slaves and animals; philosophy could only be practiced by men of leisure. Moving briskly along historically, de Botton says Christianity, although it didn’t characterize work as “satisfying,” at least valued work as providing expiation for sin. During the Renaissance, mostly only the work of artists was considered satisfying, but Diderot’s subsequent Encyclopedia valorized ALL work. According to de Botton (and I will now quote a large chunk of de Botton),

It was the 18th century that turned Aristotle on his

head. Satisfactions (previously) identified with

leisure were now transferred to the world of work

while tasks lacking financial reward were drained of

all significance and left to dilettantes. The 18th

century bourgeoisie yoked together what was

pleasurable and what was necessary. They argued

that there was no inherent conflict between sexual

passion and the practical demands of raising

children in a family unit and that there could hence

be romance within a marriage--just as there could

be enjoyment within a paid job. Initiating

developments of which we are still the heirs, the

European bourgeoisie took the momentous

steps of co-opting on behalf of both marriage

and work the pleasures hitherto pessimistically--or

perhaps realistically-- confined by aristocrats to the

subsidiary realms of the love affair and the hobby.

Thus speaks de Botton.

Most people I know (including all of Chekhov’s Three Sisters) ARE heir to de Botton’s idea that marriage and pleasure should be coupled. Most people I know (including SOME of the Three Sisters) are also heir to his idea about the coupling of WORK and pleasure, but many are not. Twenty years ago, I created a questionnaire for my college reunion; answers to a question I asked about retirement were sharply divided. Half the respondents couldn’t wait to retire to spend time with loved ones and favorite pursuits. The other half were so spooked by the very notion of retirement they didn’t even want to be asked to think about it. Now that I am in the early throes of retirement, that shoe fits me. However, given that work has always been for me a “love affair,” more about making a life than a living, why is retirement from a paid job such a problem? What exactly do I mean by work, anyway?

When I graduated from college in 1964, my friends and I felt superior to classmates who were “just” getting married. Like them, we wanted marriage and a family, of course, but we also wanted more out of life than driving a station wagon and playing a smart game of bridge. Unlike our daughters, though, who prepared themselves for careers sufficient to support them and their children should their marriages or spouses fail, we didn’t think of the “work” we would do as necessary to our own or our families’ financial support, but we DID think of work as necessary to the support of our sense of self-worth. One of Lily Tomlin’s characters in Jane Martin’s “Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe,”while laboring on her treadmill at the gym, says plaintively “I always knew I wanted to be “somebody.” I guess I should have been more specific.” Many of my peers and I weren’t very specific either. We just knew we wanted our work to be significant, worthy of our educations. If I had tried to be more specific, I might have said my idea of work was something to do with with generating and expressing ideas, with figuring out and representing the world. It would NOT have to do with physical or repetitive activities and it would not take place in my home.

Joe Bageant, a writer whom I stumbled upon recently, would disagree with my undergraduate notion of meaningful work. Bageant explores the seldom-written about white American underclass out of which he educated himself. In “Rainbow Pie: A Redneck Memoir,” he talks about how the subsistence Virginia farmers of his youth solved most problems that arose by doing and making things for themselves, speculating that the local general store circulated less than a thousand dollars a year. He describes the intense physicality of farm work, especially compared to today’s work in which “the body is a useless appendage” on the “electronic plantations” that are today’s most usual workplaces. Unlike Descartes, who “THINKS and therefore IS,” Bageant concludes that “work and life feel most meaningful when mind AND body are joined in a purposeful way.”

The first time I was on my hands and knees scrubbing my kitchen floor years ago, part of me was pleased: “ Hey, Mom would be proud of my doing such a good job;” part of me was appalled “why is a person with MY EDUCATION on her hands and knees scrubbing this floor?” Education had encouraged me to think of MY “work” as “special,” as “head work” and that the physical labor required to maintain a household was beneath me. Not that I have been especially comfortable hiring others to do domestic work; I have mostly done it myself, but I have done it with the Aristotelian attitude that the work itself, being fit for animals or slaves, could not possibly be satisfying. Thus, I have always been startled to find that I take pleasure in fixing my sewing machine or rejigging the vacuum cleaner or that I feel so good after thoroughly cleaning my house. These pleasures are guilty pleasures to me. Since they do not arise from “significant” work like teaching or acting, they don’t really “count.”

Joe Bageant would say these “guilty pleasures” indicate that my mind and body had,on the contrary, been joined together in a “purposeful” way that ESPECIALLY counts. He would also say my being dissatisfied doing little but reading shows life doesn’t feel as “meaningful” when body and mind are NOT joined in a task. In the theatre and in the English classroom, texts are analyzed: in the English classroom, analyzing texts leads to sitting alone writing about them; in the theatre, analyzing texts leads to embodying them, literally-- voice and body both demonstrating your interpretation.

The time of writing my dissertation was painful: the work was solitary, the process uncertain, the task a “head” task with no physical component: with, in fact, a disregard for the body’s needs. My daughters never said “you always seemed so happy, Mom, when you were writing your dissertation.” However, they often say, “you are always happiest, Mom, when you are in a play.” Being in a play, like writing, has an uncertain process in which you feel your way through false starts, dead ends, and wrong turns not sure where exactly you want to go until you find yourself there. As an actor, you navigate uncertainties with others, using both body and brain. Teaching engages the body less than acting, but is certainly more physically engaged than writing or reading by oneself.

I first went to graduate school in the 60ies, for a master’s degree in the Teaching of English. My work would be re-reading, then conversing about classic texts; helping students learn to write; and having my own classroom for all this teaching and learning. My salary was a second income, my work my pleasure, my “love affair.” How could it not be satisfying when a student cocks her head thoughtfully after something you say and sighs “Ohhhh, I never thought of it THAT way before.”

Parallel to my satisfying teaching “career” ran my sporadic acting “career.” “Career” is in quotation marks because, although my work was significant and satisfying to me, it was not financially necessary, so how could it constitute a “career”? On the other hand, I resented the idea that my teaching and acting were mere “hobbies.” I was not then familiar with Aristotle’s notion that philosophers are leisured and paid work is for slaves and animals. My attitude made community theatre a bit of a problem. Unlike many of my fellow thespians, I did not come to the theatre to make friends, fill empty hours or compensate for the tedium of a day job: I was in theatre because I saw myself as an artist. Directing high school plays was similarly vexing til I realized that being part of a production team gave students a sense of belonging that transcended even the value of “making art.”

That thinking of oneself as part of a team can be as rewarding as thinking of oneself as an artist was something my wise little daughters instinctively knew. When I occasionally took adult education classes, the girls, vibrating with grade school social insecurities, would ask “Did you make a friend at your class, Mom?” Huffily, I would say I had not taken the class to make a friend; I had taken the class to practice French or learn guitar. Later, during my Ph.D. work, studying the role of social interaction in the development of language, I realized that one reason I hadn’t stayed in the French and guitar classes was that I had NOT made a friend, NOT become close to my teacher, NOT made the social connections that support learning and art-making. My little girls had insights their teacher-mother had to learn from books. The social and emotional texture of a class is usually the background against which the work of the class plays, but, sometimes, the social and emotional texture of the class becomes itself foreground and the syllabus recedes in importance.

Even so, although CONNECTIONS among people in classrooms are vital, they are compromised because the teacher must give students grades. Interaction between actors and director is purer; they don’t grade each other. Moreover, the work of actors makes them more genuinely, profoundly dependent on one another than are fellow students. Students connect with each other and the teacher to further INDIVIDUAL knowledge or growth; actors play individual characters, but their goal is to make something TOGETHER. Making connections facilitates the work of students and teachers but is central to the work of actors. Mimi and St. Louis MUST connect with each other, or the play is just words on a page.

These ruminations all suggest that my recent retirement shouldn’t be a problem. I can still “join mind and body in a purposeful way” by acting. Even without a classroom, I can STILL read and write and think. Maybe I could even discover how to involve the body in reading, writing, and thinking! It should be easy to keep doing the things I used to do since I am willing to do them for free. What do I miss, then, by giving up my university appointment?

What I miss is a specific outlet for my headwork and the motivation to do it created by deadlines and audiences. Myriad ways exist to distribute headwork, but I never considered them because I’m used to the university doing it for me. A university gathers students for you; assigns a room; you show up, stand, and deliver. Since part of a teacher’s work is done alone at home anyway, what I miss is not the intellectual activity of the job but the interactions with colleagues and especially with students. Teachers aren’t teachers without students. To have a college, all that is needed is a teacher, a student and a log (the wooden kind) as Mark Hopkins’ student famously said.

Thinking about de Botton and how the 18th century bourgeoisie allowed “satisfaction” to permeate the world of work, I would say that the satisfaction in both teaching and acting is a mysterious amalgam of intellectual and emotional activity and the fact of its being done as part of a team, of fellow actors or a classroom of students. When actors improvise and, without planning, are all in agreement, all tacitly connected by their holding the tissue of the improvisation together, it is breathtaking, either to experience or to watch. The discussion in a classroom can have the same electric effect. Not having a team of students with whom to improvise in class is also missing a reason to understand things better because I have to explain them. It is missing challenges to reconsider and perhaps change my ideas. Missing students is missing my own opportunities to learn. My little daughters were right; the people in the classes keep you in the classes.

Despite a pedagogical stance that includes MY learning from and with students, teaching also gives me authority, the right to “be in charge.” Class discipline is not my strong suit; I dislike assigning grades. The idea of a job of “managing” people is off-putting to me. However, a teacher is “in charge” in the sense of being the one to set the “agenda,”creating and assembling materials for the class. The teacher is also “in charge of” discussion. Even when I turn discussion over to students, and however much I truly want them to “take over,” I am still the authority in the room and I confess to liking that position.

Missing students is also missing an audience to appreciate your performance as a teacher. I could create an audience for myself blogging or publishing, I suppose, but it’s most satisfying for me when Mimi and St. Louis are in the room with me. If, lacking a university, I don’t seek out my own students elsewhere, there is still acting. Being cast in a play is like taking a university position: the theatre creates the public and sells tickets; it gives you colleagues and a text to work on together. Actors aren’t “in charge” in the same way teachers are, but, in moments when an actor has a delicate speech to deliver and feels everyone in the house attending to her words, or in those moments when she nails a punch line and the laughter rolls toward her, actors ARE, just as much as teachers, in charge of the room.

Missing students is also missing people who need your help-- to sort through ideas and possibilities, to navigate bureaucracy, to pave the way for an interview or a job. Recently, I was strangely touched by seeing a test my son-in-law wrote for a course he teaches. What touched me so surprisingly were mundane comments to the students like “Be sure to initial all the pages of your test in case they get separated.” These workaday admonitions were poignant to me, I think, because they reflect the human connection of students and teacher, the emotional background to the foreground of the work of the class. If helping people is what I will miss, the world is full of people who need help.

Besides acting and finding ways to replicate the social pleasures of the classroom, I could look for satisfaction in my undervalued domestic arena, the pleasures of which I could begin to acknowledge without guilt. I have always (guiltily) prided myself on my cooking, decorating, and entertaining, but haven’t believed these activities significant enough to think of as an appropriate source of pleasure and satisfaction, as foreground. I thought of them as background, like paying bills and managing finances. Silly me. Any actor knows that if the people backstage don’t do their jobs, the actors can’t do what they do. Background and foreground NEED each other; one is not superior; they are just different. I have often said there are two kinds of activities in my life: Activities I really enjoy but am embarrassed to like and activities I don’t really enjoy but think I am SUPPOSED to like. I need to let myself value the BACKstage, BACKground stuff of life and heed whoever said “Be sure the things on your to-do list are important to you, because if you drop dead, nobody else will pick up your list to accomplish them.”

My sister reminds me of my new wonderful role: grandmother, implying that my six excellent grandchildren can compensate for losing my public working role. Her suggestion takes me back to my first pregnancy when people smiled at my belly and said “ahhh, you will never be the same after that child is born” and I smiled back, growling internally “oh, yes, I will be the same; there’ll just be another plate at the table.” My response didn’t mean I didn’t anticipate with pleasure the wondrousness of children, but I feared that, in giving birth, my sense of myself doing worthy tasks in the big world would go “pouf” and I would become a domestic drudge with a single identity: “mom.” The person who told me I would never be the same was right. Having children changed me radically just as making friends in a class immeasurably alters the experience of the class. The people in your life don’t just change the number of plates at the table, they change YOU.

Like an actor looking for a “through line” in a character as something to hang everything else on, I had somehow thought I had an immutable self that would remain the same regardless of my relationships. My reading and work as an educator tell me that is NOT the way things work. Education by nature, requires change, discarding previous conceptions and ideas. New conceptions and ideas get into our heads because of our connections with people. We have to be changed by others and they have to be changed by us or we only talk over each other’s heads like so many current pundits and politicians.

So, yes, the coming of my two daughters changed my life completely. However, I was partly right, too. Although I am not immutable as I once thought I should be, I didn’t cease entirely to be who I had been before I became a mother; I didn’t cease to teach or act, but I did what I did differently, and not just by scheduling my work to accommodate my children’s needs. The self I brought to teaching and acting was a CHANGED self, a self ENRICHED by the children in my life, just as it is by the grandchildren in my life. Didn’t my granddaughter Anna, after all, provide me with the title for this paper?

Years ago, when we took our children to Europe, I was worried I might somehow spoil the trip by being overly anxious. However, in the cab on the way into London from Heathrow, miraculously and unexpectedly comfortable and relaxed, I breathed a sigh of relief as I realized “It’s still just us. . only we’re in a different place.” Even though I can’t and don’t have or even want to have an imperviously immutable self, there IS SOMEthing I carry comfortingly from place to place. I am no longer a young mother. I am now a grandmother. I am a retired university lecturer. (THERE! I said it). But I am also still. . . me. I am just in a “different place” struggling with who “me” is now that I have UNmade a connection with my university. Am I Mimi? St. Louis? Maybe just “me” in a different place?

My work as an educator taught me the importance of people in the learning process, but, in my personal life, people have been another guilty pleasure. Something else was supposed to be the foreground, the thing of significance; the people and the domestic sphere would be background for that something else. I had not let my book knowledge about the significance of people seep deeply into me. I had kept that knowledge separate in my head, kept it from permeating my body, at least consciously, because, as it turns out, people have been foreground all along for me; I just couldn’t acknowledge it. In spite of my viewing people as “guilty pleasure,” as comforting background, while I looked elsewhere for “significance,” while I continued to think their presence shouldn’t be changing me, I WAS changing, my fur was being rubbed away like the fur of the “Velveteen Rabbit,” and my shape, literally and figuratively, was being changed like Shel Silverstein’s “Giving Tree.”

During the last few years, I have come to love taking pictures. My photos tend to the abstract: architectural details, nature as blocks and juxtapositions of color and texture. Where are the people on your trip, Mom, my girls ask as they asked years ago whether I made a friend in my French and photography classes. Where are the people on your trip? Why aren’t THEY in your pictures? People are hard to photograph. They don’t stand still. They move around; they disrupt the composition. And isn’t that the very point!!

Last week, I talked to my daughter Kate about my summer babysitting duties. As she delineated the hours I, as Kaki, would need to fill for her lively little boys, Anna’s cousins, Theo and Patrick, I was taken back to my front porch in Iowa sixty years ago, where, bored by summer, I corralled my brothers and neighbor kids to “play school.” Yes, I thought, energized as though heading for a “workplace,” I can “play school” with Theo and Patrick. I will plan some pre-reading activities for them and relate the reading to films they know, after which we can have a snack and then kick the soccer ball around until it would be time to . . .

Bring it on, Anna. You were right. We make each other what we are. We will make each other Mimi and St. Louis and then we will make each other into many many different Kakis and Annas and Theos and Patricks over and over again and a good thing, too

Writing this paper, however sedentarily, has helped me make connections for myself in this unfamiliar place of retirement. Thank you for providing the occasion, and for being such fine Mimis to my bumbling St. Louis.