Wah-wah

The second play I was ever in was The Miracle Worker by William Gibson. It was a summer stock company in Cortland, New York, and I was ten. I played Martha. Who's Martha, you ask? She's Helen's "friend." Her slave friend. Yes, that's right. In a feat of casting that baffles me to this day, our friends at Cortland Rep cast the whitest people they could find to play the three slaves on the Keller farm - me, a blond boy a year older, and a blonde actress to play our mother. No, we weren't in blackface (thank god); just a lot of dirt.

Now, I'll concede that they probably tried to cast locals and Cortland probably wasn't the most integrated of towns, but you are telling me they couldn't find anyone from the city of Syracuse willing to make the trek down there to be in a play?

Let's move on.

It's the climax of the play (or the movie, for those of us not fortunate enough to be viewing Broadway plays in 1959 or weird all white productions from 1979). I'll let Wikipedia recap for us:
The "miracle" in The Miracle Worker occurs in this when Sullivan and Keller are at the water pump refilling a pitcher of water. It is in this moment that Helen Keller makes the intellectual connection between the word Sullivan spells into her hand and the concrete substance splashing from the pump. Keller demonstrates her epiphany by miraculously whispering the word "Wah-wah," the baby talk equivalent of "water."

Today's sign language class was...exactly nothing like that. We (and by we, I mean Mac and me. Eliza had much more important things to do like chew on Mac's sandal and clap her hands in bids for attention) learned signs for "milk," "more," "eat," and "cat" (also "dog," but as we don't have a dog, not so useful) and were then told we weren't allowed to use anymore until the babies demonstrated a comprehension of those few. Well, okay, I guess I can buy that, but did you really need 90 minutes for just that? So to fill the rest, the instructor, who was great, btw, and whom I don't wish to malign in the slightest, taught us a lot of those signs that we aren't supposed to use yet. It's worth pointing out here that everyone in the class is a new parent and I'm guessing they suffer from the same brain disintegration that I do. The odds any of us will remember those signs? I can't remember them now. Point made. We resisted the urge to buy a book or a dvd, agreeing that if we could commit to these few signs and Eliza got on board, THEN we would move on. And probably take another class. Because that's what we do.

We also learned the ASL alphabet, something I learned during said production of The Miracle Worker. My friend, Katie, and I had great fun trying to talk with each other, laboriously spelling out words. It was especially fun to do it into each other's hands, a la Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan.

The rest of the day was not as great. Mac is headed off to London tonight so we're on our own again for a few days. Something in Miss Eliza's solid food diet didn't agree with her today and she's rather constipated (come on - it's a baby blog. Did you think I wouldn't mention poop?). We bought her some prune baby food. She liked it. Hopefully it will do its job for her. Yeah, it's a glamorous life, but someone has to live it.