I’ve been hinting about campers for a while…and here’s why: I’ve been working for the last few months to start a traveling theater company!! I’m including our new mission statement below. (As well as our logo, which I LOVE.) I’m also posting an essay I wrote in February, which offers a tiny bit of our origin story.
Friends, I am not being hyperbolic when I say this is the most excited I’ve ever been for a project…my first true love was musical theater. Singing along to cassette tapes of Broadway musicals was how I found my voice. And now, to be finding ways to perform AND bring musical theater to rural audiences…EEEEEKKKKK! It’s just too wonderful to believe.
Roots & Grass Theater Co
Roots & Grass Theater Co is a new initiative to bring high-quality, interactive, ecosystem-specific music + theater directly to underserved, rural communities. Our traveling productions are more than just performances–they are immersive, regionally-inspired experiences that celebrate the unique stories, landscapes, and culture of the prairie. We transform barns, fields, and main streets into living stages, forming connections through art that’s rooted in place and designed to inspire a deeper awareness of organic community.
In the next 12 months, we will launch our first two regional tours. One will be a semi-staged production of ‘The Grass Widow,’ a folk opera written and performed by Eliza Blue in collaboration with Jon Bakken, Sandra Kern Mollman, and Talon Bazille. The other will be an adaptation of ‘The Adventures of Pearl & Theo,’ an interactive readers’ theater-style show aimed at young audiences. Both shows will utilize the R & G camper that serves as a set, stage, and housing for performers on the road.
Birthday Campers
I have long believed that what happens on your birthday says a lot about the year ahead. This is mostly because what you decide to do on that day says a lot about what you value at that moment. But that's not the only reason. It is also because I believe life is more mysterious and crafty than most of us realize.
I came up with this theory in my twenties, and after seeing it proven year after year, I started to make birthday plans based on the year I hoped lay ahead. Did I want to travel more? A birthday trip. Did I want to focus more on friendships and homemaking? A cozy dinner party.
At some point though, I had to admit that the unexpected things that happened on my birthday almost always were more defining than the events I’d orchestrated.
Once I became a mom, celebrating birthdays changed a lot, but the theory held. For several years in a row, when the kids were tiny, one or more of us had the puking flu on my “special” day. Talk about a terrible omen! But that did feel accurate–most of those years revolved entirely around caring for and cleaning up after children. I am nostalgic for it now, but that was a very emotionally and physically exhausting time.
Last year, on a whim, I looked up airline tickets to NYC, a place I lived in my 20s and still love. Amazingly, I found incredibly cheap flights, so I spent my birthday showing my husband and kids a place that still holds a huge place in my heart. It felt like my young adult self and my middle-aged self were meeting for the first time, and that has been a very accurate metaphor for the year in so many wonderful ways.
Which brings us to this year’s birthday shenanigans. Tempted once again to try and influence fate, I told my husband all I really wanted for my birthday was a camper for my traveling summer shows, as well as camping on our land (preferably while sheep graze nearby). Some of you may remember that I bought a tiny teardrop camper a few years back for a similar purpose. I loved (and still love) that camper like a person, but I clearly wasn’t thinking about the future with that purchase. By last summer, it was already impossible for me and the kids to use it for gigs as the three of us could barely squeeze inside anymore, and truth be told, my husband had always been too tall to fit comfortably.
There were a lot of layers to the problem of finding a new camper, however. Like most things in life, when it comes to campers you can either find something that is cheap but needs a lot of work, or something that is very expensive (and will probably need work soon, because, well, it’s a camper…) In other words, you pay with time or you pay with money.
The other barrier was finding something small enough that my smallish vehicle could tow it, but that could also sleep all of us. Finally, though I was more than willing to compromise on this aspect, aesthetics are not entirely irrelevant, and I was secretly pining for an old-fashioned canned ham-style camper. After many laborious months of searching, I was fairly sure that the camper of my dreams was not going to materialize EVER, and certainly not for my birthday. But somehow I still hoped birthday magic would intervene.
I’m going to skip to the end here because of word count considerations, but in a truly stunning twist, I didn’t get a camper for my birthday…I got two. One will be for family camping in the pasture, one will be for gigs when it’s just the kids and I. Both are adorable, vintage, and also “rustic,” which means no amenities whatsoever. I don’t mind a bit. And I don’t know what that portends for the year ahead, but I’ve never been more excited to find out.
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