Life Stories - Families: Women and Children

“Women and Children First” is composed of three different stories, all about women and family, and each story draws its poetry and lyricism from the mundane, and how much more mundane can you get then checking the voice levels at the beginning of an interview? It’s truly the stuff that ends up on the cutting room floor, but in “Concerning Breakfast” it is seized upon and used as a structuring device that bridges much emotional and familial territory. “Breakfast” is a story about one girl’s struggle with anorexia, but it’s also about the effect her illness has on her whole family, and how, motivated by love, they try to understand something which to them is impossibly mysterious.

With “Trapeze” the set-up is so cinematic: a father talks to his daughter who is hanging upside down on a trapeze. It’s an arresting image offered to us through sound and language—language that renders a moment to us without belaboring its poeticness. It is casual, everyday even, but there is something here that exists in all good poetry—something that moves us while defying summation. It’s about father-daughter love, it’s about two people seeing the world in diametrical opposition, it’s about loving your children while all the while knowing they can fly away into the dangerous unknown at any time. The writing is so pretty and the production makes it feel very real and intimate.

What is poetry, at essence, if not a record of human beings relationship with stuff. Three hundred years ago Basho wrote about putting his feet against a cold stone wall on a hot summer day and how nice it felt. Once he’d written his haiku, did he want a piece of that wall as a keepsake? Margy Rochlin explores the seeming contradiction of why some stuff in our lives has value while other stuff ceases to have value. It’s a story about making stuff matter by simply deciding that it does, the energy that it takes to do so, and whether that energy is always worth it.