It’s been a week for powerful women. Tuesday night, Vice President Kamala Harris castrated Donald Trump in front of a national television audience. Thursday night at the Rochester Fringe Festival, six women took the stage to deliver monologues that deflated the legacy of another president, John F. Kennedy.
That Woman has played throughout the country with different actors re-creating six women who had intimate relationships with Kennedy. For this Rochester show, which returns to the ROC Cinema, 957 S. Clinton Ave., for a 9 p.m. Sept. 21 encore, it was five local women taking on the roles.
Katrina Davis as Ellen Rometsch, a party girl and East German spy. Kesha Sharee Hartzog as the famous stripper Blaze Starr. Meagan Zdep as Mary Pinchot Meyer, an artist who was formerly married to a CIA official, and who was shot to death in a still-unsolved murder. Elizabeth Saunders as Judith Exner, who wrote a book about her affairs with Kennedy and a pair of Mafia mobsters. And Joanne Brokaw, as Kennedy’s wife, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
Molly Breen is Mimi Alford, a White House intern. The only non-local member of the cast, she is the co-creator and director of That Woman, and plays Alford in each of the travelling productions.
Of the women in this history, only two survive today. Rometsch and Alford.
With the stage bare, save for a single chair, one at a time the Kennedy mistresses, and the president’s wife, told their stories.
First it was Davis, as Ellen Rometsch. “Yes, I like to party,” she conceded, while defending herself against accusations that she was a spy. “If a woman likes to have fun, does that make me a whore?” Yes, men said she looked like Elizabeth Taylor, and wanted her company. “Who’s gonna turn down a free trip to Bourbon Street?”
But a confession? “He took it to the grave,” Rometsch said of Kennedy, “and so will I.”
Next up, Hartzog as Blaze Starr. At 18, she was already “the town tramp.” An abused kid who had been kidnapped and sexually assaulted, “the more I cried and fought, the more I got punched.” She was “infamous for my famous rack,” working politicians and the porn industry, even propositioned by arresting officers. Her affair with Kennedy was in 1952, while “Jackie was away.”
“Loving powerful men was part of my life,” Starr said. “I was art. I was fantasy.”
Breen, as Mimi Alford, was a summer intern at the White House, although “I didn’t have any skills.” Swim parties led to Alford’s “first sexual experience,” with the president of the United States, a relationship that went on for 1½ years. Alford tells of how she was in the White House the night that news of the Cuban Missile Crisis broke.
She always addressed him not by his name, but as “Mr. President.” He broke amyl nitrate capsules under her nose for an instant high. When Kennedy went off to Dallas, Alford says the president told her “he would call me when he got home.”
It was November of 1963. And that call never came.
Alford defends her role in the story of the Kennedy presidency. “It seems historically inaccurate,” she says, “to pretend we do not exist.”
Zdep’s portrayal of Mary Pinchot Meyer casts her as a pacifist and a housewife, whose marriage broke up after her 9-year-old child was hit by a car and killed. She was also an editor at Atlantic Monthly, which had her circulating in a highbrow crowd. It was a crowd that had access to Kennedy, who Meyer describes as “an incessant talker.” Conversations about the world and politics. But also, “I likened his behavior to a predator.”
Of Kennedy’s assassination, “Not everyone gets a death so quick and painless. I didn’t,” Meyer says, recalling her own murder. Shot to death by a stranger while out walking one evening.
Saunders’ Judith Exner was working in Las Vegas when she entered Kennedy’s circle through an unexpected endorsement. “If Frank Sinatra says you need to meet someone, you follow along.” Kennedy’s loyal staff members worked to keep his trysts out of the public eye, Exner says, and at one point in the relationship she had an abortion.
“Being in love with Jack Kennedy was the easiest, and hardest, thing to do,” Exner says. “I knew, deep down, the story would not have a happy ending.” It did not, for either of them. “I spent the last 24 years of my life trying to fix the narrative.”
And finally, Brokaw. Her Kennedy Onassis is emotionally distant from all of this chaos. “I’ve been gifted with the ability to shut off emotions, like a switch,” she says. She looks at her marriage to the president as “a contract.” Kennedy Onassis says, “I know I must sound cold to you,” choosing to spend her time studying art and history. “It’s safe to be passionate about these things.”
Over time, she kept her distance as best she could. But for all six women, there is no safe place from history. As Kennedy Onassis pleads: “How can 10 years frame an entire life?”
Oh no, Scott Regan is playing John Prine’s “Lake Marie” on “Open Tunings,” his morning radio show on WRUR-FM (88.5). That song always makes me cry.
The country appears to have united behind the Bernie Sanders meme. Bernie sitting in a folding chair, in his dazzling mittens, huddled against the cold, waiting for the start of the Biden inauguration.
I’ve been doing that since I was a little kid, when my Uncle Joe gave me what’s called “A Golden Guide.” Profusely illustrated pocket books for kids, about things like fossils, the stars and zoology. This one was called “Rocks and Minerals” – Golden Guides get right to the point. They tell a kid how to identify a meteorite, although I never got that lucky. Most of my time was spent on pages 110 through 113. The igneous rocks. Granite. And pages 133 through 139. The metamorphic rocks. Gneiss and schist.