BRAVING THE COLD FOR THEATER IQ

AMT Theater
6 days ago
3 min read

Despite Storm Fern and the frigid temperatures our friends and supporters joined us for an evening of celebrating all things Horton Foote and increasing our theater knowledge.

Theater IQ, AMT Theater Project — Some of the brave souls who came to Theater IQ

Thank you everyone for coming and supporting our second Theater IQ event. Janet's pianist friend, Harry, played the piano as people arrived and mingled, all the talented actors (ahem, myself included [imagine a laughing face]) and all the people who helped get this night to happen were there to listen to a great play and learn about Horton Foote. These events, no matter how simple they may appear, take months of planning, I am sure people started to dread my emails, but it was all worth it.

This night was particularly wonderful for me because it brought together my three favourite not for profits in NYC, three organisations and people that have walked this long journey with me and made space for me to laugh from the depths of my belly and cry from heartache so profound there seemed to be no way out. So these three places close to my heart, AMT Theater, Horton by the Stream and Smoky Marys, came together to read a beautiful play, talk and ask questions as well as to eat and be merry with each other. The best way to spend a freezing night quite frankly.

If you have been wondering this entire time what a 'grass-widow' was then let me tell you, in the context of the play Talking Pictures by Horton Foote it's a woman who is divorced. Which made me chuckle, does this mean us in the divorce club are put out to pasture? I usually prefer to allow my imagination to make up the reason for terms like this, but since this is a public platform and Theater IQ is all about increasing knowledge I felt compelled to find the actual definition and origins, so here you are:

Word History: Grass widow is first recorded in 1528, and originally referred to an unmarried woman who has lived with one or more men, a discarded mistress, or a woman who has borne a child out of wedlock. The grass in grass widow seems to have originally made reference to the makeshift bed of grass or hay (as opposed to a real bed with a mattress and sheets) on which a woman might lie with her lover before he rises and abandons her—leaving her a widow, so to speak, in the grass. Throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, grass and the color green in general had sexual connotations, in allusion to the green stains left on clothing after rolling in the hay. (The lyrics of the 16th-century song Greensleeves, for example, give voice to the sufferings of an abandoned lover.) By the middle of the 19th century, however, grass widow had come to refer mainly to a wife whose husband is temporarily absent or one who is living apart from her husband. In colonial India, for example, it was used of British women who, during the hot season, went off to enjoy the cool of the hills while their husbands were stuck at their jobs in the heat of the plains. Although the reason for the change in meaning is not known with any certainty, people may have interpreted the grass in grass widow as equivalent to pasture, as in the expression out to pasture. Nowadays, the term grass widow can also refer to a wife who has separated from her husband and to a divorced woman.