In the mid-1990s, I spent some time temping as a legal document coder. Those were the days when it was so expensive to scan and OCR documents that it was cheaper to hire armies of temps to read documents and type the names in those documents into a database optimized for searching names. One of...
Author: Anne
Christmas in August, in December
I wrote this piece this summer, as part of the publicity for Theatre Unbound’s A Gertrude Stein Christmas. This seems like a good time to revisit it. May your holidays be happy, by design or happenstance! My husband used to work in a manufacturing plant, and often didn’t get Christmas off, which would mean we...
Notes from #WHN2018
Hard to choose a manageable number of snippets to share from the inspiring, info-packed Women’s History Network 2018 conference at the University of Portsmouth last week. Here are a few with obvious connections to my work and/or Theatre Unbound’s: The image above is from Victoria Iglikowski’s talk “RAIDED! What items seized in government raids can...
Talking the Good Fight
Tomorrow I head to Portsmouth, England to attend the 27th Annual Women’s History Network Conference. 2018 is the centenary of the granting of the Parliamentary vote to some categories of women in Britain. I’ll be giving a paper called “Women Cannot Fight, Therefore Women Cannot Vote: Staging the Suffragette Bodyguard,” describing the development of The...
An animated time capsule
My husband recently unearthed and transcribed some flip-book animations I made a long time ago. I had forgotten all about them. Seeing them again makes me marvel that I ever had time to do something so exacting just for fun. But as it happens, I’ve been working on some visual art tasks recently, including building...
Once more into the Good Fight
I’m just back from Chicago, where I went to attend the first table read of the Babes with Blades production of The Good Fight. It’s a tremendously sharp team, and I can’t wait to see what they create. I’ve done some rewrites on the script since Theatre Unbound produced it in 2012, largely based on...
Cleo’s roses (and other flowers)
Lately I’ve been helping my mom go through some of her mother’s things. I’ve learned that Gramma liked to take pictures of flower arrangements. Sometimes the flowers have some context. This one is labeled “Cleo’s Birthday 1981 from Joy” (Gramma’s name was Cleo), and I recognize Gramma’s dining room furniture. Others are in places I...
Remembering Agnes and Sean
In the last few weeks, two people died who were very important to me. Agnes Wilcox was the founder of Prison Performing Arts, a multi-discipline, literacy and performing arts program that serves incarcerated adults and children in Missouri. Before she started PPA, she ran TNT: The New Theatre in St. Louis. TNT’s project to create...
The Bridges of Hennepin County
Much of the work I do for ADV Document Systems is for private companies and therefore not something I can share, but here’s an exception: Electronic Document Information GUI Search (eDIGS), a website that gives access to maps, permits and other public records at the Minnesota Department of Transportation. It is the successor to a...
Scruffy history
Babes With Blades just announced the cast for their 2018 production of The Good Fight. I thought I’d mark the occasion by re-posting an entry I wrote for Theatre Unbound’s production in 2012, about the struggle for women’s rights in the USA. In the spring of 2000, I was on a solo road trip to...