Linda Purl, Veteran Actress

Alison interviews  Linda Purl, Veteran Actress

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:16):
Yes, this is the Allison Aringham Show. And I'm Allison Aringraham.
Although some of you may remember me as Evil Nellie Elson. Tonight,
Luckily I am Alison arm and this is the Allison
Argham Show. And here on The Alison Aringham Show we
talk about things that make us feel good, the movies
and the television shows that made us feel good and

(00:37):
the people who made them, and people who are doing
things now to make the world a better and more
interesting place. And oh do I have one today? I'm
so excited because this one combines many things that I
love it. It's someone who I haven't really met yet,
who I'm a very big fan of, and then also
involve some people who I have to who are friends,
have been on the show before. It's not very complicated.

(00:59):
At a marvelous show that is happening. There was a
show coming. Anson Williams is directing it. Yes, Happy Use
It's incredible, and the starring in it is this marvelous woman. Well,
I'll let you figure it out. Was she Phonsie's girlfriend
or or was she was she Richie's girlfriend because she
technically played two different people. Love Happy Days, Yes, yes,

(01:20):
and so so so much more ladies and gentlemen, Linda Pearl,
I did, how.

Speaker 2 (01:29):
Are you very well?

Speaker 3 (01:31):
Thank you really happy to be on your show? Oh?

Speaker 1 (01:34):
Thank you fabulous. Yes, Now, obviously we have many fans
who know you from Happy Days, and I hadn't realized
that's right, I kept oh, yes, well, of course she was.
She was. She was Phonsie's girlfriend. But wait, were you
Richie's girlfriend as well? Was this confusing?

Speaker 2 (01:49):
It is? It was?

Speaker 3 (01:50):
Yeah, it was confusing. Yeah. I did the first couple
of years of Happy Days as Ron Howard's girlfriend. But then,
you know, the show's sort of took off. As shows,
this can happen in an unexpected way, and it became
more Henry's show than Ron, and so Ron decided that
he's focus on directing, which worked out awfully.

Speaker 2 (02:10):
Well for him.

Speaker 3 (02:11):
But when he left the show, that meant that all
of the ancillary characters around his character were out of
a gig, including me. So this show went on to
have its you know, continued remarkable success, and all these
years later, they they put out Happy Days put out
a casting notice that they were looking for fiance for Fonsi,

(02:33):
and they wanted a Linda Pearl type. So it's like, well,
can you like see me for the role?

Speaker 1 (02:39):
Anyway, they said a Linda Pearl type.

Speaker 2 (02:42):
So I went and an entirely different character.

Speaker 3 (02:44):
And it's funny because I I recently, well, this is
the fiftieth anniversary year, stunningly of Happy Days, and so
some of the writers have put together a book and
there was a gathering for them the other night, and
so a lot of the Happy Days gang gathered writers
and the you know, associate producers and stuff, and it

(03:08):
was so wonderful. And I would say the theme of
the evening was Gary. Was Gary Marshall and his genius
and he was such an outside the box thinker, and
he thought so holistically and he moved all of our
lives forward exponentially anyway, So you know, that was Gary Marshall.

(03:29):
And he just thought, well why not you could break
the rules and have me come back as somebody else.
So he did me as solid.

Speaker 1 (03:38):
I had. It was a great show. Of course, our
fiftieth anniversary. We at Little House just had our fiftieth.
So yeah, we came up with you guys at the
same time. It was a hell of an era.

Speaker 3 (03:48):
And that I mean you have sort of a relationship
because now it's so long ago, I kind of forget.

Speaker 2 (03:54):
But I did a.

Speaker 3 (03:55):
Very short lived series called Young Pioneers.

Speaker 2 (03:59):
Was how is that related to?

Speaker 1 (04:01):
So this is Songhurs, this is our prairie connection. And
I saw them went, oh my god. She did Young Pioneers,
You aren't Young Pioneers, which was based on a book
by Rose Wilder Lane, which was Laura Ingalls Wilder's daughter daughter,
a successful writer. And it's very crazy because it was
in the seventies or after that. It was the success
of Little House had already started to really blow up.

(04:23):
We started seventy four, so about that time, they're going, well,
we should have it, we should should get out that
Little House thing in the competition. And they went, well,
Roses Books, and go to Roses Books. They owe to
the rights of that. And the reality is when Laura
went to write the infamous Little House books, she couldn't
get any traction. She wrote an autobiography. Yeah, her daughter
Rose was already a successful published author then, and she

(04:43):
got her a deal and said, what if it was
what it was, children's books, it could be children's books.
There we are.

Speaker 3 (04:50):
I loved doing that show, and I was so sad
that it didn't you know that it was failed.

Speaker 2 (04:57):
I think we did, like read like half seasons.

Speaker 3 (05:01):
We kind of limped along and somewhere in there, I
mean they're all dead and gone now, so I guess
we can talk about them.

Speaker 2 (05:06):
But our producer, who I think was your first producer,
Ed Friendly.

Speaker 1 (05:11):
No, yes, indeed, indeed and yes absolutely the cry it was.

Speaker 3 (05:16):
A great He was a great producer, and he was
he was a feisty character.

Speaker 1 (05:21):
And it was him and Michael who said we're going
to make a show up this thing or thanks, yep.

Speaker 3 (05:25):
So interesting. And then but Ed got and Ed was
our producer, and he really set sort of the template
of his like, oh, that's how you produce. You work
like crazy to hire the very best people, rigorous, rigorous
pulling to get the casting and finding the right crew
and the director and stuff like that. And then he

(05:47):
was hands off and then he trusted everybody to do this.
And it was it was really, oh that's how you lead,
you know, that's that's how you do it.

Speaker 1 (05:56):
Very much of the casting was on Little House and Michael.
Michael was mister ifing broke, don't fix it as far
as directing went. So it made total sense and the
thing was, as you saw on Urcho, we castle these
fabulous people. We have all remarked, especially you know during
the anniversary and all the interviews, like did he direct
you a lot? And we're all like you not really
think he cast us all? And whatever? You like, you

(06:18):
did it. The audition was kind of like I want that.
This is what we're buying. We want do the thing
we hired you to do. And if you just do
that thing, and and people got advice. Dean Butler said,
when you go in for a friend of visit or
are you that right? He said, a friend of visit?
Are you auditioning for a little house? He goes, oh,
don't act. He said what he said, don't act, don't

(06:40):
or don't let him see you doing it. You'd be
as natural as humanly possible on that thing. And it
was he wanted you to do a certain thing and
if you did that, basically that was it. It's like, okay,
just keep doing that. We're not going to tinker with it.
Just just do it interesting and we all like we
also eventually knew the characters so well as like we
could go you could we could have improved the show

(07:01):
at that point. You know what this character do, and
that's that's how they liked it. It was set it
up and then let it, let it do its thing.

Speaker 3 (07:10):
What a wonderful thing, you know, in the strangest in
the strangest thing, I mean, I guess as part of
the phone of being this this stage or age of life.
We were in my partner Patrick Duffie, another actor from
this same era. We were in Monaco last year and.

Speaker 1 (07:26):
For some.

Speaker 3 (07:29):
Oh my god, love Monica, Yes, and there's there's Melissa
and Tim and I had worked with Tim, Melissa and
I had met, but we'd never worked together Patrick.

Speaker 2 (07:38):
And so Patrick pulls up.

Speaker 3 (07:40):
This photograph when he's in his twenties and there's a
little baby girl Melissa, and here we are. We're all
dressed up, and we're like, well, what is this crazy
world we're in? Anyway, we the four of us got
sort of you know, reconnected, and it's just it's so
much fun. I've been to their beautiful country place in
New York and it's just, you know, it's the sweetest thing.

(08:02):
Because that was a very special time for television in
Los Angeles and we were among the extremely privileged have
been a part of it. I mean, I'm sure it's
wonderful now, but in very different ways.

Speaker 2 (08:16):
And so that we.

Speaker 3 (08:17):
Get to go, gosh, you know, sit down, raise a
glass and say, weren't we lucky that we got to
be in the arena.

Speaker 1 (08:24):
In that were you were at Paramount Studios. Weren't you
You kids were at Paramount when you're doing Happy.

Speaker 2 (08:29):
Days Paramount, Yeah, we.

Speaker 1 (08:31):
Were doing half the time many of these hit shows.
We're all running into each other in the comers very
at lunch, literally like and I was just talking to
Glenn star Pelly and he said, oh, they put all
the Norman Lear shows, all the kids in one schoolroom.
So we used to actually all talk to each other
back in the day. Now everybody's filming on Mars and

(08:55):
we're not all hanging out. We used to actually all
hang out.

Speaker 3 (08:58):
Yeah, yeah, the Commissary, the Commissarrah Paramount. I mean, oh
my gosh, Okay, well, we'll have to have some wine
at some point.

Speaker 2 (09:05):
I talk to this.

Speaker 1 (09:07):
But we were in this fabulous era with these favorite shows,
and I have to say it's wonderful because we're all
having our fiftieth and forty fifth anniversaries. Everybodys having the
anniversary read about now. It's great. We're all like whity
of getting interviewed and talking to it. It's like a
giant reunion, not just for like little house, but for
your show, for all of our shows together. We're all
suddenly all everybody's doing a book or has a new

(09:27):
thing happening, so we're all talking to each other.

Speaker 2 (09:30):
So true, yeah, very cool.

Speaker 3 (09:32):
Well, it was quite an apprenticeship, you know, you you
learned then it was kind of musical chairs. We'd be
if you didn't get one job, you'd get another. But
we were all kind of in the same I don't know,
a green room together also, And Patrick and I talk
about this a lot. We were just at that moment
where there were a lot of the great designers, makeup artists, directors, cinematographers,

(09:57):
actors and actresses who had been part of the great
Hollywood era and we're now just sort of there doing
the occasional job. But if you sat by their chairs,
they would give you the download. And my god, I
the people that I'm sure you too. I mean that
I worked with Edith had An, Angela Lansbury and oh god,

(10:20):
Julie Harris and the you know, the and the Westmoores
and you know the stories and the wisdom, and it
was just that particular moment. It was kind of a
changing of the guard. You were getting your makeup done
at five in the morning at Universal Studios in that

(10:41):
makeup building. My god, the stories that you'd hear were
just wonderful.

Speaker 1 (10:48):
I came in well four or five am, twelve years
old and had my makeup done by Whitey Schneider, Marilyn
Monroe's makeup man, and then my hair done by Larry Jermaine,
Betty Davis's hairdresser. I got dirt a little.

Speaker 2 (11:02):
That's fabulous.

Speaker 1 (11:04):
That's a lot as Witt and Coy had worked with
Betty Davis and Faye Dunaway and Marilyn and I was
hearing about Linda Darnell and Joan Crawford, Betty Davis, and
oh yeah, I got the whole. I was like twelve,
going I'm taking notes. I need more, more and more.
Tell me Mark, it was amazing.

Speaker 3 (11:22):
How fabulous?

Speaker 2 (11:23):
Good for you? Yeah? Yeah, Well, they were pioneers.

Speaker 3 (11:26):
That was sort of the wild West that they had
survived and made, and you know, been pillars of that
foundation on which we all stand, I mean to this day,
we stand on their foundation.

Speaker 1 (11:38):
I loved it. They said, a Linda Pearl type. Because
I'm remembering, Believe, who's Robbie Benson who coined the joke?
Who's Robbie Benson? Gets me Robbie Benson. Give me a
Robbie Benson type, Get me a young Robbie Benson. Who's
Robbie Benson? And that's so far. I mean. I did
a tiny, little, very cute independent film a while back,

(11:58):
and the story was the producer were saying, you know
what we'd like is somebody, you know, like Alise and
aringrom can kind of do the bitchy thing. And he said,
you know, why do we get something like that when
we can just go get that for heaven's sake, let's
call her.

Speaker 3 (12:11):
Exactly.

Speaker 1 (12:12):
But so they were they were looking for M type.
I was like, seriously, you know where I am at?

Speaker 3 (12:16):
Yeah, sob been here, I will I will just dive
we be She's yeah. So let's see, said grew up
in Japan, as we mentioned, and I you.

Speaker 1 (12:27):
Grew up in Japan. This not everyone knows this, this
mind blown You grew up in Japan, But okay, my.

Speaker 3 (12:32):
Dad was in business over there and it was kind
of a thing for a fair amount of people. So anyway,
but we were lucky. A lot of international business people
would go two years, two years, you know, pauland New Delhi,
that kind of thing. But we were we were in
Japan for my folks were there for about thirty years. Anyway,
I wanted to be in the theater, so I started
working as a kid there under a Japanese corporation called Toho.

(12:54):
And at that time, this is there was this huge
appetite in Japan for things from the West. They wanted
to speak the language, they wanted to know the arts,
it's and arts cultures. So they would bring over the
Royal Shakespeare Company. They would you know, they had Okay,
I can talk for hours on this anyway, but they
also brought over a production of Oliver. They brought the

(13:16):
adult cast from the West End. They brought the kids
from New York. Robbie Benson was one of the kids,
eleven years old. I don't know if I'm older or
younger than anyway, about the same age that there's adorable
Robbie Benson. And because they were kids, they had to
have chaperones.

Speaker 2 (13:34):
Well.

Speaker 3 (13:34):
His wonderful mother, Anne Benson, was also in the cast,
and we all became fast friends. And to this day
she's like a second mom. I see her a fair amount.
So fade out, faded so oh yeah. So anyway, they
had a girl that they had brought over from New York.
The Japanese producers weren't that happy with it for the
role of Bet, so they had me. They knew rather

(13:57):
than go to the expense of bringing yet another American actress,
so they felt, we've got this little blonde girl over
here and she acts, And so I auditioned for the
Western producers and they said she's fine. So I joined
the American cast, which was thrilling because I had never
worked with an American, let alone British cast.

Speaker 1 (14:14):
He's only worked with Japanese fully Japanese cast to this point.

Speaker 3 (14:18):
So that's how the friendship got forged with Robbie and
with his family. And about a year later he was
doing a Western in Mexico and they couldn't find the girl.
Maybe it's a couple of years. So they called Robbie's mom,
called my mom and said, if you guys can get

(14:40):
Linda to Mexico, there's a screen test and she might
get the So my parents very supportive, and off we
went to Mexico.

Speaker 2 (14:46):
I did the screen test.

Speaker 3 (14:47):
I ended up doing the film with Robbie. But that
meant that I got signed with William Morris Agency, which
meant then I had to be in New York. So
Robbie and his family were he in terms of my
transition coming to the States and starting to work as
an actress in America.

Speaker 2 (15:07):
Isn't that weird?

Speaker 1 (15:08):
I mean, are you writing a book? Are you writing
a book? Because that is a boxer?

Speaker 3 (15:13):
No?

Speaker 1 (15:14):
No, oh, fun now thing because I mean when I
was going through the stuff, oh yeah, she's in the
show Wait Japan, that you grew up in Japan and
you were acting in theater and in some field in
Japan as a young person, And that you speak Japanese,
so you worked in Japanese as well.

Speaker 2 (15:33):
I did, but you know, it's a hard language.

Speaker 3 (15:36):
But I was a kid and picked it up on
the street, so I guess I studied a little bit
of it. But and we were back there last spring,
spring fall, anyway, whenever. We were back there last year
for a month or so doing some concerts, and it
was really fun. And the language, I think when you
learn something that young, it just is embedded, you know,

(15:58):
somewhere in a deep for plateau whatever that's called, not
the hippocampus, but something deeper. And it's so yeah, I
speak it now. It's out of date. It's much more formal. Uh,
then it's right, Japanese is more formal than what's being
spoken colloquially today.

Speaker 1 (16:18):
But yeah, But to work in that language and then
come over and then you work in English. I mean,
I do a college we're talking about. I do a
comedy show in France, and you know, and they so
to do shows for me, and I had to learn.
I had some French in school in junior high school,
but not very much, and it wasn't that good at it.

(16:38):
So I had to go back to school after age
forty and learn a second language and work it. Still
working on it, but I did do the show and
speak French. And to perform and to write something and
talk about your life and then orally talk about it
on stage in front of people does things to your brains.

(17:00):
Good for you. To then switch it and do it
in another language does a whole other thing. To go
back and forth and do the show language. It changes
how I perform in English. When perform in English, and
that changes how I perform in French. Did you find
an impact on your English speaking performances because you had
done some of the material in Japanese.

Speaker 3 (17:19):
No, But I think that was a function of age,
because I, you know, it was all mushed into one.
It was just how you spoke. It happened to be
English or Japanese. It was all mushed in together because I,
you know, I picked up the language when I was four,
So it was just all part of communicating period. What
was different is the technique. So the technique in Japan

(17:42):
was very technical, very formal, very contained, reflective in many
ways of their culture more so than than now. And
then come to the States when they had just come
when I came back to the States and they'd just
gone through, you know, the the riots and the peace

(18:06):
and love and sex and all of that stuff. I mean,
it was the It was the antithesis of basically everything
that I had learned. So that was hard to what
do you mean show your emotions? What do you mean,
don't articulate?

Speaker 1 (18:22):
What do you mean?

Speaker 3 (18:23):
Turn up stage and don't basically.

Speaker 1 (18:25):
Let it all hang out We're doing let it all
hang out, be yourself be naturally. You don't have to
wear makeup, you don't have to wear a bra. We're
gonna be I'd like to come from Japan at the
height of its formal culture. Yea, that was that was
blow your mind.

Speaker 3 (18:40):
Mind blowing. That was mind blowing. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (18:43):
So you such an extensive career and then you have
a with a show, but you also have a tour.
You also have a tour of a thing that you're
doing because you're sing, you sing. There's also what a
dance performance that I'm just like, no, not dance.

Speaker 3 (18:56):
Believe me, nobody, nobody would buy it, would buy.

Speaker 2 (18:59):
Actually, a year ago or.

Speaker 3 (19:01):
A couple of year Winter was I did. I did
a musical, which was fine, but it had some pretty
serious choreography and it had been a solid two decades
since I had had to learn, you know, a dance routine.
And I got through our first day of choreographing a
couple of numbers. I was okay, my panic was just

(19:24):
about here.

Speaker 1 (19:25):
But I did.

Speaker 3 (19:28):
I filmed it, and I was home that night, you know,
on location, just you know, rehearsing and trying to get
it into my body. And it's sort of like doing this,
you know, I mean, it was just just saying the
same time. Yeah. And then the next day came in
and the choreographer said, you know, I'm not very happy

(19:50):
with that choreography, so I'm.

Speaker 2 (19:51):
Going to change do it.

Speaker 3 (19:53):
You know, piraueid here and then the jete there in
my eyes and I just said my panic went here
and I literally to excuse myself from the rehearse.

Speaker 2 (20:01):
I said, oh, be right back.

Speaker 3 (20:03):
I had a panic attack and I had to walk
the block talk myself off a cliff. It was my
nervous system was overloaded, so I just hadn't. It was
foreign stuff to me. Again when you're twelve years old,
it's like.

Speaker 1 (20:20):
Yeah, no problem, but I get anything.

Speaker 3 (20:23):
This was yeah, I eventually got there.

Speaker 2 (20:25):
I had a.

Speaker 3 (20:26):
Wonderful partner, dance partner in this who would say no, no,
dear this.

Speaker 1 (20:30):
Way, but you did it. And how long ago was this?

Speaker 3 (20:34):
This was a couple of years ago.

Speaker 1 (20:35):
It was okay, I couldn't. I'm that's staggering that you
have to still pulled it off.

Speaker 3 (20:42):
It was, you know, you just rehearsed, rehearse and somehow
that survival thing of like I just gotta just got
to hang on and do it. But anyway, it's fun.

Speaker 1 (20:53):
The singing you manage the singing tour you have though,
you manage that.

Speaker 2 (20:57):
I do, Yeah, somewhere, I guess.

Speaker 3 (21:01):
I had moved to la when I was about eighteen
or when I was eighteen, and there just wasn't an
opportunity to sing, and I really really started to miss music.
I recorded in Japan, and I but I'd done musical
so that it had just always been a part of
my life, and suddenly to have no music was just painful.

(21:24):
So I got it, started to be involved with doing fundraisers.
It was the era of AIDS, and so everybody, you know,
if there was anything you could do, you would just
say yes. And besides being in these sort of big
variety show things with some incredible talent, and you know,

(21:45):
you felt that at least you could we're doing something,
however small, to raise money for AIDS, you know, healthcare
and whatnot. It sort of put me in this circle
of some wonderful musicians, ris people, and so out of
that I met some folks who helped me build a

(22:07):
cabaret act, which was absolutely terrifying because you break the
fourth wall. You know, it's not it's just well, what
you're what you do with your show. You know, it's
not working with your act. It's the fourth wall. And
and but what I found was that maybe also like
your show, Alison, you can you can create the show

(22:28):
and then you can just call around some clubs and
most people will say, nat, I'll watch you here, but
some people will say, sure, we'll book a date for you.
And so you have autonomy. You're not waiting around for
the studio to call, and which means that you could
sort of not sort of you can continue practicing your
your art. And it's the discipline of it. I mean,

(22:52):
you know, with singing, you need to keep your voice
in shape, and there's usually a pretty dress involved, so
you kind of I mean, spanks will help a lot,
but you kind of got to keep body and soul
together and memorize some new lyrics. And the discipline of it,
the spiritual discipline of it, the joy of performing, the

(23:15):
being accountable, you know, is so is very very joyful.
So it certainly Cabaret Works certainly didn't start out to
make a living for it, but it was really just
to keep the continuity of music in my life, and
it has become increasingly important for me about sixteen years ago,

(23:35):
I met this wonderful music director and he was it.
I worked with wonderful people before, but this guy was
my guy, and he's my guy for a lot of people.
He works with a lot of folks. He's a jazz
piano player, and so we go out on the road
about once every six weeks. We're doing a concert somewhere
and we've done four albums together. His name is Ted Firth,

(23:55):
and you know, he's a kick ass jazz pianist and change.

Speaker 1 (24:00):
By fantastic see And it's true, and that's why it
is marvelous that it's like, oh, well, there's the things
are slow and there's no work or this event has
been moved or postponer canceled. Hang on a minute, hey
can you book me the Louisville naturally? Yeah, yeah, I
can go. I can like I can have a gig.
I can have a gig.

Speaker 3 (24:18):
Yeah yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (24:19):
It's nice. It's nice and it kind of compliments everything else, like,
oh look I have a book and the book and
the gig, and I can sell the book. It's there's things.
It's it's it's nice you now you are doing a show.
I'm very excited because fabulous Anson, and this is just
the show Sharon Scott Williams, who is married to Anson,
so that no answers. Mary Sharon Scott Wins has written.

(24:42):
She wrote a book actually called her memoir Crazy Mama.
Not to be confusd to the film, but you also
started which is wonderfully boggers, if that's the thing. And
it's opening actually in March March twenty six, March twenty six,
and the running three April six at the Rubicon, which
is up Inventor up and it's really intense. I have

(25:03):
not gotten to see it yet and I'm really looking
forward to a part kitchen April show. And she wrote
this book about her life dealing with her mother who
was severely ill, was schizophrenic, who did not know where
it was, and wrote this show. And you are doing this. This
is a one woman shows. It's just you on stage.
I am reading that this is a sixteen character, sixteen

(25:27):
character tour de force, one woman performance of Crazy Mama.

Speaker 3 (25:32):
Yeah, kind of wild.

Speaker 2 (25:34):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (25:34):
Sharon is she's my vintage and her Ken is our friend.
Sharon was raised right where my mother's kinner from in Virginia,
so there's that sort of familiarity with some of the
types of characters. And as you say, when Sharon was
eight years old, her mother had a catastrophic psychotic break

(25:56):
in an era when any number of things, there weren't
great medicines for it. People weren't talking about it, they
didn't know about it.

Speaker 1 (26:02):
There was so much People wouldn't say, Oh, she had
a psychotic break, perhaps she's schizophrenic, and non said, and
we should go. No, they just said, well, maybe she
won't do it again.

Speaker 3 (26:13):
Nobody wants to do it exactly. So they all her mother,
her father, her brother, her close family and friends survived
the event as best they could, but it was there
was such collateral damage, not to mention her mother, this
beautiful woman's own tragedy of having lost her mind. So

(26:35):
I don't know when exactly Sharon wrote the book, but
not that long ago. It took her that long to
finally gain an objective view and to from a most
compassionate place right about her own childhood and her mother.
And once she completed that cathartic task, Anson said, that's wonderful, honey.

(26:59):
Now turn that into a one woman play. And so
she did. It's a sixty four page monologue. Honestly, that's
what's more daunting to me than sixty characters.

Speaker 1 (27:09):
I'm just going the very page monologue. I'd be like,
I'm done, I'm done, and the different characters would include
what the mother and Sharon, and then the mother and brother,
the board.

Speaker 3 (27:22):
And the yeah, the neighbor, the yeah, the school mistress, Yeah,
the physician.

Speaker 1 (27:28):
I'm terrified already just hearing.

Speaker 3 (27:32):
Me too, me too, Yeah, I mean, right now this
I've started, let's see, I'm half I'm about halfway through.
I'm up to about page thirty eight, so a little
more than halfway through memorizing this thing. But it's also
it's incredibly well written, which is therefore a joy. And
it's a meaningful story to tell because it sheds through

(27:55):
Sharon's humanity. It sheds a lot of light on on
this whole topic.

Speaker 2 (28:01):
And.

Speaker 3 (28:03):
You know the challenges that are involved and whether or
not you know, I mean, all of us have family dynamics,
I'm sure, and there are all sorts of levels of
mental illness. There's schizophrenia, paranoia, there's depression, there's alcoholism, even bipolar. Yeah,

(28:27):
so then this is and also, how does a tragedy
in your childhood. Then how does that how do you
metabolize that over the course of your life? How do
you try to make sense of it?

Speaker 1 (28:40):
And it went on because she talks about that it
was years and years that since she kind of became
the caretaker because other people couldn't handle it, and she
was willing to put herself and try to navigate what
mental health system or an excuse for it existed with
her mother. It was not even like, oh this ten
years when I was a kid living with her. It's

(29:00):
like forty years of dealing with this woman day today,
and how can we help her? What do we do
and how do you protect yourself at all of that
over literally decades?

Speaker 3 (29:10):
Correct? Correct, it's quite quite a journey. So they're going
They've done i think some readings of it before, but
this will be the first production of it. Anson, as
you mentioned, is going to direct it. And we were
talking the other day and said, could we have imagined
that over fifty years ago when we met, that you know,

(29:33):
our Eliza being twined again, and now we'll be working
together on this project that's so personal to Sharon, and
obviously as her husband, Anson has a great deal invested
in you know, and bringing this production to light. So
we don't start rehearsals for a couple of weeks yet,

(29:55):
but we're pretty much on the phone every day, just
talking through things and trying to get clear. And I
think it'll it'll take that long to really digest it
and try to spew out a production that's worthy of
Sharon's writing.

Speaker 1 (30:09):
And this must be very intense for her because this
is her life. This is literally her life from what
she went to and as I said, there were a
couple of readings and here she's got her husband directing it,
and it's Antson Williams from Happy Days, and it's a
and now you her friend again. It's all wound up
there to see this, I mean to see moments from
the worst, most traumatic moments of her life now on

(30:30):
stage and you performing this has got to be really
intense for everybody involved.

Speaker 3 (30:35):
I think so, I think it'll I've never met Sharon
in person. We've done zooms, but we've never you know,
pressed the flesh, as it were. And I it's interesting
to sort of get to know someone backwards, because I'm
getting to know her from really the deepest level possible.

Speaker 1 (30:54):
Like you'll get to small talk in a couple of months.
How's the weather. We'll start with the worst that ever
happened to we'll talk about lunch.

Speaker 3 (31:03):
And I imagine I don't know, but I, as the
creator of this project, I imagine that for Sharon, the
process is going to involve a lot of letting go
because I'll be playing her mother. I'll be playing her
father and her brother, and I'm guided by the book.
But I you know, it'll be me doing it, it

(31:23):
won't be them, So I you know, I just hope.
I mean, Sharon is such a lovely, gracious human being
and a wonderful artist, so I'm sure she'll be okay
with it.

Speaker 2 (31:32):
But it'll be quite a ride for her.

Speaker 3 (31:34):
I think, to see someone kind of intrude into all
the corners of her childhood.

Speaker 1 (31:40):
Because it'll be someone else's life, your whole life story back,
draw your whole inner story and everything that happened to
you and your personality now speaking the words that her
father's hit that's right, what that's yeah, No matter how
that's going to be. Well, this is just all readjusting
one's mental bring synaps are scary, so it's it's intense,

(32:03):
it's a fascinating story, and she talked about this, as
she said, the soul crushing grip of a mental illness,
but also because she does love her mother very much.
And part of the problem was resources for mental health
for a woman who is going through this were compared
to now virtually nonexistence. Also, like in Virginia, this isn't

(32:25):
happening in New York or LA or Chicago or some
huge metropolitan center full of hospitals and institutes. This isn't
a small town. This is where people have no idea
what they're doing. The family doesn't know, they have no
experience with these issues, right, So it's going through that.

Speaker 3 (32:42):
Yeah, absolutely, and it was scary. I mean, you know,
not knowing what they didn't know at that time. Is
it contagious?

Speaker 1 (32:50):
Is it?

Speaker 3 (32:50):
How dangerous is this person? Is she dangered to the community.
So all of that was very impactful to you know,
to Sharon's Sharon Sharon's childhood, and she's she's a she's
a strong person. So she has you know, she's created
a beautiful life for herself, hugely successful ad execut in
New York. So she she did survive. But you know

(33:14):
that in the history of these kinds of journeys. There
are many people that did not survive at the level
that Sharon did, and I just wonder, but it's you know,
to to love her mother as fiercely and they had
a very special mother daughter bond, very special, but for
the fact that her mom lost her mind, I can't

(33:34):
you know when it's when you love someone, but it
is actually dangerous on every level to love that person
and to try to make that safe separation as a child.
I mean, those are huge things to try to negotiate.

Speaker 1 (33:50):
And would her mother presumably it's like there would be
times where she would come back to earth, or she
would be on medication or offer where you'd think, well,
we're out of the woods, We're going to have a
normal relationship. Everybody's going to live happily ever after. But
it's not gone.

Speaker 3 (34:05):
No, it was never gone, never really gone. So and
I think too, you know, at this stage of life,
you want to because the arts are powerful, because they
are bell Weather's, because they help all of us process
whatever we need to process in life. You want, especially

(34:25):
at this time in our world, and as a performer,
you want to be involved with something that has meaning,
something that can help or heal or illuminate or elucidate articulate.
So I for all of those reasons, I am as
especially grateful to be involved with this upcoming production.

Speaker 1 (34:47):
We still have such issues with our mental health system.
In different parts of the country. There are not the resources.
I have friends who've been trying to start projects actually
in some parts of the country where resources for teens
who may be suicidal, well for in the city, but
if you're out here, who do we call? We did
that mental health resources regionally around the country are not

(35:08):
what we need them to be. And for someone maybe
who absolutely wants help, but nowadays it's more someone might say,
I am having by a polar disorder, and I actually
know what I have and I want to go get
good luck. It is extremely difficult for many people to
access mental health services, not to mention the cost and
insurance issues and everything else. And in the year that

(35:29):
this woman was going through this mean it had to
be just like abysmal. And I would hope that this
draws a tech must attention to the current situation with
mental health for people.

Speaker 3 (35:37):
I think that's very much the aim in terms of
people that we reach out to. I had for a
few about thirteen years I was doing another one woman
play called Gear Magical Thinking by Joan Diddon, and it's
a story, a true story of how she matap She
got through the sudden death of her husband and her
daughter within the same year. And then she wrote about

(36:02):
this about surviving the black hole of grief and in
an encouraging way. I mean, not that it's not hell
to go through, but her point in the end was
that you can get through it. And as I got
to do this around the country, there were you know,
we have groups from grief counseling and hospice that would

(36:25):
come to see this play and we'd do talkbacks afterwards,
and they many people would say, finally there's a play
for us. We don't talk about death. We don't know
how to talk about death in America. We just we don't.
It was like, Oh, that's not going to happen, really,
you know. And so I imagine it will be the
same thing with this, where there is an event, there

(36:45):
will be an evening that looks into the ravages of
mental illness and create an opportunity where people can talk
about it and ask questions about it. So I'm hoping
that this, you know, that we reach a wide audience

(37:05):
of people that are curious, that know a lot about it,
that know nothing about it, doesn't matter. We're just hoping
that people can can come and learn something from it.
I certainly am. I am learning a lot about it
just working on that, working on the play.

Speaker 1 (37:21):
And then with her relationship with her mother going on
for so many years, there must be also with the family.
I presume there's also elements of humor, even dark humor
in this as well.

Speaker 3 (37:31):
There's a lot of humor. Yeah, there's a lot of humor.
I think that's Sharon too, and just.

Speaker 1 (37:37):
What I think I've gotten of shared a little life.

Speaker 3 (37:40):
Yeah, good, yeah, good, yeah, I mean, you know, and
then the great characters from that part of the world
that are that are just delicious, they're wonderful.

Speaker 1 (37:52):
There there's that sense of humor from out there. Yes,
that could help people. And that's the thing is that
in real life, when we're going through some thing really
difficult or really just even completely terrible human beings, we
do we try to find the humor and it we
do laugh so that we don't just completely break down.
And even the worst there's a situation where we grieve,
where we fight, and where we laugh. And when you

(38:15):
put all of those things together into one piece, that
creates the realism.

Speaker 3 (38:21):
For sure. Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 1 (38:25):
Now sixteen characters, and it's how long.

Speaker 3 (38:29):
It's sixty four pages long.

Speaker 1 (38:33):
And no intermission.

Speaker 3 (38:35):
Actually there is an intermission. I think it's good.

Speaker 1 (38:37):
Good. I'm not worried about the audience. I worried about you.
It's a lot, it's a lot. But clearly you can
do it. I mean, if anybody can do it, man,
it's you.

Speaker 3 (38:49):
Wow, here's hoping. You know, that's the plan. And it's
so weird.

Speaker 2 (38:56):
I can't remember what I had.

Speaker 3 (38:57):
For dinner last night, but I.

Speaker 2 (38:59):
I don't know.

Speaker 3 (39:00):
Memory is just it's a strange thing. Again, it so
depends on the writing. The writing is good, and so
the ideas I'm counting on this. The ideas sort of flow,
you know, narratively, one in one into the next.

Speaker 1 (39:14):
But this is a crazy thing. Yeah, with our with actors,
with our people. I also sometimes say, we sit Thursday
or Friday, and where did I the car? I have
the little beepy thing so I can find the car
when someone says, go can I memorize pages of a
script and even in another language, get me a pot?

(39:38):
Of coffee and yes, we'll do that. And I can
remember vast sums of things to talk about in between
my stand up show and writing a book and people,
how on earth do you remember all the things you remember?
And I go, it's amazing, But do you know where
I park my car? Right?

Speaker 3 (39:57):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (39:59):
Only see you get older and you go I can't
remember anything, and said, yes, but you just got up
and did well. Oh, that's that's act that's actor brain.

Speaker 3 (40:07):
Right, it's actor brain. Thank you. I'm going to steal
that phrase.

Speaker 1 (40:11):
We luckily well with actor brain. I'm just looking forward
to this and it's took the Rubicon. Apparently I have
not been there, but apparently this is a fantastic Rubicon
Theater company Inventora, of all places it is.

Speaker 2 (40:26):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (40:26):
I did their first production, however many I might be
thirty years ago. I'm not sure. I think this is
my ninth production with them.

Speaker 1 (40:37):
It's a wow, beautiful.

Speaker 3 (40:39):
Regional theater in Ventura, which is this lovely town. I
mean I used to go get in the car in
Los Angeles and go, oh, there's in Ventura, go and
go on to Santa Clas never got off in Ventura.
But it's a great community, Beach community, and there's a
lot going on there. So and the founders of that theater,

(41:03):
Carolyn Burns and her husband Jim O'Neill, figured that out
years ago and they planted their theatrical roots there and
they've been doing wonderful, wonderful work for all these decades now.
So it's kind of a homecoming for me to go
back and work there again.

Speaker 1 (41:21):
One incredible thing is she said, you know, here we
are fifty years later, this incredible error we came out of,
and you're back at this theater where she said, you've
done multiple, multiple productions. You did their first production and
it's being directed Fans and Williams from Happy Days.

Speaker 3 (41:36):
You know, I thought, God's health, good health, you know, Touchwood.
This is it's my most favorite part of life at
this point. And the economy of it, that how life
does fold into each other.

Speaker 2 (41:49):
I mean, look at you and me.

Speaker 3 (41:50):
We've never met, but now I feel like I've known
you all my life, and there's all of this wonderful
connective tissue. And so there's a lot of translation just
it doesn't need explanation. And we didn't know it, but
when we were going to work at five and six
in the morning and working with these wonderful people.

Speaker 2 (42:10):
We were doing that.

Speaker 3 (42:12):
But I didn't know that we were also building that
weave a friendship. When I first met Anson, I didn't
know that I was starting a friendship that would feed
directly into work that we'll be doing in the room.
There's a level of trust, a level of knowing that
we will have because we have fifty years of history
for goodness sakes, and it just like any stew it

(42:35):
just makes everything so much richer and better and deeper.

Speaker 1 (42:41):
We're having fun with that now in our fiftieth year,
now fifty first year The House Madness Dean Butler, who says,
high Dean Butler, you would say, Hi, I see him
now constantly, which is crazy because we have a whole
fiftieth anniversary podcast and that we do and it's me

(43:02):
and Dean Butler and Pamela bob of New York's Broadway actress.
But she's a very big Little House fan and she's
sort of the best the good questions, the voice of
the fandom, and we talk about Little House, we talk
about we do whole discussions of episodes we've had on
darn near everybody from the show and we have on
people who are experts about lower ingles Wilder what have
here in the show and it is all things Little

(43:24):
House but as processed by me and Dean and travel
above in New York and it's Himarus. We are a riot,
if I may say so myself.

Speaker 2 (43:33):
But it's.

Speaker 1 (43:35):
But it's so crazy to have this person who I
met in the seventies, right, And then we have our
guests on. I mean we had Melissa Gilbert on. It's like,
so we've literally physically known each other fifty one years, right,
and our ruch and we're just talking and with some
of the cast members, it's that thing if you didn't
see each other for a year, you can just start

(43:56):
picking up the conversation where you left off, because it's
like you're weirdly like a family. And now we're able
to test you know, every week or so, let's all
go on the show and discuss it at length and
in depth in front of everyone. It's been like therapy.
But it is marvelous. We've been having more of these
get togethers with our cast members and it's fascinating how

(44:18):
we relate to each other over a thing that started
fifty years ago when we met at five in the morning.

Speaker 3 (44:24):
Right, Yes, it is. It's a wonderful thing. It's just great.
It's just great.

Speaker 1 (44:32):
It's fantastic. I am looking forward to this as absolutely
intense here, as it says, a testament to the steely
resilience of the human hearts. Yes, they're saying, it's really
it's really about hope, because she continues to just hold
out hope that they will get through this somehow.

Speaker 3 (44:52):
She did, Yes, she did. That's a really good way
of phrasing it. She hope was the hope was the fuel.
And in some ways it won the day, uh, in
some ways. But even even where it didn't win, it
got them through. It allowed them to, as she says,

(45:13):
get out of bed in the morning. So it's a
it's a testament to the strength of the human heart.

Speaker 1 (45:22):
And these things nowadays they talk about ace adverse childhood
to experience that they now know. Yes, yes, these things
do affect you do affect your permanently leader in life.
It's it's it's a physical thing. That's what are you
going to do? It has physical effects on a person,
and it's how do you how do you navigate that?
How do you react to it? Do you use, you know, art,
do you use help?

Speaker 3 (45:42):
How do you survive everything? Right? You use? You use everything?
I mean yeah, from white lightning to to body jokes
to ridiculous humor, to crying, to healing to just getting
on with it. It's a it's a constant creative process.

Speaker 1 (46:04):
Okay, I'm okay, so is Rubicon ruber Coll Theater Company's
on Main Street. Inventory of people will get your tickets,
get your tickets. You got a little time here. It's
absolutely incredible. It's going to be March twenty six through
April six. I'm just I'm like, huh, I'm gonna Kitchen
Aple show, Kitchen Apel Show. I'll be back, I'll be back.

(46:26):
We can do that. Where can people find you? And
I still think you should write a book? Where can
people find you? Find about? Where you're going to be singing?
Thank you? Where are you?

Speaker 3 (46:35):
Okay? So I have lindapearl dot com if anybody does that,
and I'm I'm not great about posting, but sometimes you know,
the posts are kind of there, but lindapearl dot com
that's kind of has my where what I'm up to,
what we're doing for the most part.

Speaker 1 (46:51):
So all right, all right, thank you so much for
coming on my show.

Speaker 2 (46:56):
On your show, thank you, thank you.

Speaker 3 (46:58):
Likewise, like I'm going to write, all right, and I
met your girl.

Speaker 1 (47:03):
Fantastic, fantastic. I'll say hi to Deem for you so cool.

Speaker 2 (47:07):
Tell me to get his career to the show. I'd
love to see you. I'll make him go.

Speaker 1 (47:11):
I'll make him go. People gory, people up in Ventura,
I'll make them. I'll just make them all go. And
they can call me before I get there. All right,
thank you so so much, thank you. And this is
the Alice Argham Show. And that was Linda Pearls. I'm Alison.

Speaker 2 (47:27):
Thank you.