On Milwaukee Kitchen - Flora Coker
Being Famous and Unpacking Portrayals
So I decided I’m taking a whole new direction with Grape Eater. Starting now, this newsletter is dedicated to the compilation of Interesting Facts and Noteworthy Tidbits. For example, did you know that one out of every 213 people on Earth lives in the Greater Tokyo Area? Or that woolly mammoths existed at the same time as the pyramids?
Or that nine out of every 10,000 currently-alive people are considered, by certain metrics, famous? That’s counting all the names on Wikipedia’s Living People pages, which includes everyone from Estonian centrist politician Jak Aab, to heavyweight gold medallist of Tbilisi’s 2021 Judo Grand Slam, Geela Zalishvili. There are fifteen Fiores listed, but I’m not one of them. Though you will find Paul Drucker on there. Also Paul Druecke.
It’s kind of crazy to me that Flora isn’t listed. Though she does have an IMDB page and a two-word biography on TVGuide.com. Actually, Flora’s name pops up all over the place once you start looking. I spent hours wading through YouTube results, IMDB listings, show write-ups, her LinkedIn, her Facebook, her pages on Rotten Tomatoes, Turner Classic Movies, and the British Film Institute. Each one, another piece of the puzzle, as I tried to get a sense of who she was.
Mostly what I learned is that the internet wasn’t built to contain Flora. It may just be because she’s been appearing in plays and films since before we could dream of such a thing as TVGuide.com. But I don’t think age is the key factor. I think there’s something about the woman herself that defies explanation.
So it’s lucky I had a chance to meet her in person. The person, after all, is the glue that holds all the resume lines together. It’s hard to make much sense of them otherwise. It has a lot to do with that special feedback loop I was talking about last time, how a good conversation has more to do with the conditions of the exchange, than what’s being exchanged. With Flora, making conversation took no effort at all. She has an easygoing nature, content to be sitting at Paul’s kitchen table, sipping mint tea, answering my questions. We had a lovely talk. I wish I could tell you about it.
Because here’s the thing. I said last time that the best conversations are the hardest to put to paper. Well, Flora and I had a wonderful conversation, but not so good an interview, if you see what I mean. It’s kind of embarrassing, to be honest. Hard not to feel like I dropped the ball. It kind of leaves you wondering what’s the point of writing, ultimately. That maybe it’s something better left to the professionals.
Incidentally, did you know that tarsiers have the biggest eyes relative to their bodies? It’s true.
If you want, though, I could give it a shot anyway. The Flora thing I mean. I’ll do my best. Just don’t be mad if it comes out sounding wrong, or if the things I say don’t exactly make sense. It’s really hard, writing.
Okay, here I go.
Maybe part of the reason I felt so comfortable talking with Flora was because she has one of those gentle Southern accents. It’s the kind that’s difficult to pin down except by cliche. Honeyed is the only word I could use. She also hums softly when she doesn’t have anything else to do, which added to the feeling that we were sitting on an old log somewhere, by a creek.
She told me what she likes best about Milwaukee Kitchen is that it lets her respond. She’s done all kinds of acting work, but what she likes best is improvising. It’s fun, she says, responding. It’s easy for her. She’s able to stick to a script if she has to, but loves more to defy the recipe. It might be the reason why, despite all the dishes she’s cooked on Paul’s show, her own kitchen repertoire is limited to the basics.
She learned to improvise over decades with Theater X. The same world-touring, visionary, mold-busting, experimental Theater X that was such an important part of Marcie’s career. Flora was there in the early days, the early seventies, doing a bit of everything. Set work, office work, once writing an act in a play about Margery Kempe. She played around a hundred different roles with the company over 35 years, and only quit, she says, “out of respect,” when a few longstanding actors were given a leave of absence amid some complicated organizational drama. She managed the company for a year after that, but Theater X disbanded in 2004.
Of course, it’s the on-stage roles that survive best in memory. YouTube is full of examples, some dating back fifty years. Like Civil Commitment Hearings, an original 1975 Theater X production that used official court transcripts of hearings where citizens were deemed mentally ill by the state. The script is taken verbatim from the transcripts, but the names were replaced with the names of the actors.
The footage may only have survived because it casts a young Willem Dafoe, though it was Flora’s performance I was watching. She plays both a state prosecutor and a defendant, the latter being the hub the whole climax turns on. Her moment comes right at the end, as the prosecutor and defense attorneys squabble with a pair of half-wit psychologists, while the defendant, Flora, waits for her fate to be handed down.
If you have 43 minutes to spare, definitely give it a watch. It’s not really a popcorn show. I’d say watch it with a gin and tonic.
Civil Commitment Hearings is actually the bottom of what turned out to be a deep YouTube rabbit hole. Flora pops up everywhere, like in the trailer for the 1994 Sundance horror feature, Aswang, where she plays a fetus-eating vampiress matriarch. You can also watch the entirety of the 2007 short film, Artificial, an adaptation of Flannery O’Connor’s Good Country People, where she’s the mother of a girl who gets her leg stolen by a traveling bible salesman. She appears briefly in the trailer for the 2009 Baraboo, as Woman With Dead Husband, in a promo for a 2010 staging of Four Places at Next Act Theater, and in a trailer for Renaissance Theaterworks’ Agnes of God.
These are, let me be clear, a minuscule fraction of the roles Flora has played over the course of her career. She estimates at least 150 total, over her life. She was, and is, constantly being put in things, a favorite of various theater companies, film students, and of course, Paul. If you think Milwaukee Kitchen is the first time she’s shown up in his work, you’d be wrong.
Each role gives me another angle on Flora, partial but honest. After watching her portray a dozen or so different characters, I’m left wondering if there’s any thread that runs through them all. On the surface, Flora doesn’t have much in common with the state prosecutor, the paranoid schizophrenic, or the vampiress matriarch. But maybe, like in conversation, let’s less about the what and more about the how.
No word immediately comes to mind, but if I had to pick one, I might go for aloof. Flora doesn’t tend to set things in motion, but moves in response. She pays attention and takes the course that comes most natural. Even playing a state prosecutor, she’s more lofty and condescending than confrontational. In Artificial, she’s a more frigid Mrs. Hopewell than can be found in the original short story.
Though, on second thought, maybe aloof isn’t the right word. Because even if some of her characters are detached or incurious, Flora herself is anything but. It’s more that she’s happy to go with the flow.
So forget all that, about the acting and everything. We’ll start over and try again.
I have a confession to make. I probably should have mentioned this sooner, but I think the reason why I’m having such a hard time is more about me than it is about Flora. All through our conversation at Paul’s, I was distracted by something I wanted to ask her about. It’s possible that I’m still distracted by it now.
In December 1991, Theater X put on a staged production of the Truman Capote short story A Christmas Memory. I’m a big Truman Capote fan, but not because of his crime novels or Breakfast at Tiffany’s. In fact, it’s not really even A Christmas Memory that I like. It’s specifically Miss Sook, one of the characters in the story.
Miss Sook is a sixty-something-year-old woman, opposite a seven-year-old boy called Buddy, who is also her best friend. Like Flora, her character is difficult to pin down. She’s fond of making declarations like “It’s fruitcake weather,” and filling her days with tasks like gathering windfall pecans in an old baby buggy, or buying bootleg whisky from stern Mr. Haha down the road. You’ll notice her life is largely fruitcake-centric. She’s anything but aloof, more childlike, outspoken, and eccentric. She’s actually based off a real person from Capote’s childhood, a woman who was said to be developmentally disabled, though who Capote described, without irony or condescension, as “a genius.”
I identify with Miss Sook because I like people who follow their enthusiasm straight off the beaten path. Especially when it gets them lost. I like characters who split the difference between foolishness and genius.1 Here’s a fact. Did you know the word genius shares its root with genus? It has less to do with intelligence and more to do with who we are at our core.
I wish I could watch Flora’s portrayal of Miss Sook, but I couldn’t find any footage of the Theater X production. Maybe if I’d had a chance to see it, I’d have an easier time separating the two in my head.
So that’s my confession. Though I guess I shouldn’t feel too bad. I’m not the first person to confuse a favorite fictional character with the person who portrays them. It kind of comes with the territory of being an actor, I think. Really, it comes with the territory of being a person. As I’m drafting this, just ten minutes ago, I got an email from Paul where he mentioned that he thought I’m portraying him as both more altruistic and more devious than he really is. I didn’t take it as criticism, just modesty.
Part of me still worries that I’ve made a mistake somewhere. That I failed to see Paul and Flora as they really are. But no, I think I’ll give myself a pass on this one. Nobody can expect to really understand a person after meeting them once. And if my portrayals end up feeling bigger than the people I’m portraying, well, of course they do. That’s what a portrayal is.
Did you know, by the way, that the word portray shares a root with trace? They come from the Latin trahere, which means to draw. But here’s the interesting thing. Trahere means draw in both senses of the word. That is, to depict something in a hand-made picture, and to pull or drag. If we tried to translate pro-trahere literally into English, what we’d end up with is something like, to bring forth a depiction by means of pulling or dragging.
Which almost half makes sense, but is true to the feeling. Portraying someone, even admiringly, feels like dragging forth. Like a toddler who’s tired of walking, your subject makes themselves dead weight, stubbornly insisting that they’re nothing more than themselves, while you’re just trying to get the damn grocery shopping done.
It’s not a perfect metaphor. Don’t forget, you agreed not to get mad if I stop making sense.
On Milwaukee Kitchen is a five-part series where I speak to the cast of a locally-produced made-for-YouTube cooking program. If you haven't checked out the show for yourself, I would recommend looking at their most recent episode, Sweet Sourdough.
In the early pages of the story, the reader can’t help but notice that Miss Sook has some sort of cognitive difference. In the 1930s South, the term they might have used is touched. There’s a whole literature of touched-ness in the American canon, spanning Steinbeck, Faulkner, O’Connor. Stephen King. While such portrayals can be at times problematic, they tend to return to the notion that cognitive difference can only make us more authentically human.
Personally, I’ve always read Sook’s childlike enthusiasm, shyness of other adults, rigid and idiosyncratic morality, and love of routine as having a lot in common with what we call today Autism Spectrum Disorder. What was, a decade ago, called Asperger’s Syndrome. I think if Marcie was assigned this condition in her work as a standardized patient, she’d have an exhausting day. ASD is a spectrum disorder which, put simply, means that it doesn’t have a definitive collection of symptoms like the flu, but works more like the color-chooser tool on photo editing software. But rather than colors, imagine the different regions are different symptoms or traits.
If we imagine the red region as sensory processing issues, the green as social challenges, and the blue as adherence to rules and routines, we can get an idea of how ASD works. No single person embodies all traits. We might put Miss Sook in the cyan area, leaning toward blue. The guy portrayed in Rainman maybe in the yellow portion. I, well entrenched in the green. It relates to a saying in the ASD community--If you’ve met one autistic person, you’ve met one autistic person.