The Legend That is Isabella
I'll never turn down an opportunity to hear family history in gossip form.
Hello! I am still in my parents’ basement!
It’s a new month, technically, and I am continuing on with the subscription donation project. Like many things this month, I am also taking a bit of a break with the project as I recalibrate for unemployment and so on. I’ll pick a new organization come August and we’ll continue on then.
If you are new here (welcome!) or need a refresher, you can always find more details of the project on my About page. And if you want to be a matching donor, let me know.
This newsletter means a lot to me. If you are connecting with the work at all, please consider clicking the heart button and/or leaving a comment and/or sharing it. After you read this week’s, just know, Isabella would love you to share too.
The only one who has any rights with this story
is me.
I came first.
I laid the groundwork.
The rest of it
is
it’s a pity
It’s out of everyone’s control.- Isabella
and, and, and Isabella Bootlegs
When I arrived in Washington State back at the beginning of June, the family and I immediately made our way to Missoula, Montana. The trip was mostly focused on my Dad’s side of the family but towards the end of our time, my Mom decided to go drink wine with some cousins. She asked if anyone wanted to come along. Free wine and likely some good family gossip? I did not hesitate. I said, “Yes.”
There were six of us total there - my Mom and I, one cousin that I knew decently well, and three that, if I had ever met, I hadn’t seen in twenty years or more. My Mom is fond of her cousins and her childhood, in general. She grew up in a very small town and half of that town was probably related to her in some way. There are a lot more people in my family than I can even fathom. I grew up in a tight unit of four, not a sprawling bloodline in the north central part of Montana.
Honestly, I tagged along just to listen, to hear stories about times and places that I can only imagine. But, inevitably, there was some talk of me. The first question was, “You’re a writer. What kind of stuff do you write?” I always hesitate when asked this question; it’s hard to gauge how saying that I write incredibly queer, mostly female focused plays with breakneck dialogue, lots of whiskey, and some surprise violence that usually explore some of the many facets of grief is going to land in a group of people whose personalities (and politics) I don’t know. In this situation, I stammered a little bit, said I was a playwright and a poet mostly, and then said that I had written a play about Isabella.
Isabella is my great grandmother, my Mom’s Mom’s Mom. It is pretty well-known and generally accepted that she was a bootlegger. And there the rumors start. She may have also let some cousin take the fall for her bootlegging. She may have done a lot of things. Everyone, and I mean everyone, you talk to about Isabella has different tidbits and a different opinion of her. She was a matriarch in the truest sense of the word. It seems what she said goes. And everyone has different feelings about that.
The play I wrote is called and, and, and Isabella Bootlegs and you can read a synopsis here. Ultimately, the whole thing is about exploring secrets, the way information gets passed down through families, and generational trauma. In order to explain this play to a group of family who are directly related to Isabella, my Mom launched into talking about the Macha Theatre Works production that happened in Seattle in 2015.
That production was, I believe, my first non-workshop, non-university, non-short play production and when I say I learned a hell of a lot, that would be an understatement. It was a rough process. The director and the Artistic Director of the company at the time had very different ideas about what the play was and what it was trying to do. The director thought the audience wouldn’t be smart enough to get the interweaving timelines; she literally said to me, “I think we can assume the audience is not as smart as we are” which…is always the opposite of true. She also thought I was trying to do was Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia which is also the opposite of true. The Artistic Director just plain didn’t like the play or the character of Isabella. She sent me a full and terrible email that was basically a bunch of editing directives and then got frustrated with me when I didn’t respond to the email right away. She also then told me that they were investing a bunch of money so the show, for which they were paying me $500 total by the way, should be the most important thing for me instead of the, you know, the grad school program I moved across the country to do.
I was going to say the production was a story for a different day but there’s the rant so…
Isabella being a bootlegger was, yes, the originating inspiration for the play. But the show opens up with another bit of family lore which is that my great grandfather, Finley, died at the dinner table after he drank a cup of lye. Lye is a corrosive agent that was typically used to make soap so it was pretty common for households to have it around. When drunk, it will burn right through your throat. So, Finley drinking lye at the dinner table was a bit of a shock for all involved. And the lore is about why he died - was it an accident, suicide, or murder?
In telling the story, my Mom really emphasized the Finley section which is actually a very quick moment in the grand scheme of the story. The point was that some family, that I had never met by the way, came to see the play and reacted…not the best to seeing that on stage. Isabella’s characterization and end was a bit of a sore spot as well. In reality, she died peacefully(?) sometime in the 1960s but her demise in the play is being shot straight into a coffin at the end of prohibition. I never knew her so I dramatized to my little playwright heart’s content. Because it is, in fact, A FICTION.
Some of the family was fine with the show, presumably because they understood it was a play. Other family members were not so happy. My question in this situation is, why would you come to a play that is not so secretly inspired by your family written by someone you have never met without asking any exploratory questions first??
Regardless, that is when I knew Isabella was even more mythic than I thought.
Which brings us back to drinking with the cousins. As my Mom is talking about the play, particularly the opening, Isabella loomed large. All of the different opinions of her bubbled right to the surface. With every tidbit, someone would say, “Oh, she absolutely would not have done that. No way.” or “I’ve heard that and I believe it.” From the chatter, it seems that the men of the family tend to have a much better view of her than some of the women in the family, which I find incredibly interesting. Although, I’m pretty sure my grandmother would not say anything negative about her; I don’t remember her talking about Isabella to me directly at all.
Isabella is important in our family history. As a character, Isabella is direct, in charge, fighting for survival of her empire (really her whole life), and often cruel. I make no apologies for her (nor any of my characters); I don’t see the point of apologizing for being a complex, complicated human. Whether you like what you see on stage or not, it is a fact that she was a complex, complicated boss-ass woman in real life too.
There are some things…most things about Isabella and her story that I will never know the truth of. Quite literally, all of that information has been buried, taken to the grave. I only have speculation. Well, after opening night, my Mom and I were standing in a group talking to some friends and she said that while I said I made up most of this play, some of it got surprisingly close to what really happened. So maybe, I don’t only have speculation. I also have cosmic knowledge of a real past that is only stories to me now.
I think it really shows that whether you are aware or not, you are always connected to your history in some way.
And I also think Isabella would be so fucking pleased by how much we still talk about her.
It doesn’t matter once you start.
You’re just gonna get there.
Or you just ain’t gonna get there.- Isabella
and, and, and Isabella Bootlegs
This week, paying subscribers got a glimpse of some of my favorite embarrassing childhood things. If that sounds intriguing to you, consider becoming a paid subscriber.