Betty

Betty is the object, grammatically speaking, of today’s blip. The subject is the extra.

This is yours truly and our great friend Betty. We are having lunch celebrating her 90th birthday, one month before the pandemic started. We caught the morning ferry to Nanaimo, had lunch at a beautiful restaurant, cake at her care home and returned on the evening ferry.

Betty and her husband are parents of six, and lifelong friends of my wife's family. K. is like their sixth daughter. When we started dating, I was unconditionally accepted by their family because I was accepted by K. Over the years Betty was our ally and moral support in everything we did. As the kids would say, she had our back.

Betty’s eldest,Karen, is the same age as my wife. Karen has always been interested in the theater, as both an actor and singer. Several years ago she decided to try to write a musical about the complex relationship between the eldest daughter and her aging mother.

The show is a two person affair consisting of a series of vignettes along the course from the first signs of confusion, to dementia and ultimately death. While Karen’s inspiration was her relationship with her mother, Betty never had full blown dementia. She used her great social skills to cope with day to day routines and interactions. But the mother daughter interactions could be more complex, and frustrating to both.

Karen first performed her play at the Toronto Fringe and then in San Diego. She workshopped and tweaked it for a couple of years and then performed the updated, retitled version in last year’s Vancouver Fringe where it won Best New Musical. During the run, Betty was in the hospital, and very shortly after the last performance she passed. I can’t help but feel she had a little something to do with the play winning an award.

We finally got a chance to celebrate Betty in May, and while there were not many dry eyes, we were grateful she was, and always will be, part of our lives.

Recently, Karen performed her show in the Nanaimo Fringe, to SRO audiences (of 75+) and standing ovations. As the audience entered the theatre they were handed a program with a tribute to the mothers of both performers, and this package of tissues, which they would have needed.