HEY, MS. FORTY- OR fiftysomething -- Yes, you, the one with the hot flashes and mood swings. You say that your internal furnace makes your face glow such a bright red it could guide ships into port? You say that you take so many bathroom breaks you're thinking of setting up a cot next to the bathtub? You say the perspiration you collect from one night could fill a child's swimming pool? No sweat -- you're just going through menopause. The good news is, you're not alone.
Menopause The Musical is in an open-ended run at the France-Merrick Performing Arts Center. It's the story of four middle-aged women -- a soap-opera star, an Iowa housewife, an Earth mother and a professional woman -- who bond in the Bloomingdale's lingerie department after discovering the havoc that their plunging estrogen levels are wreaking in their lives.
As might be expected, the show's audience is heavily, though not exclusively, female.
Michael Larsen, the show's director and a proud possessor of the Y chromosome, was sitting in the audience at a recent preview taking notes when a woman tapped him on the shoulder.
"Are you with the show?" she asked. "Clearly, they pay you to be here."
Menopause is a pastiche of songs from the 1960s and 1970s with lyrics that have been rewritten to reflect the realities of living with the Change. Thus, "Stayin' Alive" has evolved into "Stayin' Awake" and "My Guy" has been transformed into "My Thighs."
The show, which was created by Jeannie Linders and which premiered in Orlando, Fla., in 2001, was inspired, she says, "by a hot flash and a bottle of wine."
It celebrates fabulous women of a certain age, so we decided to get together with the six fabulous women of a certain age who are on the M&T; Bank Pavilion stage -- the four leads and two understudies -- and dish about their real-life experiences with the Change.
For nearly two hours, the six -- Monica Lijewski, 43, of Chantilly, Va.; Lisa Mack, 38, of Columbia; Barbara Pinolini, 50, of Silver Spring; Jennifer Timberlake, 35, of Rockville; Maureen Kerrigan, 56 of Alexandria, Va.; and Kara-Tameika Watkins, 32, of Fort Washington -- talked and laughed.
At times, the conversation took on the tone of a Girls Night Out, punctuated with cries of, "Spill it, sister."
Be warned: what follows -- like menopause itself -- is not for the weak of spirit.
Take memory lapses. They happen to the best of us.
There Monica Lijewski was, in the role of the Iowa Housewife, for the first premiere of the show's Baltimore run. She was on stage belting out "The Great Pretender" ("Oh-oh yes, I'm the great pretender / Pretending that I'm doing well. / My mind goes void, Then I get annoyed / My brain skips, But no one can tell.") At that very moment, life, with its puckish sense of humor, decided to imitate art.
"I know this show cold," Lijewski says.
"Then I got out there, and I opened my mouth, and I had absolutely no idea what the next word was."
The other cast members sensed something was wrong, and pitched in to help, with encouraging smiles and leading comments. Soon, Lijewski was back on track.
"This would never have happened to me if I were younger," she says. "I used to have a photographic memory, but it's dissipating fast."
Cats had to tell her
Then, there's the delightful experience of hot flashes, which Barbara Pinolini (the Earth Mother) describes like this:
"It's like a wave. It builds in the upper part of your body and washes over you. It starts in your chest and neck and goes down into your thighs."
Pinolini could handle the physical discomfort. The worst part was when a hot flash struck while she was out and about.
"When you're in public, it's really hard to hide," she says. "The thing I hated was turning bright red. It's an immediate tell."
Not all women experience hot flashes, and for a long time, Maureen Kerrigan (an understudy) was one of them.
"I was really fortunate for a few years," she says.
"I had teeny, tiny hot flashes, and no night sweats. My girlfriends would be complaining, and I'd feel way superior to them.
"And, then it happened. I found myself turning on the air conditioning in February. Because I live alone, I didn't realize I was having hot flashes. I thought there was something wrong with the thermostat.
"I told my cats: 'You must be awfully warm and uncomfortable in those little fur coats of yours.'"
The cats had to virtually pull out a ball of yarn and start knitting miniature scarves and mittens before Kerrigan realized what was going on.
Steamy on the subway
Kara Tameika-Watkins, the show's other understudy and the dance captain, began going through menopause at the relatively young age of 31. She remembers one hot flash that was particularly inopportune.
"I was riding the subway into New York," she says. "I got so hot, I started taking off my clothes in the middle of the train.
"I started with my hat. Then, I took off my scarf and gloves. Then, I unbuttoned my coat. Then, I took my coat off. It got to the point that there wasn't anything else I could take off without getting arrested."
Jennifer Timberlake wouldn't mind taking a few things off herself. But in her case, it's not clothes that she wants to rip off, but a few pages from the calendar.
Timberlake understands only too well the plight facing her character, the soap opera star. The real-life actress is blond, petite, unlined -- and 35. Already, she's starting to lose plum acting roles to more chronologically advantaged performers.
"Last year, I was cast as Cinderella," she says.
"This year, the company did the show again. I auditioned and got a callback. I just assumed it was for the Cinderella role. But when I got to the second audition, I found out they wanted me to read for the queen."
Ouch. But, the worst was yet to come.
"I made it through to the bitter end," she says. "But I didn't get cast. The part went to a 23-year-old."
Timberlake can laugh about that now that she's got a steady gig playing the soap-opera star. Sort of.
"I started on the stage later in life," she says, "so I didn't get to play ingenue roles when I was in my teens and 20s. Those younger girls should just wait their turn."
For Mack (the professional woman), the song that elicits a rueful smile of recognition is the retooled version of "Lookin' for Love."
"Now, I'm packin' on pounds where I didn't have spaces," the women sing. "Lookin' for food in too many places / Stackin' by shelves, buyin' by cases."
"I've been heavy all my life," Mack says, adding that she hopes exercise will help stave off the inevitable metabolic slowdown that accompanies aging. Mood swings
Menopause The Musical recognizes that women aren't the only ones afflicted by symptoms. The people they love -- children, parents, and especially, their men -- don't have it so easy themselves.
"She's a witch, she's a witch," the foursome croons, to the tune of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight." "In the guest room, or on the sofa, my husband sleeps tonight."
As Lijewski puts it: "My husband doesn't have the 'six-second radar' [about a wife's moods] they talk about in the play. His is a lot faster than that. I'll be in the middle of a sentence, and I'll turn around, and he's already gone."
Mood swings aren't the only symptom that potentially disrupts family time.
After Lijewski passed her 39th birthday, she began developing a preternatural awareness, a kind of survival instinct, for homing in on the nearest ladies' room.
"My mother was the same way," she says. "Every time we went anywhere, the first thing we had to figure out was the location of the bathroom. We'd plan our day around it. I can see that's in my future."
The six actresses hope the show, with its dose of humor and its empowering message, will help their audience cope with, and even celebrate, the not-so-silent passage.
As Timberlake puts it: "It's really nice to see the reaction of the crowd. This show is particularly meaningful for women who are going through menopause themselves, and who may have questions about the experiences they're having. This gets good information to them, packaged in a fun way."
And that's the real skinny. Period.
mary.mccauley@baltsun.com