Hatboxes glossary: Havdalah

Once the Saturday evening sky becomes dark enough to see three stars, the Havdalah ceremony may begin, marking the end of the Sabbath.


Celebrants recite the blessing over a cup of wine, symbolic of joy.  They pass around a container of sweet spices, like cinnamon and cloves, which symbolizes the pleasure of the Sabbath. A braided candle calls to mind the multiple but unified strands of Judaism in the world, and its extinction in the remainder of the wine evokes the sadness of the end of the Sabbath.

Miriam and Nadine observe Havdalah in Hatboxes

How do you mark the difference between workaday life and a more special time?

Hatboxes glossary: keeping kosher 2

A kosher kitchen requires separate utensils, tableware, and cookware for dairy and meat products, and some folks even use separate appliances and linens.

Rendering a kitchen kosher, called kashering, can seem intimidating:  everything must be deep-cleaned, pots and pans have to get submerged in boiling water (or hot coals get dropped into them as they boil water so the water surges over the lip), and silverware has to get boiled, too.  Things with porous surfaces may have to be disposed of altogether.

Miriam and Nadine kasher Nadine's kitchen in Hatboxes

Keeping kosher is a way of paying attention to what goes into your mouth in addition to what comes out of it and serves as a constant reminder of of a Jew's place on the spectrum of Jewish life and observance.

What food customs root you to your culture?

Hatboxes glossary: clip-on earrings

Miriam and Nadine shop together in Hatboxes

In Hatboxes, Miriam exclaims, "You never see such nice clip-ons," as she peruses a whole tree of earrings in Lena's boutique.  "I think I'll get two."

Some observant Jews do not pierce their ears because it may be considered immodest. Tzni'ut (Hebrew: צניעות) is a body of Jewish law concerned with comportment, including dress, and relations between the sexes.  Tzni'ut is rooted in concepts of of humility and modesty, articulated repeatedly across the Bible as ideal traits, and it forms the basis of an enormous body of jurisprudence.

Ear-piercing sometimes gets included among the prohibitions against mutilating the body:  "Ye shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor imprint any marks upon you: I am the LORD." (Leviticus 19:28; the Talmud identifies tattooing as an idolatrous practice, but the rabbis disagreed about whether including the name of a deity was what was prohibited or the entire act itself.  800 years ago, Maimonides concluded that tattoos are entirely prohibited.)  In Exodus 32, Aaron collecting the earrings from women, sons, and daughters, but maybe melting them down to use as the Golden Calf casts a taint on piercings still, thousands of years later.

Is modesty a part of how you choose to dress yourself?

not dying of embarrassment

A consistent theme in writer/director Lisa Cholodenko's films is the comedy and mortification bound up in sex.  I was relieved to hear her talk frankly about her own embarrassment directing sex scenes in the director's commentary to The Kids Are All Right. Jules' sporting with Paul features the wacky directiveness of porn, of which we know Jules and her wife are consumers.

Greta falls asleep right there in her pleather pants during sex with Lucy in High Art.

And in Laurel Canyon, Jane's grip on her son becomes excruciatingly clear when Sam picks up the phone in the middle of making love with his fiancée.

We filmed the most emotionally intense scenes in Hatboxes on the last day of our shoot, and we scheduled them out of chronological sequence.  I was probably more twitchy about it than either of the actors, and it wasn't even like they were going to be getting all naked and getting it on.  The three of us sat down together to talk things through before we started shooting. I attributed the actors' relative serenity to their professionalism and resolved to emulate them.

Nadine and Miriam in Hatboxes

I had the set cleared of all but essential crew at about 10:30 that Wednesday evening, right about the time someone started reading aloud the ingredients in Cheetos (a word to the wise:  don't).

Balancing the sometimes conflicting, sometimes overlapping values of directorial precision, humanity, and manners, we captured essential and good footage, and no one died of embarrassment.

What embarrasses you?

Susana Darwin

Hatboxes glossary: keeping kosher 1

What Jews may and may not eat is covered under the laws of kashrut (Hebrew:  כַּשְׁרוּת).  

A vegetarian diet may be considered de facto kosher (fit for eating) unless non-kosher insects happen to infiltrate the food (crickets and locusts are considered kosher).  

An animal must be disease-free and not only have a cloven hoof and chew its cud to be kosher (cow, deer, sheep = kosher; pig (cloven hoof but no cud chewing), horse (cud chewing but no cloven hoof), bobcat (no cud chewing, no cloven hoof) = non-kosher ("treyf")), it has to be slaughtered in a ritually acceptable way, which includes efforts to reduce the animal's suffering.  

The fact that Deuteronomy explicitly prohibits eating a limb torn from a live animal makes you wonder what people were doing to prompt the prohibition.

Meat and milk may not be consumed together, so don't ask for butter and sour cream with your steakhouse baked potato side, and if there are milk solids in your bread mix, forget about serving that loaf with your roast.

Nadine inquires about whether bread mix is kosher in Hatboxes

Fish must have fins and scales to be kosher; shellfish and bottom feeders like catfish are prohibited.

Chickens, domesticated geese, turkeys, and ducks, and pigeons may be kosher. Raptors and carrion eaters are not kosher.

Some foods are parve, which means they are neutral in relation to meat or dairy products.  These include vegetables, fruit, nuts, water, salt, and eggs.

What prohibitions do your eating habits include, and where do they come from?

Meet the Hatboxes Cast: Kat O'Connor

Kat O’Connor plays Nadine, a secular Jewish lesbian lawyer, who runs into Miriam in a grocery store.

Nadine and Lena out for a run in Hatboxes

In real life, Kat divides her time between theatre and film, and working as a marketing and social media professional.  

She has been featured in a number of independent films, including The Dog (Featurepoint Cinema), Schizo Cool (Schizcago Pictures), and 16th Street (Studio 22).

She’s a company member of Terra Mysterium, a Chicago-based collective of musicians, actors, dancers, poets, magicians, and fire performers; creating, producing, and performing experiential works of music, theatre, and performance art that are rooted in the Earth mysteries. Kat has performed with them both musically and theatrically at the Chicago Fringe Festival, LaCosta Theatre, and a variety of community festivals. She'll be appearing at Terra Mysterium this September.

But, truth be told, she doesn’t always have her feet on the ground. In her spare time, she practices aerial circus arts at the Actors Gymnasium.

A graduate of Drew University, she is a natural storyteller, with words or, just as often, without. Her personal mission is to tell the story, and thus change the world, one heart at a time.

Her website is here. 
Follow her on Twitter.

Announcing Our Cast

We are delighted to announce the actors that have been cast for roles in HATBOXES.

Miriam will be played by Robyn Okrant, a veteran actor of Chicago theatre and indie film.  Miriam is an orthodox woman with three children trying to deal with her husband's abandonment of the family and of Orthodox Judaism.

Playing Nadine is Kat O'Connor, who studied acting both in the US and London, and has acted in theatre and film productions in Chicago.  Nadine is a secular Jewish lawyer who has been out as a lesbian for years but is trying to figure out what it is she's longing for.

The estranged husband of Miriam is Aaron, also a lawyer,  who will be played by Tom Hickey. He recently had a role in the pilot for Underemployed and has played many roles on the stage for companies like Straw Dog Theatre and Lakeside Shakespeare.

Nadine's friend Lena is a creative business woman, free spirited, energetic and witty. She will be played by Fawzia Mirza. She was in the new film Scrooge and Marley, that is currently in post production, and has appeared in many Chicago indie films.

Rounding out the cast is Maya Boudreau who plays Hannah, the 15 year-old (and oldest) daughter of Miriam and Aaron. Maya is a graduate of New York University. Locally she has performed with  companies such as Lookingglass Theatre and American Theatre Company.