Hatboxes gets a frum audience

A is an Orthodox Jewish lesbian who lives in a sprawling house in Chicago with many children and animals and occasional others. She has the longest dining room table I’ve ever seen in a real person’s house.  A and I met several years ago through a mutual friend.  I follow her blog posts with interest.

Hatboxes features a frum woman (“frum,” Yiddish: פֿרום, related to the German fromm, meaning "pious" or "devout") coming to grips with major changes in her life, including – maybe – her sexuality.   It's a film I'd like Orthodox women to see, whether they are lesbian or bi or questioning or just interested in seeing Orthodox women on film.  But really, if it can make one lesbian feel a little less alone, then maybe it's done its job.  However, the likelihood of Orthodox lesbians availing themselves of a public screening of Hatboxes seems dim in the extreme.  Fear of exposure is a powerful deterrent.

Miriam (Robyn Okrant) in her millinery, Hatboxes

A had invited me to come to her house so we could talk about Hatboxes for her blog.  We talked for about 20 minutes, and then I told her that I'd brought a screener copy of Hatboxes to watch if she wanted to.  Good Chassidish woman that A is, she doesn't have a TV, so she ran it on her laptop.  She seemed to like it very much and said she appreciated its restraint and the depth of its respect for frumkeit and the research that went into the making of the film. She spotted only one small mistake, but shrugged it off as minor (and no, we’re not saying what it is!). Otherwise..."It was great!"

I underestimated how anxious I was about A seeing it, both as another artist and as an Orthodox Jew.  I worried that we’d gotten things wrong—big things, like its tone or ethos other bedrock elements.  I was relieved that A responded positively with emotions ranging from delight to curiosity to wanting to know what happens next.

We'll keep you posted on when the interview runs. 

Susana Darwin

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

"Frum* Gay Girl"

The blog "Frum Gay Girl" addresses the lives and experiences of Orthodox Jewish gay people.  In the post "Don't Be Afraid," R. discusses her upbringing in Los Angeles in an observant family, reactions to her coming out from her family and community, and how she is making her life as an observant queer Jew.

Readily apparent in these posts, which began appearing in August 2013, is a sense of exhilaration.  Even though the blogger masks the identities of the people she interviews, the questions she poses and the thoughtful answers that come suggest a sense of possibility in spite of sometimes broad and intense disapprobation.

Reading "Frum Gay Girl" makes me wonder:  how would Miriam react to this blog?  How might her reactions shift over time?

Susana Darwin

*"frum" means 

Meet the Hatboxes Cast: Robyn Okrant

Robyn Okrant plays the role of Miriam, the 30-something Orthodox Jewish milliner whose husband has recently abandoned her.

You may have seen Robyn before. Like in an Onion short, or a Luna Carpet commercial on television.  She confesses to being more than an actress. She’s also an author, a freelance writer, a story-teller, a director, and a yoga teacher. 

Maybe you caught her blog, www.livingoprah.com. All about following Oprah's advice for one year. It was read by an international audience and has been visited by over a half a million people. Her book, LIVING OPRAH: My One Year Experiment to Walk the Walk of the Queen of Talk, was published by Center Street in 2010.  

Oh, and she appeared on the Today Show, CNBC’s The Oprah Effect (which, to her mother's delight was seen internationally...even on American Airlines' in-flight entertainment), The Bonnie Hunt Show, Fox and Friends, The Joy Behar Show, and NPR’s All Things Considered. She’s also been featured in the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago SunTimes and has been seen in Entertainment Weekly, TV Guide, USAToday.com, Salon.com, and The Huffington Post.

Miriam in her millinery in Hatboxes

She calls Chicago home, along with her husband and two cats.  She has an MFA in performance art from the Art Institute of Chicago, which followed her undergraduate degree from Bennington College.

And if you want to see a little more of her, click on this short video, a part of Ready, Set, Wife.

Here’s her website.  http://www.robynokrant.com/

And you can follow her on Twitter.

Hatboxes glossary: hats/head-coverings/tzniut

Tzni'ut is an encompassing Jewish conception of modesty and humility that emanates from the Torah  (Micah 6:8, Numbers 5:18) and Talmud (Tractate Sanhedrin 97b; Tractate Sukkah 45b) as a bedrock value.  

Tzni'ut can be observed in mystical tales of the Tzadikim Nistarim, 36 righteous individuals whose very existence is said to secure the world against destruction.  Exemplars of humility, the Tzadikim themselves may not know they are among the 36, and if they do, they would never call attention to their special status.

Observant Jewish men cover their heads as a sign of their reverence for and obedience to a higher power, a practice which dates to biblical times. A man may wear a yarmulke (Hebrew: כִּפָּה‎ "kipa"), a cap, or one of many different broad-brimmed hats, depending on his sect or community.  Sometimes, men wear both a yarmulke and a hat.

Observant married Jewish women keep their hair covered as a mark of modesty, though variations from hats through scarves to wigs exist across different communities.   Modest clothing—skirts reaching at least to the knee, blouses covering the elbows, and no trousers—are strongly encouraged, as well.

Miriam with two of her customers at her millinery in Hatboxes

In Hatboxes, Miriam is a milliner—a hatmaker—but she wears vibrant scarves instead of hats throughout Hatboxes.  Maybe she's a bit at arms-length from her community, or maybe she's coloring inside the lines, but with the colors that suit her personality.

How do you color outside the lines?

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.