AN INTERVIEW WITH BETTY ABERLIN

BY CHRIS GRAVES

CHRIS GRAVES: For those who do not know, what is your background and how were you introduced to the world of View Askew and Kevin Smith?

BETTY ABERLIN: I’ve got a resume out:

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0008640/resume

That kind of shows you, acting-wise. I started out during the McCarthy years in a ‘folk-opera’ about Sandhogs, when I was ten. Studied ballet and modern jazz dance, got into Performing Arts for drama and Music and Art for art; always read, wrote, sang, thought life was going to be like musical theater. I studied acting with Jeremy Piven’s father, the wonderful Byrne Piven, and toured with his straw hat summer New England circuit of West Side Story as Anybodys (got to dance with the boys!) when I was sixteen. Went to Bennington College, thesis in short stories, and acted in plays at Williams College. Played in the NYC satirical revues (with Madeline Kahn) that preceeded the Laugh-In & SNL shows. Studied Improv, and other fine acting teachers were Harold Clurman in LA and Vivian Nathan of Actors’ Studio.

That’s a great question: because I can’t remember how I found CLERKS, but when I saw it I was like: YES!!!!!!!!!!! I have loved to make people laugh; tend to nod and say ‘that’s funny’ when something is really, really funny. Kevin’s writing made me laugh out loud. Most rare. (I would completely have bought his original ending for Clerks 1, btw.) His fusion of wit & pathos are EXACTLY my cup of tea. His courage.

CG: Can you describe your Dogma experience? How was it acting opposite Matt Damon?

BA: I loved the script - loved it. In my mind, I had already cast Ben Affleck as Loki and Matt Damon as Bartleby, so I was preparing to do my scene with Affleck, and until the call sheet for my shooting day slid under the hotel door, I did not know I’d be working with Matt. I owed both of them tremendous gratitude because of a line (’It’s not your fault!’) repeated in GOOD WILL HUNTING, which echoed initials (’i.n.y.f.’)I had been writing on all correspondence to my nephew (the so-called ’savior child’, whose charge upon birth was taking care forevermore of his older brother, born with every damage conceivable. Because of the family anguish, he was continually apologizing, as though the family strife, and his brother’s handicaps, were somehow his fault. And I took pains to remind him so often of i.n.y.f. - that his at-war parents got together long enough to forbid my reminders. When he had gone to see Good Will Hunting, the message had broken through again despite these prohibitions.) Now picture Matt with a truckload of lines before him in the long walk down the airport corridor, not knowing me from Eve, as I took my place beside him and poured out my incoherent and heartfelt gratitudes, as quickly as I could. He was totally gracious. I had asked him to please slap me if he caught me acting. And off we went. In our sit-down scene, Matt threw me a great curve which cracked my nervousness about ‘doing well’, so I owe him for it. My little nun in the background of the moving elevator scene was supposed to drink beer with a lighted cigarette in her mouth, and since I don’t drink and have asthma, I thought sure that Kevin would never use me again, when I begged to be allowed to do something else. I rediscovered joy itself in DOGMA - and realized by contrast how for-real confining and constrained the unremitting child-development disciplines and prohibitions had been in the t.v. work I had been committed to for so long. Joy. Fun. Comedic freedom. Being part of something both profound and funny.

CG: What was your reaction to the film’s controversy?

BA: Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. The enemy is doing push-ups and Pilates in the next room. Great progress, great opposition. I don’t think Kevin in any way courts it - if he wrote dead-in-the-shallow-water movies, there would be no opposition. He is an original - this is threatening to group=think, whether the thoughtforms of ‘Orthodoxy’ or the buck$-stop-here audience surveys of The Suits.

Too bad the Catholic League was instrumental in cutting out Bethany’s Boo-Hoo scene (see Extras), for me the secret heart of hearts: I have held that the best way to watch DOGMA is with a pregnant teenager to one’s right, and a veteran of abortion to one’s left. Or vice versa. And bring the Kleenex. Kevin’s idea of a God merciful beyond comprehension…..! Oh yes! And the Alanis song: ‘Still’. Heavenly ditto.

CG: Jersey Girl was a fantastic film that got some negative publicity due to the real life romance between Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez. How was the environment like on that set? What did you think of the finished film and how it was treated?

BA: You really want to hear Betty’s Little Conspiracy Theory? All That? I did my homework, I watched Gigli - because short of Heaven’s Gate, I had never ever seen such lavish excoriation of a film, and I marveled at the venom of it. How bad could it be? Was Lopez’s beauty and strength, and Affleck’s gentle character THAT threatening to the audience? Was it the fluidity of sexual identity that threatened? What? P.S. I thought Lanie Kazan and Christopher Walken were especially funny in it, and in hindsight, the scene of Lopez & Affleck in bed - the tenderness of it - was, to me, beautiful. This love, by the time of JERSEY GIRL’s shoot was a palpable spirit of joy and union that permeated the shoot, certainly in my brief time there. The perfection of the casting and the beautiful nature and talents of Raquel Castro - their imaginary child - was part of the magic. Offscreen Ben and Jennifer were damned if they did and damned if they didn’t - whether they flaunted their union, or sought a morsel of privacy within the circus. Ben had spoken of political aspirations, and I thought: WOW! What a team they would make! What power to unite us in the direction of all good things - a for-real rather than the spun-myth of Kennedy/Camelot! I think, apart from Gigli, the idea of their potential power, the sheer moxie of a woman who had been with Puff Daddy and was now flaunting her happy confidence with a white Boston guy who was at once handsome and smart/funny - was a red flag, and the media assassination velocity stepped up, and the beauty of their work in JG was eclipsed times three. By the ill and extraneous linking of JG with their previous movie together, by their zenith ‘hot’ factor (set them up to knock them down), and by a simmering anti-JLo & let’s raise Matt and mock Ben current.

I read the original script of JG. I did not know whether I was laughing through my tears, or crying through my belly-laughs. I know how good it is, and I have seen the director’s cut - even though my cluelessness - I had to ask Kevin ‘what does T.L.F mean?’ - might have made for an unnecessary change (mea culpa) in the message painted in the new home of Ollie & Gert, in the savagely cut Part One of JG. When test audiences responded to the survey questions (I saw the questionaire - it really ought to be posted on viewaskew!) I believe that there was such tremendous anti-JLo & Ben feeling at the time that the first half of the film was bloody sacrificed to focus on the second half. It is how I got to be in the first scene, however.

Furthermore the NYTimes reviewer is not to put it mildly a family man, and trashed every woman in the film, and was the expressly dead wrong person to write on it. I am a fatherless one. I stop in the street when I see little girls with their fathers. Every widower and every child who has not been given to know her parent - would have found goodness in this film. Word will get around. Affleck’s comedic chops and his wonderful scenes with Raquel were completely ignored. That does not mean they are not there. The-side-by-side scene with Will Smith speaks of the nature of fatherhood itself. The love that Bennifer had for each other within the media circus is there, if ‘only’ on film. It is there. It can be felt. When the People magazines are being used to light firewood, if the grid itself doesn’t go down, the love will be there to see.

Aren’t you glad you asked that question? Ask me what time it is - I’ll tell you how to make a swiss watch. Apologies.

CG: You played Lady Aberlin on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood for many years. How did you get involved with that show and what did you learn from working with Fred Rogers?

BA: Followed a funny song (’Boy From’) written for THE MAD SHOW under a pseudonym by Stephen Sondheim (only I didn’t know that - just HAD to sing it) - to Pittsburgh, where I met Fred Rogers and began to talk to Daniel Striped Tiger at the first Public TV station there. His Lady Judy Knaiz had just left Pittsburgh for New York, and I had made the opposite trip, and he needed a ‘Lady’ character, having dropped Josie Carey, the woman with whom he had first created The Children’s Corner (but I didn’t know about her either.) Don Francks (see one of the boxcar hobos in ‘I’m Not There’, see FINIAN’S RAINBOW, film version) had sung two wonderful songs in his Village club act, and I had asked about them, and they were by Fred Rogers - Don had played Mister Anybodys in the Canadian beginning of what was to become Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. But I digress.

I learned, in the Mel Brooks phrase, that ‘it’s good to be the King.’ I learned that the very rich are not like you and me. I learned the power of television for good and for intimacy. I learned to focus on one thing at a time. I learned that you can introduce a lot of good ideas as long as you don’t need to take credit for them. I learned that people by and large underestimate the skills and intelligence both of children and of so-called ‘children’s performers’. I learned that I might be typecast for life. I learned the power of faith and the discipline of commitment to an ideal. I learned how blessed I was to be working with others, I learned the dangers of believing in one’s own finite identity, and I learned over and over and over again to answer the question ‘What’s Fred Rogers really like?’

CG: Did you ever interact with a young Michael Keaton? I heard he got his start on that show.

BA: Michael ran the trolley for a while, and was also a member of the Flying Zookini (sp?) Brothers, the funniest members of which were actually on the floor crew of the Neighborhood (the unsung Niki The Frog Prince may be on Zack & Miri, for all I know - these were the guys that would wedge newspaper in Fred’s shoes while he was trying to locate his loafers and sing the Tomorrow song inside the final time crunch). Michael went to LA - where I played with him in an improv class taught by Betty Thomas (Hill St. Blues, directed the Howard Stern movie Private Parts) an alumni of Second Ciuty, Chi. Her idea of putting a cap on a scene was to get naked upside down in a folding chair.

A shorter answer to your questions would have been: yes & yes.

CG: What was your reaction when Michael became Batman?

BA: Glad for him, glad for the ’son of Pittsburgh makes good’ angle. Pondered for a split-second the distance it might put between him and his former buddies, as ’success’ often does. Kevin’s m.o. is most remarkable in this respect. Of course, Captain Marvel (’SHAZAM!’), not Batman, was my fave. And Wonder Woman. I did form the idea that a Betty would usually lose to a Veronica…. Our mother had forbidden us comics, so we had to sneak off to read them at a friend’s house.

CG: Can you tell me about your new book, ‘The Diary of an Old Soul & The White Page Poems’? When and where will it be available?

BA: It’s two books in one. The idea of it is to read his, read mine, and to write yours. I believe it’ll be out first of 2008. There is a description of the book here…



It’s been a kind of 5 year detour/meditation. George MacDonald (check out a ‘children’s’ book called THE LIGHT PRINCESS) was C.S. Lewis’ spiritual mentor. In 1880 he self-published a book called ‘A Book of Strife in the form of The Diary of an Old Soul’ - a poem for every day of the year. On the opposite side of his poems, he set a blank white page, and the following Dedication invitation:

‘Sweet friends, receive my offering. You will find Against each worded page a white page set: - This is the mirror of each friendly mind Reflecting that. In this book we are met. Make it, dear hearts, of worth to you indeed: - Let your white page be ground, my print be seed, Growing to golden ears, that faith and hope shall feed.’

The dedication was only ever printed in this first edition. At the tail end of 2002 a member of the Wingfold cyber-group posted the original, and I began to answer a poem a day, for a year & 5 months. This is that book. Published strictly by grace.

CG: How easy a transition was it working for years on a children’s television show to the more adult oriented world of View Askew? Did some of the dialogue take getting used to?

BA: Bliss. It was like going from a cardboard playhouse that had gotten a little smaller every year - into the realm described in the song ‘I Believe I Can Fly’ - Viewaskew is the home I was born a tad too early to avail myself of, but by - what’s the term for the special loophole in DOGMA? - again, grace, I although relatively elder, get to be here. Here, where absolutely everything can be talked about - here, where the humor and language is commensurate in power with the incomprehensible state of ‘Reality’ we are asked in these times to attempt to absorb. It’s tonic.

CG: Do you have any new projects coming up?

BA: (prayerful silence)

CG: What is your favorite View Askew / Kevin Smith flick (Dogma / Jersey Girl excluded)?

BA: Red State. [ed. note - Interesting, as we hadn't known she had read it -- Will she potentially appear?]

CG: And finally, do you still keep in contact with anyone from View Askew?

BA: Sometimes, when the burden of gratitude gets just too heavy to bear, I’ll send a little e-mail in the direction of Holy Moobydom, and, between us? - the Buddy Christ and I are ‘like that’.

Thanks so much to Betty for her very insightful, detailed answers, and congrats to Chris on logging #20! More exclusive interviews from Chris are on the way to News Askew in 2008.