In the quiet of a brunch-hour coffee shop, I looked across the table at the medium, whose body looked like it was gently being pulled from side to side. She started clearing her throat, over and over, like there was something caught halfway down the wrong pipe. “Is there something you’re not saying?” She rasped at me. “I feel these hands on my throat, squeezing, like there’s something you really need to say but never have.” Then she started coughing as the squeezing got tighter.
The previous evening, I was still in the presence of the medium, but both of us were doing something completely different. I was sitting in Cascades Theatrical Company watching said medium, Michelle Mejaski, direct a rehearsal of “Something Rotten,” an epic musical comedy with ornate period costumes, multiple dance numbers and multiple Shakespearean monologues. It’s almost exhausting watching Mejaski bounce from sitting in the audience, taking notes on performances, wearing her hat as producer when some of the costumes go missing, to putting on her tap shoes and leading a dance number onstage and singing with the chorus when they were unsure of a moment.
Majeski and co-director Angelina Anello-Dennee have a very fun show on their hands. Set in 1590, the show follows a pair of brothers, Nick and Nigel Bottom (the last name should be familiar to anyone who’s seen or read “A Midsummer’s Night Dream”), who desperately want and need to write a successful play, but the only bard anyone cares about is The Bard, William Shakespeare. So Nick goes to Nostradamus to get some advice and hijinks ensue, including a giant musical number about breakfast foods (featuring a good old-fashioned cancan), multiple tap numbers and all kinds of romance.
So many of the performances were hugely enjoyable, such as Nathan Kristjanson’s exasperated Nick Bottom, Victoria Lusk as his long-suffering wife, Bea, and Jessica Hayes as Portia, a Puritan discovering her groove. But the performance I couldn’t look away from was Kisky Holwerda as Shakespeare. This isn’t a Shakespeare you’ve ever seen. This is Shakespeare by way of David Bowie in “Labyrinth.” Holwerda can take a completely throwaway line and, seemingly effortlessly, extract belly laughs aplenty. It’s performances like hers that remind me why I dedicated a huge part of my life to theater.
Once “Something Rotten” ends, Mejaski Choreography & Productions will put up “Rent” as this year’s Theater in the Park musical, but instead of constantly teaching dance, producing and directing between now and then, Mejaski has discovered a new calling. During the shelter-in-place period of COVID, she found herself meditating quite a bit and, after a while, started hearing voices. At first, she thought she was having a breakdown, until she spoke to some of her closest friends and explained what she was experiencing. They told her she was becoming a medium. Now she has launched Redbird Readings.
“I believe that spirit energy is like a frequency,” says Mejaski. “It’s a vibration, just like there are frequencies all around us. Radio waves, television signals; once you turn on the radio or the TV, you tune into those frequencies and you hear them. I believe there is a spiritual…a universal energy around us. A vibration. We are all able to tune into it. When I open up, that is what I am listening to, seeing and feeling. It is not a gift, it is an ability. It is, by far, the most peaceful and loving place I have ever been. I love everything about it.”
So, the morning after the rehearsal, I met with Mejaski at Palate for a reading. She instantly tapped into something. I watched the way she carried herself change completely. Eyes closed, flickering behind her eyelids, she reached out and connected with parts of my past and avenues of my future. She wouldn’t ask me to explain anything I didn’t want to; instead she would tell me what she saw, heard and felt, while letting me apply it how I saw fit.
But then came the throat clearing, the rasping, the coughing. The coughing got louder. Mejaski needed me to say something. Needed me to face some kind of truth and speak it aloud. I did. Within moments, her coughing subsided. We parted ways and I went home and cried. Days later, I texted her to clarify a few quotes and told her my experience of the reading. I can still feel the chills I got after she said, “I don’t remember that at all.”
One of us does.
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This article appears in Source Weekly February 9, 2023.
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