Isabella Ides

PORTRAIT OF AN ARTIST AS A YOUNG GIRL

Isabella’s world slipped off the cosmic map of known planets at Blessed Sacrament Elementary School on Sunset Boulevard, in Hollywood, California. Blame it on the Hollywood nuns with their flair for theatrics. Or it may have been the sign itself, casting a secular magic over all the holy business.

In any case, something happened one day in a catechism class. An epiphany. Flexing her own wings of invention, the youthful redactor edited out the unlikely off-world God that only allowed two of each of the animals to board the Ark. She was deeply offended that God had drowned all the children; the visual that accompanied this offense was heartrending. In secret, she removed the off-world Father from her stack of holy cards.

Isabella’s on-world father ran searchlights for the openings of Hollywood premiers. Stars of different magnitude stepped into the light. Marilyn Monroe, goddess of the silver screen thrummed in little girl’s Hollywood heart the day she wore her best dress and climbed the balcony at the May ceremonies to crown the Virgin Mary with fresh cut flowers. When the school children began to chant Aves on the playground below, Marilyn and the Virgin and the Hollywood Sign coalesced seamlessly into a personal trinity.

Under the long bells and searchlights and Hollywood nights, Isabella began to spin in a tantalizing metaphorical matrix. And thus, she slipped unawares into the labyrinth of poetics that is theater with its game of masks. Tangled up forever with a muse who flipped identities like pancakes on the griddle of the Goddess, Isabella became a fool for art. Yes, religion got her after all.

JUMPING AHEAD TO THE ALMOST NOW and bypassing all the inevitable setbacks that delay arrivals…such as University Degrees & Lovers & Children & Excess & Taxes.

In 2003 Isabella Russell-Ides bounced back into the play fray after a silence so resounding even Isabella believed she had managed to erase all evidence of ever having been a writer. Starting over, with earth boots securely laced and her visionary glasses retro-fitted, in a quick five years she raised her profile in the theatre arena with an impressive array of new writings, productions and performance pieces. She won the DFW 2008 Critics Forum Award for Best New Play: Coco & Gigi. More recently, she won Echo Theatre’s international Big Shout Out competition and celebrated the world premiere of The Early Education of Conrad Eppler.

Sitting in the audience, Isabella began to modify the world of her character, Conrad Eppler. Those imaginary changes would become the novel, White Monkey Chronicles. Like the white rabbit, Isabella almost arrived too late to find a seat at the novelists’ tea table.

“When I first saw the play, there were so many unanswered questions. Who is Conrad Eppler? That was a big one. As soon as I started to write the novel, I knew the answer. But the most fun, the most astonishing event, had to do with the toy monkey that actor, who played Conrad Eppler, carried around in the play. No sooner had my fingers begun dancing on the keyboard than the monkey came alive. I knew that white monkey. He’d been waiting to jump into the story all along.”