Sunday, May 28, 2006
Whatever happened to ...
Elizabeth Strother
Recent columns
- For those who have too little
- Time to gather mountain views
- Our blind spot on roads
- Following the money trail
From the RoundTable blog
For you Blacksburg High alumni out there who remember Mardy Baker belly-dancing for the talent contest sometime in the late '80s, early '90s, be advised that she is alive and living her dream of becoming an actress in the big city.
While carving out an acting career was a real long-shot, you might expect that simply being alive at age 32 is no big deal. But you'd be wrong.
Martha Baker, a Blacksburg High graduate and home-town girl through-and-through, went on to Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond to pick up her BFA in performance, then to New York City, where she lived in Manhattan for three years and acted, there and in summer stock in Pennsylvania and Connecticut.
During those years, she got sick.
"I thought I had pneumonia. But I kept traveling. I never paid much attention to it," she told me last week in a phone interview. But after seeing a pulmonologist, being on antibiotics for a month and a half, being hospitalized, then treated as an outpatient for tuberculosis for three weeks -- all without improving -- she finally got a diagnosis that stuck: Wegener's granulomatosis.
"Till the early '90s, it was a death sentence to have what I have."
Hers is still a potentially deadly disease characterized by inflammation of the blood vessels that can damage many of the body's organs. She took oral chemotherapy and steroids for a year. The disease has been in remission for four years.
And Baker is in Chicago.
"My brother was already living there," she said. "I needed to live in a big city for my career. But I wanted to be around family because of my illness."
And she's married.
She was performing improv in Chicago "and a gentleman came up afterward who gave me his card and wanted me to join his company," which did comedic training sketches for corporations.
"And he happens to be my husband."
Well, now.
Steve Matuszak then was merely co-founder and business manager of the Chicago Comedy Company. (You can check it out at www.chicagocomedyco.com. Baker's the one in pink.)
She did -- join his company, that is, working as a writer, performer and on the business side.
"The company did so well, I started joining him in the office. And we opened up a comedy club in Chicago this past November."
And Matuszak, an actor and stand-up comic, showed real talent as a romantic lead.
"I'm very attached to Blacksburg," Baker told me. "It's in my heart, and will always be in my heart." And it had always been in her dreams to be married here, at her church, Blacksburg Baptist, surrounded by family and friends.
His family was there, though, and "because of the business and all that -- we work eight days a week --" well, the dream just wasn't going to be.
The pair flew to Blacksburg for a visit, though. "Steve had convinced me we just were not going to get married. This is not the time." Heh-heh.
"He brought me into my church. He proposed to me in my church, so that will be part of my memory" of her wedding. "My mother was in on it. She left her purse in the church," a ruse to send the couple back after the Sunday service.
Mom is Jeannie Baker, a nurse with Tech's student health services and, her daughter said, "always my No. 1 fan." Dad is Jim Baker, professor of crop and environmental science at Tech. An older brother and sister, Mike in Illinois and Margaret in North Carolina, were part of Mardy's dream too, though. And a posse of friends.
After he proposed, Matuszak told her they needed to talk about "one more thing. He said we should go and have a drink, and we walked down to Bogen's. We walked in and they took us upstairs. They have a private meeting room upstairs." And all of her family and her closest high school girlfriends were there -- sans Mike and his wife, Amy, who were in France. Still, Matuszak got it just about perfect.
"He got big points. Big points."
The couple are still with what is now called the Chicago Comedy and Training Company, which works for corporate clients, and just the two of them have opened the Chicago Comedy Company Theatre.
"I started improv work in New York, performing right next to Broadway," Baker said. "That's when I started the comedy. ... Improv started getting me because it really worked on your comic timing, it really honed those skills."
Explain the process, I asked her.
"Improv is such a unique animal," she said. "You're starting from nothing. When you come from nothing, anything is possible. It's just being able to be completely free. The way life is. ... You deal with it exactly the way it shows up instead of raging against it."
Like when you find out you have Wegener's granulomatosis, I thought. It's in remission, but there's no cure yet.
"It's scary to think what could happen," she had told me earlier. "But I feel extremely blessed to have my health."
A trouper, all around.
