Truly great actors are willing to do whatever it takes to disappear completely into their roles, and here’s a story about a performer whose extraordinary commitment to her craft is sure to make her a community theater legend: Mom got absolutely shredded to play one of the nuns in a local stage production of “The Sound Of Music.”
Wow! Who knew she had it in her?!?
Last month, Mom received an email informing her that after a grueling two-callback process, she had been cast as one of the singing nuns in the Madison Area Community Theater production of “The Sound Of Music,” and in an effort to fully inhabit the part, she immediately embarked on a bodybuilding regimen so punishing she is now barely recognizable as the Mom we all know. When rehearsals began, Mom resolved to lose 40 pounds of fat and put on 50 pounds of pure muscle mass in order to “do the role of Sister Margaretta justice,” rising at 4:30 each morning to weight train for three hours before guzzling down a breakfast of six raw eggs and jetting off to rehearsal at the local high school auditorium. During her cutting phase, Mom forewent all carbs, even when Aunt Ellen brought over her famous pound cake, and soon the excess fat starting melting off, revealing the twitching, muscle-bound frame Mom said she needed in order to “become” one of the nuns of Nonnberg Abbey. Between her nonstop hex bar squats and diligent creatine supplementation, Mom has turned her average post-menopausal physique into a terrifying, rock-hard body that her director (Mrs. Holliday from down the street) called “a potential distraction.”
Earlier this week, the cast began running rehearsals in costume, and despite the baggy, form-concealing fit of Mom’s nun’s habit, you can still clearly see her enormous delts twitching underneath. And though her full six-pack is not visible while she and her fellow nuns sing “Maria” at the start of the show, an impressive network of huge pipe-like veins bulges alarmingly from her neck and forehead thanks to her obsessive efforts to cut her body fat to zero and replace it with a pro wrestler-like musculature. It wasn’t easy for Mom to eat pounds of boiled chicken and vegetables a day for weeks or to put in three-a-day workouts with her lifting coach Alonzo in the basement, but now that she’s on stage stealing scenes from the several other middle-aged women playing her fellow nuns, it’s clear her hard work paid off.
Damn! Mom is truly establishing herself as one of the preeminent method actors of her time!
The hard-earned transformation Mom made for this role is really something to admire. We never thought she would strength train at all, let alone dangerously dehydrate herself in a sauna so that her muscles would pop for her scenes in “The Sound Of Music,” but she’s done it, and we’re proud AF. Go Mom! You deserve a Tony!
