Yael Interview

7/27/2019 Yael Interview

1/6

Yael Horowitz

FILM104 Middletown Interview

1

I walked into Kid City, a place where the walls swirl with green wood and any

kind of play is possible, to meet Jen Alexander, the director and owner of the

museum. She was meeting with someone from the parking committee of

Middletown. Immediately, I felt as if I had walked into the calm yet chaotic world

that Jen lives in. We left Kid City after she had checked on the construction going on

upstairs and had come down barefoot as to not track saw dust through the museum.We travelled to an edgy coffee shop where she decided she was going to buy me a

coffee. As we travelled from place to place to find a location to begin the interview

she jokes about making an existentialist movie with this search as the plot, talking

about rootlessness and absurdist theory as if she were talking about the weather.

We settle on the steps near a public park, with classical music coming from a

parking garage nearby, the absurdity of it certainly suits Jens world. We begin to

talk and I am captivated. Without even knowing it she manages to make you feel

perfectly inadequate in the most reassuring way. There seemed to be an unspoken

agreement that we were both the insiders.

Yael Horowitz: So, where are you from originally?

Jen Alexander: Oh, Wayne, New Jersey, right outside New York City.

YH:So what made you want to come back to Middletown after studying at Wesleyan

University?

JA: Well, I never left. I kind of fell in love with Middletown. It was very, very

different from the place that I grew up. I grew up in a place that had the same

number of people but was very suburban. And the fact that this had a Main St, I had

never lived any place like that. I'd always lived in places where if anyone wanted to

do anything interesting they went into New York City to do it. And here its more the

kind of place where you have to make your own fun, cause you're really too far from

New York and Boston to rely on them for culture. I was really drawn to that.

YH:What did you major in when you were at Wesleyan?

JA: The College of Letters.

YH: Okay, How was that?

JA: Philosophy, Literature and History... I was really interested in Medieval Iceland. I

took an amazing class called Kingship and Law in Medieval Iceland, got me totally

hooked. But you know, CoL is not the kind of major that you...well, maybe it was the

times too we never, I never even knew anybody who gave a thought to what they

would do after college. Its very different now, people worry about: "Oh, if I'm an art

history major, or a philosophy major..." But we didn't used to worry about that. Well,

turned out the economy sucked when we all graduated anyway, but we didn't worry

about. Yes, CoL you just sat around in a room and talked about books and wrote


2/6

papers and argued and there were no tests and no grades...it was pretty much

Nirvana.

YH:Wow, so then what did YOU do right after college?

JA: Yeah, well I basically bummed around Middletown and worked washing dishesand as a secretary. I got a job at a non-profit in Hartford setting up farmers markets

in low-income neighborhoods because I was interested in food policy and the

radicalism of the food desert. I mean this was like 1988, so food deserts were a very

new idea but it was also really obvious that something was happening. And, um, I

did that for two years - living in Middletown and working in Hartford and it became

clear to me that, um, uh, that, um, living and working in different place, meant that

everything I was investing personally didn't accrue to my work place and vice versa.

And I know thats the American way, and I know that's how everybody does it...but I

found that, that it just didn't work for me. Hartford was kind of a bottomless pit of

need, like I was never going to change Hartford. Hartford was bleak...But there was

stuff I wanted to work on in Middletown and I felt like the issues and the problemsyou could get your hands around and maybe you could make a difference. And so, I

gradually just quit my work in Hartford and started doing volunteer work and

projects in Middletown. And I fell in love, and had a couple babies... And then I sort

of went through another big shift where I realized that the community...I mean

Middletown was really in the pits at that point, like all the stores closed on Main St.,

there was nothing open and I mean it was really bleak. So I went through this other

shift where I was like "Wow, if I want to stay here in Middletown I have to do

something to make Middletown more compelling, with better places to live." Do

something that will make people want to stay here! Instead of always leaving. And I

started working on Kid City, so that was 1994.

YH:Can you talk a little bit about the moment when you came up with the idea for Kid

City, and what that was like.

JA: Mmm, it was really two moments, maybe three. I remember that when my first

child was 18 months old, we went to Austin, Texas to visit some Wesleyan friends at

grad school. And we went to the children's museum. And my son was 18 months old

and I felt like it was the first time I sat down since he was born because he was one

of these intensely imaginative children, and I was his playmate. And so, you know,

we never just crossed the street... There was an airport on the other curb and we

were the planes getting ready and we just got the green signal and Quick! They are

waving the flags! We go!...You know it was never like fold the laundry it was"There's a fire truck crossing the...!" Like "Its a laundry basket..." "No, its a firetruck!"

And I literally, felt like it was the first time I sat down when I went to a children's

museum and it was like the environment jump started the play and participated,

you know, in a way that my living room didn't. I just had a very clear feeling, like I

want this in my town, I want this next to my house, you know. But it was about a

year later, when I had my second child that I just kept making really good friends

and then having them leave because this place wasn't interesting enough for them to


3/6

Yael Horowitz


3

stay. So it was when my second child was born, it was Thanksgiving weekend and I

remember I just stayed up all night and I just wrote out a business plan: "There

should be a place, and this is what it should have in it and this is why people would

come and this is who would pay for it and here is what it should look like." And I

thought: "Okay, its Thanksgiving weekend, wow, this should take me five or six

weeks to put it together, you know maybe it'll cost 10, 000 dollars, I should have thisthing open by New Years. No problem. Easy." I took four years. All of that social

capital that, like I was saying when I worked in Hartford I felt like the social capital

didn't build up, like you would make contacts at work but they didn't help you in

your personal life and vice versa, like that wasn't true in Middletown. In

Middletown, people that knew me because I volunteered on a political campaign or

because I helped start a garden or because I did whatever, when I went to them and

said "I have this idea about a children's museum" I got a very different response.

There was a trust built up there, I think that's why it was possible to put it together.

But it did take a long time.

YH:Do you think being the director of Kid City has influence the way you've raisedyour kids in any way?

JA: That's an interesting question. I think its the other way around [laughter]. I

mean being a parent has influence my feelings about Kid City. I think its really about

parents, its not really about kids... I think parenting is really hard and really

isolating, and its kind of like being in college, in that there is constant sense of failure

and like missed opportunity. I remember being at Wesleyan and being like "Okay,

there's two films and an Indonesian Dance group and somebody's throwing a part

or cooking an amazing meal and those people are putting a band together and like,

I'm gonna go take a nap." So you had all this sense of lost opportunity and failure...

And parenting is an awful lot like that because you can just be really good at it for 12

hours a day and still have time to totally screw up before bedtime. Its arduous. So,

my work at Kid City really comes out of that feeling about parenting. I'm trying to

create a little bubble of relief for people, where they have some fun, where they feel

what I felt in Austin, essentially, which is "Wow, this gives me a moment to sit and

reflect, and recharge my batteries." Its not away from the kid, its not like getting a

baby sitter and saying "Okay, I'm going to go have a girls night out" kind of thing. Its

more like being with your kid but feeling a sense of community at the same time

that really strengthens you and gets you ready to go back out and keep parenting.

YH: On a different aspect of Kid City what influence your creative process? What is

your creative process like coming up with the new rooms and new ideas for Kid City?

JA: Gosh. Well there's a couple pieces to it, mostly I think about my own childhood

and I'm going for certain feelings like...My mom was a very early feminist and she

was a school teacher, and you know, on the last day of school every year we would

all get in the car and we would drive all the way through the country. She was just

very independent. We would spend the whole summer driving and I had this very


4/6


5/6

Yael Horowitz


5

us this whole other world, which you know could probably be summed up in the

words New York. It was so smart. And its not like I'd read a lot of Russian novels

which its essentially a send up of Russian novels. But I knew it was a joke about

something and I knew that it was an insiders movie. I knew that in the movie Woody

Allen was an insider and that I was an insider for knowing that he was an insider.

Probably is the root of my whole, uh, okay... so I have this theory... that like, I'm sureits not an original theory but basically...People used to be tied to their religion, and

then they were like really tied to their nationality, and now people are really tied to

what they buy...Its a tribal thing. Its like that how you define I'm in this group. And I

feel like that was my first encounter with my tribe. It was like I was in that tribe but

I never knew it. You know, and then all of a sudden realizing like "Wow! There's a lot

of people that think this is funny and they're out there somewhere and I'm gonna go

find them." So that was kind of why it was, I didn't really analyze it that way until

you asked me this question but we just thought it was the funniest thing ever. We

had memorized those scripts and we played them out, to reenact it in the back yard.

We memorized all the dialogue the way that teenagers ten years later were doing it

with Monty Python.

YH:So in the movie, you mentioned the humor, they use humor a lot when they are

talking about very serious things, like death and war. So I want to ask if that's

something you've taken on as a practice in your life? Of using humor as this

mechanism to deal with more serious issues.

JA: Um, Yeah. Its the making a joke about something you can't really say. I think for

me it goes back to that insider thing. We all know we're all going to die, but we don't

talk about it, so this is like talking about it without talking about it. I don't know, that

could just be me.

YH: The scene at the end of the movie--

JA: Dances off with--

YH: --where Boris is dancing off with death, what does that make you think of?

JA: [laughter] Well its ridiculous! I don't know if I, its funny, I don't know if I relate it

really with a philosophy about death...I think what struck me more about it, what

strikes me more about it is just the absurdity of it and the lack of control and how

these thing happen to us and we think we're in control and then it turns out we're

not in control. At one point, he's in front of the firing squad and he's waiting, and

they're saying "We're gonna kill you now!" and he's going "No, you're not! I was

visited, I know you're not! So hey, go right ahead!" And then they kill him! And that

to me was just so classic of what life is like. It doesn't matter if you think you know

whats going on or you don't really. That's not reality. Something else entirely is

happening so what you believe and what's actually happening are two totally

different things and you know, it just is.


6/6

Documents

Yael Interview