At first glance, Judith “Miss Manners” Martin and daughter Bina, an improv instructor at Chicago’s Second City, seem opposites. Gentle Reader, you be the judge.
Even from a distance, through a glass door, she’s instantly recognizable: the imperious gaze, the elegantly arched brows, the signature Victorian up-do that has graced best sellers for more than a quarter-century.
She’s Judith Martin, a.k.a. Miss Manners, the reigning queen of American etiquette.
She’s a touchstone of the culture, for Pete’s sake.
So, perhaps, we can be excused for failing, at first, to fully process her answer to the perennial softball question: “Parents today have trouble instilling manners in their children. How do you go about doing it?”
“Beating,” a familiar voice declares emphatically.
Martin, it turns out, is not the source of this acid-etched one-liner. Instead, she turns to the woman who has dared to put words in her mouth: her daughter, Jacobina “Bina” Martin, an improv instructor at Chicago’s Second City.
Laughing uproariously, both women implore us to present the line in its proper context: “It’s a joke!” The jokes flowed freely when this mother-daughter odd couple got together for what proved to be a surprisingly raucous interview in a plywood-paneled classroom at the Second City Training Center.
The occasion is the publication of the first book they’ve written together, “Miss Manners’ Guide to a Surprisingly Dignified Wedding” (Norton), and the younger Martin’s effective coming-out as a member of the Manners clan.
Both, in their own very different ways, profess dismay at the excess that now passes for a formal wedding.
“People asking for things (directly or by way of a registry) is not what presents are supposed to be about. Counting on returns on your outlay for a wedding is not what hospitality is supposed to be about. ‘It’s her day, and she can do whatever she wants’ violates everything about consideration for others,” Judith Martin says. “I’m very angry about that calling itself etiquette.”
More inclined to humor than indignation, Bina Martin, 39, recalls her recent wedding.
“I ran into this: If you don’t register, that means that you must be asking for cash. I was like, ‘No, we were actually just not thinking about the loot.’ “
At first glance, the Martins are a study in contrasts. Judith, 71, wears her hair pinned up; Bina’s flows past her shoulders. Bina, clad in black and a tad reserved, seems grateful to yield the spotlight to her charismatic mom, who shows up in rose lipstick and a peacock-blue coat.
Then there’s the little matter of careers. Miss Manners is a crusader for “excruciatingly correct behavior” who frowns on the common practice of (gasp!) addressing a new acquaintance by his or her first name. (You’re supposed to wait until that degree of intimacy is invited.)
Bina Martin, a founding member of the groundbreaking all-female Chicago improv group, Jane, is a champion of a brash, irreverent school of sketch comedy whose proud heritage includes nun jokes, wheelchair jokes, unprintable lyrics and a skit in which a baby is tossed off the roof of a burning building.
On a recent Monday afternoon, the younger Martin could be found gently egging on an advanced improv class until the students moved beyond rhyming “sucka” and “Carlson, Tucker” with the obvious profanity to, among other things, improvising a grisly attack on an innocent beaver.
Bina Martin’s response to a geek-love skit in which an ill-fated third date ended with a whimper: “You were trying to be nice, and nice doesn’t go anywhere.” Her response to a sinking-ship skit involving copious vomit, graphic drug use and multiple sexually explicit references: “Awesome! Good. Yeah. This is why we do this! We see people in their true colors in extreme circumstances.”
And what would Miss Manners make of such shenanigans?
“It’s entertainment!” Judith Martin says. “We don’t think entertainers should be models of good behavior. There would be no drama! Even I would not like to sit and watch a lot of people be perfectly polite to each other.”
And what about profanity in the theater? “Are you thinking I’m ‘Miss Morals’ and I’m going to tell people how to be prissy? That’s not what this is about,” Judith Martin says.
“Etiquette is social behavior among human beings, and we try to keep it out of conflict because conflict in real life is not much fun. In the theater, it’s interesting. They’re two different things.” Bina Martin’s illustrious parentage has been something of an open secret in the improv community for years.
“If you’ve worked with Bina in a show, you probably know,” says friend and colleague Matt Malinsky. “She’s very proud of her mom.
She’s definitely not hiding it, but it’s not something she leads with.” The Washington, D.C.-raised, Harvard-educated daughter of Judith Martin and husband Robert, a scientist, made her professional acting debut at 12 in “Troilus and Cressida.” She has lived in Chicago on and off since 1992.
She got involved in improv almost by accident, she says. “I was working for an agent who had a lot of Second City clients, and he was like, ‘You’re funny! You should go take some classes!’ I took some classes at Second City, and 15 years later, I’m still kinda here.”
She’s perhaps best known for her work as the director of the improvised one-act play “Chairs,” which challenges the boundaries between traditional theater and improv with a variation on musical chairs, in which the loser delivers an impromptu monologue about a character who has just died.
“As a director, she’s fearless,” Malinsky says.
Directing inexperienced actors doesn’t scare her off, he says. Bold ideas, shoestring budgets and expensive technology don’t either. Her response is always, “Let’s figure out how we can do this.”
Similarly, when Malinsky’s father died, Martin made a two- hour journey by bus to attend the funeral. “In this day and age, the easiest thing would be to send me an e-mail or pick up the phone,” Malinksy says. “She never looks for the easy way out.”
Martin’s career path began to converge with her mother’s in 2007, when the improv instructor’s boyfriend of nine months, Ron Kroll, accompanied her family on a December trip to Venice, Italy.
A proposal was a definite possibility, but Kroll told Martin that Venice wouldn’t be the place. “I wish,” he said. “But I don’t have the ring yet.”
As a result, she was completely unsuspecting when he lured her to the Santa Maria della Salute church and told her, “I love you so much.” In fact, there was such a long pause after the “I love you” that Martin began to get nervous. Was Kroll going to break up with her on her family vacation? “But?” she said.
“No,” he said. No buts. “I would love you to be my wife.”
“I think I started hitting him,” Martin recalls. “It was such a surprise. I was not expecting it.”
With her big day on the way, Martin began to look at wedding magazines and was aghast at the blatant requests for presents and the willful oppression of bridesmaids.
She told her mother, “You know what personalizing the wedding really means? It means depersonalizing everyone else.”
“I thought that was tremendous,” Judith Martin says. “We had various conversations like that and I said, ‘OK. You’re going to do this (book) with me.’ And she did.”
Personal etiquette
Real-life questions for Judith “Miss Manners” Martin and her daughter, Bina.
Q: How often do you set the table properly?
Judith: Every meal.
Bina: Every meal — when she comes over. (Laughs.) We’re making a point of having family dinner. It’s just my husband and I right now, but we set the table.
Q: What about breakfast?
Bina: Breakfast is a little more on the run.
Q: How many forks do you set?
Judith: Depends on what you’re eating. The fork sticks in people’s minds as some kind of symbol of oppression by etiquette. It’s very strange. You put out the tools that people (need to) eat their food.
Q: But what’s the maximum deployment?
Judith: Five. If you’re having a formal dinner at the White House, for example.
Q: How about your bed?
Judith: I beg your pardon!
Q: Do you make it?
Judith: I’m sorry. I don’t discuss my bed with (the press).
Q: How about you, Bina?
Judith: You don’t have to discuss your bed with her either. Really!
Bina: I do (make my bed), but I don’t think this is etiquette. I think this is hygiene.
Q: When was the last time you sent a thank-you note?
Bina: The last time I got a present.
