Jody Gelb

Jody Gelb has a forty-year career acting on stage and screen. She has portrayed roles in the Tony Award-winning Broadway plays The Who’s Tommy, Titanic, Big River, and Wicked, among others. Gelb also played Joan of Arc’s mother in the David Byrne rock opera Joan of Arc: Into the Fire at The Public Theater in New York and was a featured player in the world premiere of Shel Silverstein’s Wild Life with Julie Hagerty, Henderson Forsythe, William H. Macy, and Raynor Scheine. On television, she has appeared in guest roles in Gunplay, Law & Order, and Dr. Death. Gelb is now following the career of her daughter, Dora Jar, as she tours the USA and the world as a singer-songwriter.

Instagram: @jodygelb

Facebook: @jody.gelb

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Is your go to comfort food sweet or savory? Is it something you make yourself? 

My comfort food is zucchini. I heat olive oil in a large flat frying pan and add finely sliced or diced onions and then a huge amount of sliced zucchini. I cook it at a high temperature so that the zucchini begins to caramelize. You need to scrape it off the pan as you continue to flip it with a spatula. Add salt as it cooks and some fresh ground pepper, and eat it out of a bowl that my dear friend Harry threw in his pottery studio. Grate a chunk of fresh Parmigiana over it. Sometimes I’ll add a bit of crumbled feta cheese on top. This is heaven.

Do you collect anything? If so, what, why, and for how long?

I have a few jars of white buttons in my bathroom closet. Clear glass jars so you can see the buttons when you open the small closet door. I am not sure why I am drawn to the white button. I can’t remember when this interest first appeared, but I kind of remember being on a national tour of Wicked and poking around in the small shops of Vancouver and buying white buttons and thinking: there is something beautiful here.

Do you have another artistic outlet in addition to your writing? Do you sew? Paint? Draw? Knit? Dance?

I have been an actor for more than forty years, and writing became my other artistic outlet. I started writing solo shows for myself. I had these characters and monologues that emerged as spoken speeches, and I started writing them down and piecing them together to create work for myself in small cabarets and theaters. I feel like I came in a back door as a writer.

If you could create a museum exhibition, what would be the theme?

The theme would be letters. Handwritten letters and the envelopes that they came in. We are losing or have lost the world of letter writing. The joy of waiting for letters at the mailbox. Choosing stamps and pens and sealing wax. I recently found boxes and boxes of love letters that belonged to my maternal grandmother. We were cleaning out the family home of many years, and I found them in a storage space under a kitchen banquette. I now have them in my garage in California, and my fantasy is that they could live in a Museum of Letters and tell the tale of her deep love for this much younger man who took her on picnics and to museums during her long widowhood when she lived with our family.

What brings you great joy?

There is a lot that brings me joy in this life, but my greatest joy is spending time with my daughter and watching her as she begins her career as a singer and songwriter. When she’s home with me, we spend time with her dad and his partner and go on long walks in the Berkeley hills or head to Half Moon Bay on the coast and walk with Leo, the dog, on the beach, and nothing is better than this.