“My hair is dirty,” says Mylou Frencken as she enters the restaurant, takes off her turquoise hat and kneads her hair into shape with her hands. She looks colorful, just like the viewers of With the knife on the table know her. In that television quiz she has been the bartender who washes glasses and sings songs for 26 years. “Dirty hair looks better. You can clay that into shape. Otherwise I have that static toddler hair.”
Mylou Frencken (57) is, she says regretfully, perhaps more famous for that quiz than for her real work: comedian and songwriter. She started as a television bartender when her daughter was small and she didn’t perform for a while. Later, after the death of her husband (comedian and director Bert Klunder) in 2006, it provided a basic income and she gained “more respect for this side job.”
“Of course I have sometimes thought: now I have to stop. I’m standing there giving off a strange, unemancipated image while cleaning those glasses.” But she also notices that people find her inspiring, she receives a lot of mail. Not just cards, but also jewelry and brooches. “That means something. Apparently I’m saying: dress nicely and don’t be dismissed as an old woman.”
Two days after this lunch is the premiere of her theater program Mistress. In Theater de Liefde in Haarlem, her own theater, which she founded a few years ago together with four others. In doing so, she created her own place to try new things, such as a Dutch performance with Brigitte Kaandorp and Niki Jacobs last December. Thanks to this theater, she no longer feels dependent on programmers who need to be convinced that she can really do something. “I’m getting older and there are all kinds of new, great, younger talents coming along and they also need a place in the theaters. I wish them that wholeheartedly, that’s the nice thing about getting older, but because I have my own stage, that makes it easier. Otherwise you become one of those annoying, suspicious old things who thinks: they can all go on tour and I can’t.”
It’s noisy in the restaurant, it bothers her. She actually wanted to meet in Café Schiller on Rembrandtplein, because she was born in that neighborhood. She came there a lot with her father. But they don’t serve lunch there. Furthermore, she does not know many lunch places in Amsterdam, where she wanted to meet, nor in Haarlem, where she lives, because she does not eat lunch often and certainly not out. “Lunch never fits into a schedule. And I don’t think about it either, I’m too chaotic for it. Not good at all, because then I will eat a lot at five o’clock.”
During the last try-out, her director Leoni Jansen whispered in her ear afterwards: “Lose one kilo.” Frencken laughs loudly. “I now follow a ketogenic diet, I am hardly allowed to have any carbohydrates. But of course I do that very sloppily.” She looks at the map. “Oooh, this is delicious, avocado with toast. Then I just don’t have the toast. But I’m still going for eggs benedict.”
What do you think, I ask, when someone tells you to lose weight? “Well, I think that’s loving.” She has become easier on herself. “I am much more body positive than I was a few years ago. And it’s not possible, I also see that with friends. That transition, those arms, those breasts, those fats here and there, it’s much nicer to be kind to that.”
Up ass
Her latest performance is a tribute to the mistress. She sings about mistresses and the art of loving, and she tells stories from her own life and about famous mistresses from history. Like Monica Lewinsky, publicly dismissed as a bad woman in the era before #MeToo. „That woman. But that girl was nineteen. Maybe she was a victim. It feels empowering to say: such a relationship can happen, but take good care of yourself as a mistress. Don’t let yourself be called a slut. Don’t make yourself less important than such a man. It will have improved because of #MeToo, but you still have to be careful that as a woman you are not treated as an inferior, as an object. The mistress could use a good ass. I want to return the word to its original meaning: she who loves.”
The intention, she says, as she removes the egg and ham from her brioche bun and pushes the bun to the edge of her plate, was to not talk about herself for once. “Because that is so tiring sometimes.” In cabaret, she says, you are often the starting point. It’s about what you experience, what moves you, what your view of the world is. “It is such an egocentric profession. But I couldn’t ignore it. It has to be done, to talk about something important.”
And so her own experiences inevitably became an important part of the performance. For example, she talks about the woman who became too close to her first husband and started mothering her daughter. A woman who was everything she was not. Down to earth, caring, practical. “She took up way too much space in our family and I let that happen. That is a painful realization.” The woman cleaned their house, made sure the refrigerator was stocked and spent a lot of time with her loved one.
She doesn’t know what exactly happened between them. A few years after her husband’s death, she heard that this woman was terminally ill and went to visit her. “We both felt why I was there. But we decided to leave it. That was a really beautiful moment.” She didn’t need to know, she says, because she saw there was no point. She didn’t want to continue living with resentment. “And I don’t really believe in finding the truth either. I think I understand the deep layer of it.”
Hope against hope
She also knows the other side. In the years when she herself was “Monica Lewinsky-like young”, married men fell in love with her. “I had the illusion that I was much more interesting than their 40-year-old wife. Ha! Old woman!” She laughs loudly. “So childish. I think many mistresses have that: a kind of misapprehension of how a tied man is stuck in his club, in that bond with his wife and his children. As a mistress you rarely intervene in an equal way. It’s incredible how much patience and hope women can have against their better judgment. How many times do you have to be abandoned again, be alone again at Christmas, be the one who is not allowed to go on holiday again? And let’s hope that it will change anyway. And why?”
Yes, I ask, why?
“Because waiting might be easier than demanding what you want. Because I don’t think many women are very good at expressing their own will. I recognize that myself. A shame. Because you can bet that those women want something. They just can’t reach it well. Girls quickly learn that. A strong-willed girl was – at least in my youth – called rude or forceful. Not nice. A girl learns to to please. To be obedient. And it was precisely because we were praised when we were obedient and not troublesome that we became such troublesome women. That made me a difficult woman. I have learned to be easy and unlearned to indicate my limits.”
The consequence was that in her relationship with Bert Klunder, and in other relationships as well, she became dependent on her partners and never really chose for herself. That, I say, is actually a bit mistress-like behavior. She nods. “That slightly leaned-back life. That waiting. Because you are used to not calling the shots yourself. I still have to be careful that Frénk (journalist Frénk van der Linden, her husband, ed.) does not decide everything. He loves taking care of me, which is very sweet, but not always a good thing. Sometimes I have to figure it out myself. Learning to recognize my own needs.”
It was the same in her work. “When I was at the cabaret academy, I didn’t even know that the Cameretten Festival existed.” This is the oldest and one of the best-known cabaret festivals in the Netherlands. “It was that I met Bert and he said,” she imitates his voice and suddenly sounds very confident: “You just have to participate, because you will easily win.” And so she entered, in 1991, and won the personality award. Her act was called ‘I don’t dare but I do it anyway’. “Very funny, but apparently not so convincing that the agents stood in line for me.” The fact that she was soon able to start performing in theaters was because she and Bert merged their programs and the two of them continued. “And so the beginning of my relationship was actually in a kind of dependent position.”
Slalom
That only really changed after his death, he died of a cerebral hemorrhage. She was forty, their daughter ten. She started making her own performances and music. “Very bitter. But that’s how it turned out.” Sad, I say, but something good also came out of something bad. “Yes, that’s how it is. But it was painful for myself because I couldn’t really do it on my own.”
The feeling that she had to fight for her place has always remained. And that is, she thinks, mainly because of herself. “Because I have never really been able to fully believe in what I do. I need someone like Frénk, who says: ‘Yes, but it is really special, give yourself that now’.” For example, she only dared to record a CD when she saw that Wende, who graduated from the cabaret academy ten years later, was doing so. “It was only then that I could think: why not?” What didn’t help was that she started at a time when songs were less popular. “It always had to be called cabaret, because then it sold better to theaters. But then I came up with my songs and people didn’t think it was really cabaret. In recent years, cabaret artists such as Wende, Yentl and de Boer, Jeroen van Merwijk and of course Acda and de Munnik have made songs more visible. I also benefit from that.”
Secretly she sees Mistress as part two of a trilogy – her previous performance was called Girl. The next one should be about women passing on what they’ve learned. “That seems wonderful to me. I’m not quite there yet. I’m still slaloming like this.” This is also due to the nature of her work, she thinks. “Making a performance is nerve-wracking. It has to be sold, it has to become something, musicians have to be added and they have to be paid. That doesn’t make life smooth.” Her strongest motivation is the kick she gets when she has written a good song. “I feel most like who I am with a few beautiful songs on stage. Someone with a story. Someone who can spread that with a lot of poetry and musicality. If I didn’t, I’d just be a clothes-addicted, whiny, brooding idiot. I still want people to listen to me.” In a louder voice: “And now you have to listen to me. That need was there from an early age, but I let life take it away from me. And I just want it back. It’s no one’s fault. A little maybe, a little the patriarchy’s fault. Sorry, guys.”