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There’s no single path to reaching Walt Disney Imagineering, and many didn’t plan to even work on theme parks. Quite a few Imagineers share a background in theater, which makes sense given the connections between the two mediums. Karen Connolly Armitage began her career as a scenic designer in theater before joining Larkins Associates in St. Louis. During that time, she developed her skills as an artist while designing for the new Busch Gardens parks in Tampa and Williamsburg. A chance moment at IAAPA ultimately led her to join Disney in 1977 during the early ramp-up for EPCOT Center.
Karen is my guest on this episode of The Tomorrow Society Podcast to talk extensively about her amazing career. She describes how moments early in her life set the stage for her career as a designer. Her work designing the interior theaters for The American Adventure and Impressions de France creates just the right tone for those spaces. Karen also describes her role on the planning team for the Disney/MGM Studios. She played a key role in developing the Great Movie Ride and designed the gangster scene.
Imagineering was a very different place in the ’70s and ’80s than it is today, and Karen explains some challenges of that environment. She ultimately thrived and worked there for 26 years. We also cover her work for the remarkable Frontierland at Disneyland Paris and Main Street in Hong Kong. Karen is one of 12 women featured in the upcoming Women of Walt Disney Imagineering Book, which will be released on March 15th. We conclude the podcast by talking about this exciting book and how she got involved in the project. I really enjoyed talking to Karen and learning more about her story.
Show Notes: Karen Connolly Armitage
Learn more about Karen Connolly Armitage on her bio at the Armitage IMAGES website.
Listen to Tammy Tuckey’s interview with Karen on the Tiara Talk show from November 6, 2020.
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Note: Photos in this post were used with the permission of Karen Connolly Armitage.
Transcript
Karen Connolly Armitage: You were just dressed up beautifully. You had a beautiful suit on and everything, and when we were sitting down at the table and we were going through your books and everything, I kept looking at your glasses and he said they were clean, but around the rim, they had tiny little paint drops all over them. And he said, this girl’s got to be for real, because they kept asking me in the books, now you just directed this, right? Somebody else did this artwork. I said, no, this is my stuff, both theater and theme park. I said, here’s a list of people that you can call. And so they offered me a job right then and there.
Dan Heaton: That is Karen Connolly Armitage, who’s here to talk about her 26 years at Walt Disney Imagineering and so much more. You’re listening to The Tomorrow Society Podcast.
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Dan Heaton: Hey there, thanks for joining me here on Episode 162 of the Tomorrow Society Podcast. I am your host, Dan Heaton. Hope you’re all doing great out there. I know it’s an interesting time right now in the world, but I hope this gives you a little bit of time to think about something else. And I am really excited about this week’s show. It was awesome to talk with Karen Connolly Armitage, who worked at Walt Disney Imagineering for 26 years, like I mentioned, but just has so much more to her story starting out doing designs for theater.
She was also an actress at that time. Ultimately started working at Larkins Associates in St. Louis, which is where I am right now. While she was there, she worked on theme parks, two of them for Anheuser-Busch in Williamsburg and in Tampa. Did a lot of work for them and then ultimately ended up joining Disney sort of by chance, but in the best way possible and did so many cool things. Joined in the 1970s as they were getting ready to ramp up for Epcot and then designed the interior theaters for Impressions de France and for the American Adventure.
Worked on Main Street in Hong Kong Disneyland, was very closely involved in the development of the Disney/MGM Studios, and then worked on the layout for the Great Movie Ride and specifically the gangster scene. It was really fun to hear about that. Plus Frontierland at Disneyland Paris, my favorite Frontierland of any of the ones I’ve been to, which is saying a lot. We talk about that so much more and beyond the specific attractions, I just think that Karen has a really interesting story and how she got to where she was and was able to do so many amazing things at Disney. And the timing of this episode is perfect actually, because the book Women of Walt Disney Imagineering is set to come out in a little over a week on March 15th.
And that is a book that we talk about on this episode near the end, but 12 women who reflect on their careers in the parks, including Peggie Farris, who was a guest on this show. Others like Kathy Rogers, Katie Olson, Tori Atencio McCullough, Becky Bishop, Julie Vinson, so many more. It was the brainchild of Eli Erlandson, who we also hear about on the show. I cannot wait to read this book and to learn so much more about some Imagineers that I know, a little about others that I know almost nothing about.
And just hearing Karen’s story really makes me think that we’re in store for a real treat with all of these stories in this book. So based on what I know, I would highly recommend you check it out, and I plan to do so as soon as it comes out next week. So let’s get right to it. Here is Karen Connolly Armitage.
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Dan Heaton: First of all, I’d love to know, before you even started working on theme parks or Disney or anything, how did you get interested just in art and design? What really drew you to that when you were growing up and getting into a career?
Karen Connolly Armitage: Well, I had a very unusual upbringing. I was raised in two private boys’ schools where my dad was director of athletics, and he also taught American and world history. And the first one was Howe military school in Howe, Indiana, which closed a couple of years ago. It was how is in northern Indiana.
And I remember little snippets of that. I mean, I was there from birth to maybe seven or eight, but one thing that I do remember, well, two things. I remember my mom, who was a stay at home mom at that particular time, even though she was a Wesley graduate, dabbled in watercolors. And by the time I was a toddler, I didn’t get finger paints, but I got my own watercolor set and there was just big reams of paper around that my dad got from the school. So when my mother was painting, she put me in a wetsuit practically and sit me on the floor and just dabble in it.
She loved the watercolors because everything was washable. You could wash it all out. So that’s a very strong memory I have. The other strong memory I have is I remember a sandbox, and I remember these guys, I mean, they were men to me. I was three, but they were students, they were cadets. And I was told when I was older that they built me a sandbox and I was the only little girl on the home campus. This is a military school. These are all baby boys from ages like seven to 18 away from home. So most of them had little sisters. I was very popular because it reminded them, you know what I mean?
Dan Heaton: Yeah.
Karen Connolly Armitage: I can remember a couple of these guys, I can’t remember their names, whatever, but I remember sitting in the sandbox and they would be sitting in there with me, sitting with a bucket of water and stuff like that, and they bought me little trucks and stuff like that. And we built a town. It was something I had no experience of going to the beach in the summer and building castles. That came later when we moved back to Massachusetts.
So that was my in the late spring and early fall, because talk about snow, Northern Indiana. So that’s one of my very, very first memories. And eventually we moved to Connecticut, southern Connecticut. My parents were originally from the Boston area, and we moved to Cheshire Academy in Cheshire, Connecticut and lived in a dorm. There were 21 boys in this big dorm that we lived in.
My dad was director of athletics, and he had many of the guys on his teams were in the dorm. I remember on the other side of my wall lived a guy by the name of George Vegas, and he used to help me with my math homework all the time. This was a time, let me see, I was born in ‘47. So yeah, a little bit before that, the Mickey Mouse Club appeared. The original Mickey Mouse Club appeared, and I’ll tell you very honestly, I found it very entertaining and engaging, but not the stuff about Disneyland. I was drawn to Spin and Marty, Quirky and White Shadow, and I was starting to get really horse crazy because that was the time of Fury and My Friend Flicka and everything.
And back in Indiana since Howe military culture right there, I went back in how I went to a two room schoolhouse. It was called Lima School with Amish kids, and they all got to ride their ponies and their horses to school. And I cannot tell you how jealous I was. That kind of continued in Connecticut. And then we got transferred to the Ainsley house, which was a much smaller, it was an old Victorian home. It’s not there anymore. I checked on Google Maps, but it was built in the late 1890s or something like that. So it was an original home. So I was getting older and older, and I had two little sisters by that time. And my dad started asking around, and by the time I was nine, he’d set me up with a job literally
In South Meridan, Connecticut, cleaning stalls for a private show barn. And he thought, we’ll do this maybe for a week, and then that’ll be the end of it. She won’t be bugging us anymore. The following Saturday there I was next to his bed, daddy, come on, wake up. You have to drive me to the barn. And that lasted from the time I was nine to the time I was 15. And I got to show some of these other people’s horses. I was New England, five gated champion in 1961, juvenile champion. And since my dad was into sports, he’d always send a reporter from the Boston Globe to these horse shows.
There I’d be in the sports section of Boston Globe a little bit. So the reason why I mentioned this is that there was a lot of, because by the time I was 12, I was the manager of that barn, getting ’em ready to go to shows and stuff like that. So I became very clear thinking under pressure. These were expensive horses, and because they were horses, you had to know what you were doing. And that at such an early, early, early age, without my knowing, it put such a foundation of going and doing things and using my head and not being afraid. You understand what I’m saying? As a little..
Dan Heaton: Oh yeah. As a 12-year-old, that’s really early to have that kind of responsibility.
Karen Connolly Armitage: Absolutely. Now, there were adults around all around and everything, but I learned how to take care of tendons and just all colic and just all kinds of stuff. And I had no problems shoveling manure. I still do it every morning to this day. But anyway, no problem with hard physical work at all. And my parents were thrilled that I wasn’t around the boys growing up.
My dad was especially thrilled. It started, I was 15, I was like a sophomore in high school, and school was getting harder. I always had really, really good grades, had to, my parents were teachers. My mom ran the library at Cheshire Academy then, and I was a junior, and I hadn’t been in any cliques or anything else like that, but a couple of things happened with the horse barn, and I knew I just couldn’t do that anymore. So I just told my parents I wasn’t going to go back.
It wasn’t a healthy place for me anymore. And so I’m looking around for something to do, and I’m a junior, and I start seeing these notices about, we need some help designing the junior prom. Okay, I’ll help. So I ended up designing and painting. Well, I ended up art directing, actually, when you look back to it. But I ended up painting a mural for one end of the barn, end of the gymnasium, and it was 30 feet high. And how big is a basketball court? I mean, it was the width of the gymnasium with the bleachers pushed back up to the wall. So it was probably 45, 50 feet long, something like that
Dan Heaton: At least. Yeah.
Karen Connolly Armitage: And my dad got me this seamless paper heavy. It was almost canvas. And so I did this little rough, the theme was Blue Hawaii. Elvis had come out with the movie, and the movie South Pacific. This is back in the early ‘60s. So I did the sketch and took it to my art teacher, and she kind of went, well, that’s ambitious. And my parents had a house on the cape at that time, but I didn’t have any friends there. So I stayed home by myself and up in the attic, I could roll out. I had, I had the 30 feet tall, but I could only roll out about 20 feet. I had just grid it off. My mom showed me how to grid it off and everything. She says, you can just blow it up like this.
My dad got me all the paint from Cheshire Academy, and so I painted this huge thing, and then the football team arrived at my house with a pickup and a really long flatbed, rolled the sucker up and everything, drove it to the high school and all the guys in shop and everything, they all got together and figured out how to hang it. I didn’t think anything of it. I just thought, God. Okay. So that was one thing. See, I was working on being an art director from the time I was born.
Dan Heaton: Yeah, totally. From three years old. Yeah.
Karen Connolly Armitage: So the next year, and you’ll probably laugh at this the next year, well, I always sang to the horses. I loved music. My dad took me to the Schubert Theater for the pre Broadway run of My Fair Lady with an unknown by the name of Julie Andrews. And I was like, for the whole thing. I mean, I was just like mesmerized. Then the movie South Pacific came out, and my parents took all of us to see that. And again, I was just mesmerized. And my parents got me a little, they were called record players. Then a little turntable that did 45s.
Dan Heaton: I know what a record player is.
Karen Connolly Armitage: Yeah. And a 78, even my sisters to this day teased me about it because I had it going all the time, and I’d sing along and dah, dah, dah, dah. So my senior year, it comes out that the senior play is going to be a musical called South Pacific. And I went, so I was still pretty shy by this particular time, but I walked in to the band room where all the auditions were going on, and there was a guy sitting there at the piano, and he says, he looked, took one look at me, and he said, so you want to try out for Nellie Forbush?
I said, no. I said, I want to be Bloody Mary. Now, this is long before there was any notice of, I mean, there were no Tahitians in Cheshire. You couldn’t cast it appropriately. And here I am, fair skinned Irish with big blue eyes.
I want to play Bloody Mary. And he said, why? And I said, because I love her songs. Those are the songs I want to sing. And he said, you can sing. And I start, most people live on a lonely island, and he went, holy crow. So I got cast as Bloody Mary, had the time of my life, and I now had switched from being addicted to horses to being addicted to musical comedy. And also I helped paint the scenery and whatever. By the time I got to UMass, I joined the operetta guild and just did musical after musical.
I usually could get cast either in the lead female or the supporting female role. And there were directors. You’ll see where this is going. There were directors from New York City there and talked to myself and another gal that we did a lot of shows together, along with a couple of guys. And only one guy did musicals. I mean, there was a guy by the name of Steven Schnitzer who ended up on Another World, the soap opera, for 13 years. And then there was this other guy, he didn’t do musicals, but you may have heard of him. I did a couple of shows with him, and his name was Richard Gere.
Dan Heaton: Oh, yeah, I think I’ve heard of him.
Karen Connolly Armitage: Okay. Yeah, there were lots of people at UMass. Lots and lots of people at UMass. I did summer stock. These directors said, come down to New York audition and you can do summer stock. So I got cast, and it was an incredibly exciting experience. I ended up at the Surf Light Summer Theater for one summer, and it was a new musical every single solitary week.
So if you were on stage in a lead, the next musical coming up, you were usually in the chorus, so you were rehearsing, you were learning lines and music and dance and everything. But in the afternoon, you were in rehearsals for something else. I mean, you were doing three shows at one time, and it was a pretty intense summer, a lot of cat fighting in the acting group. I mean, it was just ridiculous. That part I hated. And it was a non-equity group.
Actually. Some of ’em were equity. I wasn’t at that time, but I found out, well, I saw that they were having trouble getting their scene repainted. I said, when I have time, let me just come fix that for you. So I became their secret weapon. I was patching and doing all kinds of stuff when I had time, and I would rather do that than go to the beach and lay in the sun. So fair. I just fry. So I kind of, while I was doing that, was doing the shift plus they were the only straight guys in the whole company.
Not that I just didn’t love all these other guys, but I was raised in a boys prep school, you know what I mean? And I swung a hammer and on and on and on. So I would go back to UMass for the regular school year and everything. And from that experience, I just walked into the scene shop and said to Nick Bryson, who ran the scene shop and was a professor there, he had just got his MFA from the University of Wisconsin. He said, who are you? And I said, I come to volunteer to paint scenery.
He said, terrific. Can you paint? I said, yeah, if you tell me what you want, I think I can figure it out. So I started doing that, and I got better and better. And there was really nobody that, well, there was one guy who was really, really good. One professor was really good, and he taught me a couple of tricks and stuff like that. I just loved being in the scene shot. I was a liberal arts major because initially I thought I wanted to go into the Peace Corps. You know I am of that generation.
And I was taking French and Spanish. I had started picking up extra stuff with art classes, and I really hated the drawing and painting classes, but I loved the sculpture class. So this is what happened simultaneously, I was going to school and I had really close friends from the operetta guild, and a dear friend of mine, whom I still chat with once every three or four months, and she was a theater major. And she said to me, I’m going to take over Roister Doisters. And Roister Doisters was a student run theater organization at the University of Massachusetts, one of the oldest ones in the entire United States. It had originally started in the early 18 hundreds.
I said, are you asking me for help? She says, yeah. And I said, okay. And things went along, and I was in sculpture class. The professor said, alright, you’re going to have to do something really big for your final project. I’m eating pizza with Kareem that night and everything. And she says, we’ve got to find a set designer. I said, I’ll do it. She said, really? I says, yeah, I’ll do it. She said, well, okay. She didn’t say can. It was a pretty famous play at that particular time. Do you know what that is? That’s the story of Thomas Cromwell and butting against Henry iii. He wanted Cromwell to sanction his marriage to Ann Boleyn. And Cromwell was a devout Catholic. And this was when the Church of England started to get set up because Henry.
It’s all political, and the show ends with him getting beheaded. So I did this very Shakespearean set and everything and walked into the scene shop and saw Nick Bryson, and I wasn’t a theater student, and I told him what I’d volunteered to do and could he coach me through it, the construction and everything. He was so delighted that he’s my God and everything. So I had a lot of his guys on the, and some grad students helping me do this thing and everything. I cannot begin to tell you what I felt like on opening night because I had more elation, different kind of elation than I ever got from performing on stage,
Even though I was pretty good. But this was just, it was different because I wasn’t building somebody else’s set. It was something that I worked out with the director and everything else like that, and the lighting designer, and I mean, it was a very masculine looking set. I mean, it was wood and timber, and we could dress it up to make it look like, but it was very gothic and feeling I couldn’t use a lot of real wood paneling, so I had to paint it paint paneling that sort of made it look like an interior of a room and stuff like that. Had the time of my life, had the time of my life. Now, did I realize I was a set designer? That yet? No. No.
But it was about two months after that that Nick Bryson and a woman by the name of Liz Weis, who was the costume design teacher, and she ran the costume shop and they took me out to lunch. The two of them, they had been partners. They had been students at the University of Wisconsin at the MFA theater program there. They took me to lunch to tell me all about that and to tell me that that’s where I needed to go to graduate school.
And they both looked at me and said, don’t you know, can make a living as a scenic designer? And I went, really? People make a living doing this? They said, yes, we’ve decided you have to, after you graduate as a senior, you’ve got to come back here and do one year of graduate studies in theater because you have no theater credits whatsoever, and we can’t send you to John Ezell without any theater credits. And I said, who’s John Ezell? And he was the big guru scenic designer at the University of Wisconsin.
So I got there to the University of Wisconsin, and I think it was a three year program, and I think it was the second, yes, it was Thanksgiving of the second year I was there. John Ezell called myself and a gal by the name of Judy Juracek, who eventually ran the scenic shop at the Met and is great art director in New York doing a lot of TV and film and stuff like that.
John called both Judy and I into his office and said, there is a fellow I went to school with at Yale. He lives St. Louis, and he’s doing The Nutcracker for the Milwaukee Ballet, and we are going to loan him our scene shop over Thanksgiving to get his scene repainted, especially his backdrops. He can’t pay much, but he’s looking for a couple of good scenic artists. And I volunteered both of you, Karen, I know you’re not going home to Boston for Thanksgiving. He looked at Judy and he said, I know you probably were going to take Karen to your parents’ house up in Oshkosh for Thanksgiving, but can I convince you to stay here for Thanksgiving and paint this stuff for him? And that’s how I met Grady.
Dan Heaton: Yes. So from there, I mean Larkins Associates, St. Louis, which obviously very personal to me, but how did you end up, what was the process where you ended up working actually for Larkins and working on Bush Gardens parks and working entirely related, but different field?
Karen Connolly Armitage: Judy and I painted this for him, and we had a great time with him. I mean, we discovered he wasn’t that much older than us. Judy did go up and visit her parents. So I just sort of finished up everything he asked me to do. It was some paperwork so that he could get the stuff shipped. And he told me what it was and showed it to me and said, can you do this for me?
Because I need to go to Milwaukee and I need somebody to make sure that everything gets shipped. And I said, yeah, sure. No problem. I’m here. I’m not doing anything else. And I did make one trip to Milwaukee, and then he came back to Madison for a bit, and I can’t remember where this happened, but he had a set of brand new scenic brushes. He gave one set to Judy and one set to me.
I mean, it was like 500 bucks of scenic brushes. I mean, I was shocked and everything. And he said to me, he said, do you ever get to St. Louis? And I said, well, no. He said, do you know, and I cannot remember the guy’s name. Do you know so-and-so and so-and-so? And I knew him vaguely. And he said, well, he comes down all the time. He said, if you’re ever looking for something to do over the weekend, he said, I just got a beginning contract for the new Bush Gardens in Williamsburg, Virginia.
And he said, I need help first naming all of these shops. He said, I would love if you, and even Judy, if she wants to come down. He said, we’ve got a big house. We’ll put you up. He was married; he had two little kids. He says, we’ll put you up and everything and you can help us out; he had an ulterior motive. I didn’t know that yet. Right.
Okay. So gosh, spring break went down and I got more and more involved in the Old Country and more and more about it and everything. And I mean, I was working through my thesis and I just was like, oh God. He called me on the phone and he said, if you want to come actually work, instead of going to another university and teach, give me a call. And so I did. So I, I didn’t have any attachments. He offered me a job, and I didn’t even go to my graduation. I went there and he is the one that really taught me how to draft. And he sent me to the cabinetry place that was making all the cabinetry for all the shops in New Hampshire. So I learned how retail cabinetry at that particular time was built.
But he was also the resident scenic designer professor and actual scenic designer at what was the Loretta Hilton Repertory in Webster Groves, which eventually came to be St. Louis Repertory.
Dan Heaton: Right. Yeah. It’s very close to my house. Yeah.
Karen Connolly Armitage: Yeah. He also was doing the Muny opera every summer. So he was slowly building a company that could handle all of that. And I did paint at the Muny every once in a while, and I actually designed a couple of shows at the Loretta Hilton. He had two other guys, painters that really helped him out at the Muny. And I started to get all the theme park stuff, got to be very well acquainted with the Anheuser-Busch team that was shepherding that and everything.
He just dumped more and more responsibility on me. And I was the one that he would send to Tampa when we were changing that from just a beer garden into a theme park. And there were loads of low concrete walls. So we figured out a story, and I did a ton of research on African cultures and stuff like that. I was not the married one. I was the one on the plane. Now, I was doing all of this. I had never seen a Disney theme park.
Dan Heaton: Wow. Had you been to any really parks, even similar type parks?
Karen Connolly Armitage: Not one. Well, no. I take that back because Grady also did the Six Flags parks. He would do the shows, and it would be my responsibility and another person’s responsibility. We worked as a team to take his initial design and then make sure it fit well. He would design it for Mid-America, which is there in the St. Louis area. I don’t know if it’s still there. Is it still there?
Dan Heaton: Still there, yeah. It’s different name. But now it’s Six Flags St. Louis. Still there.
Karen Connolly Armitage: And all of that scenery was built at a huge, at Dallas Stage Scenery down in Dallas, Texas. And so there was Six Flags over Mid-America, Six Flags over Texas, and Six Flags over Georgia.
So it was one show, and they did the same show, but all their theaters were different. We would have this other guy, and we would design, he’d just give us sketches and we would design the scenery for Mid-America and then translate it to Dallas and Atlanta, and then just make sure it got shipped in and whatever. So I mean, I didn’t actually ever get to enjoy the theme park. I was working my butt off all the time.
I was getting pretty burned out; I mean, when I had a couple of conversations with people where they started asking me about this, and I start, and I’ve looked back and I knew deep down that I couldn’t keep up that pace forever; I just knew it. And I was exhausted, but I didn’t know it. I was still, by this time I was 27, 28. I had no social life whatsoever. I’m looking in the mirror saying, hey, girl, wake up.
Yes, this is exciting and everything, but come on. Not that I didn’t love the job and everything that I did, but I’m starting to think long-term for myself and what is it that I really want? And don’t run yourself into the ground in the whole nine yards. I did have one incident. I used to do a flight from St. Louis to Dallas, Texas. And Grady had a scenic shop there in Webster Groves.
And he would take in shows from the Houston Opera, and we’d paint him on the floor. I would fill in when I wasn’t busy doing something else. So there was a lot of stuff going all the time. And sometimes I’d be the one sent to Houston to watch it come in and make sure everything was there and the whole nine yards. And then I would fly to Tampa on that park down there.
Sometimes that was a four week thing, because I was supposed to paint walls or see more graphics go up or something like that. And one time, Grady was doing a theater show at the arena stage in Washington DC and he wanted me to check in with him there. And then he sent me to Williamsburg, and then I had to go to New York. On one of those trips. One of those trips, I woke up and I didn’t know where I was, and I got scared. I really got scared; I didn’t know what town I was in. I didn’t know what day it was.
So I called back at the office hoping to find Grady and his secretary picked it up and everything. She said, what’s wrong? And I just burst into tears. I said, please tell me where I am and what I’m supposed to do next.
And she said, okay. She said, I’m going to call. You are in Washington, DC. That’s what she told me. She said, Grady’s no longer there. You were supposed to. She says, never mind. I’m going to call Delta or United, whatever, pack your bags. You get on a plane. I’m going to get you direct. I’m going to fly you first class right back here. I was having a meltdown. I was so tired. And that was really kind of a wake up call for me. And so I started thinking about leaving. So I sat down with Grady and I told him, and he said, I, in all honesty, I’ve seen this coming.
And he said, well, he said, the contacts I have are in the theater world, and here are two for New York. I said, okay, thanks. He said, why don’t you go with us to the IAPA Convention was one of the first conventions, and it was in New Orleans. He said, stay in the French Quarter; he said, I’m going to have you and Dick Godwin paint scenery. We have a booth and everything. And he said, you’ll have a good time. And I said, oh, okay. All right. I’m not paying for it.
He says, bring your paint clothes. And so I did. I had Oshkosh that were just covered, and they had a lot of pockets and everything. I had really long hair at that time. So when I was painting, I would braid it up and everything and I’d either braid it down the back and stick it in the back of the, because otherwise it would get in the paint. So one day at this huge convention, theme park convention, I’m painting away with Dick Godwin.
We had little postcards and we’re doing eight by 12, and we’re both going on the same piece at the same time. And I hear these guys standing behind me just making funny comments. I mean, they were amused at what we’re doing and everything and kind of whatever. I turned around and there’s four guys, and two of them are in suits, and two of ’em are in, I mean, two of ’em are in suits with ties.
And the other two were in just jackets and whatever, all dressed pretty nicely. And so I turned around and started talking to ’em and everything, and we were laughing and joking and the whole nine yards. They said, what’s your name? And I said, I’m Karen Connolly. They said, how long have you been doing this? And blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And he said, we are from Walt Disney World, the entertainment division of Walt Disney World. It was Tom Craven who was head of all the parades and the shows and stuff like that. John, how, who was the lighting designer. And this other guy, Michael, God, I don’t even remember his last name, but he’s the one that figured out how to build the Main Street Electrical Parade for Bob Jani. So they took me out to dinner that night and offered me a job at Walt Disney World.
Right there on the spot. I mean, Tom Craven said, he says, we so need you in Florida. He said, but I have to tell you, Karen, you really belong in Glendale. I said, what’s Glendale? And he said, have you ever heard of WED Enterprises? I said, no, never. I didn’t know. So he explained it to me and he said, I have a dear friend there. His name is Eric Westin, and he is running the interiors division at WED Enterprises right now, and they’re starting to staff up for Epcot Center. Long story short, after this thing at IAPA, which was in November, Grady took me back to Tampa, and I thought I had something to do.
But no, he actually took me to Walt Disney World for the first time ever. I worked all of that time and never been to a Disney park. And I can remember he had a friend there, and we walked in on the east side behind the Opera House at Town Square, and I mean, I had no idea where I was and everything. And I’m looking at the train station and stuff like this. Now I’m in Florida, and I’m going, holy crow. So different from the Busch parks. You know what I mean?
And I’m just turning around everything. And I remember Grady took my shoulders and he pointed me straight up Main Street, I’m going to get real weepy. I saw that castle and just collapsed. Oh my. I just lost it. Just lost it. It was so beautiful. Look at me. I’m an old woman now. Anyway, that first moment I thought, wow. And Grady laughed and laughed and laughed. He said, I thought you’d like that. No kidding. So along came December, I was starting to get interest from New York City, especially from Doug Schmidt, who was the overall art director at Lincoln Center.
Dan Heaton: Oh, wow.
Karen Connolly Armitage (00:42:02): No kidding. Oh, wow. Yeah. And Grady had designed a boat ride for the Tampa park. So Anheuser-Busch was going to send me to Nairobi, Kenya to the buyers they had over there for the Tampa park for their retail shops. They had cities and towns over there that did incredibly beautiful cultural stuff, props and dressings and stuff like that. So they were going to send me to Africa, and I thought, okay. And then the Green Monkey Disease broke out in Nairobi.
What they eventually figured out, they shut down Kenya completely. And most of Africa, it was spreading like wildfire. What that was the beginning of HIV/AIDS. And I don’t know why they called it that, but that’s what they did. So Busch said, because of their retail connections, there’s an LA gift show, Los Angeles gift show, and the people that supply the wild animal park in San Diego with all of their retail and their props and dressings and everything else, they’re going to be there. We want you to hook up with this guy. So I flew to LA right after New Year’s, I still had the card from Tom Craven with Eric Westin’s name on it. And I thought, I’ll just give it a shot to lose.
So I did, and I had to meet this props guy down near San Diego, drive down to San Diego, and I can’t tell you how much I loved being in January in Glendale, California, where it was, I left what you’re living with right now. And there it’s 78 degrees. I mean, I was just in seventh heaven. I had what Eric Weston’s internal work phone number. And I called him and he answered the phone, and I introduced myself. I told him, Tom Craven, dah, dah, dah, dah. I told him why I was there and everything.
And I said, I have brought my theater portfolio and my theme park book, and I would just love an opportunity to show them to you. And he goes, well, sure. Great. How do I get to where you are? So the next morning, I met him at 10 o’clock in the lobby there, and he always used to tease me because he said, you were just dressed up beautifully.
You had a beautiful suit on and everything. And when we were sitting down at the table and we were going through your books and everything, I kept looking at your glasses. He said they were clean, but around the rim, they had tiny little paint drops all over them. And he said, this girl’s got to be for real, because they kept asking me in the books, now you just directed this, right? Somebody else did this artwork. I said, no, this is my stuff, both theater and theme park.
I said, here’s a list of people that you can call. So they offered me a job write then and there, and right while I was there, how soon can you start? And I was doing a play, the front page at that was the name of the play at the Loretta Hilton. And opening night was like, March 15th, this is in January. I said, I’ve got a show. And they said, okay, we will move you. Your first day will be April 4th. How’s that? I said, fine. And that’s how I got to WED.
Dan Heaton: Wow. And you mentioned you get there and Epcot is full speed ahead?
Karen Connolly Armitage: Not yet.
Karen Connolly Armitage: Still ramping up, not in ‘77. They were just starting to build up for it. There were only 350 people there when I arrived.
Dan Heaton: So what were some of the early things you did at that point before that, really, before Epcot really took off?
Karen Connolly Armitage: I got assigned to do a lot of what they used to call ’em lessees participants. It’s the corporate sponsorship that you see in the park. So one of the first assignments I had was the American Egg Board wanted presence on Main Street. So they put them in the former home of Hills Brother Coffee Shop, which is, it was like if you walk into the park, the Opera House is on the right hand side. And then there’s the corner building that’s opposite the Emporium on the other side of the street. Okay, you following where I am?
Dan Heaton: I think so.
Karen Connolly Armitage: So right next to that was a Hills Brothers venue. Okay. Pretty little Victorian thing. They’d let guests in into Town Square, but the rope drop was right there at the Emporium in that corner building.
But people would go into this coffee shop for pastries and coffee and stuff like that. That’s what it was. Well, the American Egg Board wanted this place, and they were going to do omelets, and so they wanted to demo kitchen right out front and everything. That was something new that hadn’t been done on Main Street before. So that was one of my first assignments. And then there was stuff with Sunkist. They wanted to upgrade their little shops and both in Adventureland and Main Street and everything. But that’s when I met Dorothea Redmond. And she is the incredible watercolorist who did New Orleans Square, but her beginning claim to fame, I don’t know if you know this or not, she was the first woman continuity artist ever hired in Hollywood.
Dan Heaton: Wow. No, I did not know that.
Karen Connolly Armitage: Do you know what a continuity artist is?
Dan Heaton: I believe so. But please. Yeah.
Karen Connolly Armitage: Alright. This is what I understand it to be.
Dan Heaton: Yeah, go for it.
Karen Connolly Armitage: A script gets written, the director is starting to envision how he’s going to do this, and he’s working with the producers and the script writers to weave the story together. And they would hire continuity artists to set up the main point. They’d say, all right, this is this kind of entrance with a staircase. And the draperies are kind of like this. It said in this period and dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. The continuity artists would get just rough pieces of the script. And it’s like reading a script and doing the set. Only you just do an illustration. She was hired by David Selznick for Gone With The Wind.
Dan Heaton: Oh, wow.
Karen Connolly Armitage: Okay. And she was on it for the whole thing. Her illustrations from that film are just breathtaking. Just breathtaking. She was a teacher at, what was that school? Chouinard? That was the big art school that they all taught at in downtown LA. She really did teach me a lot about watercolor and taught me some really good shortcuts and stuff like that. And she was a great lady. She was a grand, grand do. I mean, she was elegant. And I mean old Hollywood just right there. And it’s funny, just really, really funny. But she said, no, don’t get involved with this drafting and stuff like that. Let the boys do that. Don’t go to the job site. You don’t want to get dirty.
And I’m thinking, well, there were a little different. Yeah. And then finally, I was just, as Epcot was building, they were asking me to do, they were looking for artwork to pitch to various lessees in World Showcase. So do me a Steiff stuffed animal shop. Steiff is the really high end stuffed animals. Do me a shop that sells hummel figures for the German pavilion. Do me a wine shop for France, blah, blah, blah. And so you would just pick a corner, and they were real fast, and they had a bunch of artists doing that far better than I could. But they sort of handed this whole lessee thing that was still going on simultaneously at Disneyland and Walt Disney World to just, it was like Marty Sklar and John Hench said, okay, she’ll take care of us.
She’ll keep us appraised. I was working with the guys at the studio that was doing all the contracts and working with the estimators and stuff like that, and then the people at the parks and everything. So that was very similar to my experience with Anheuser-Busch. And then Epcot started taking off, and because I had a theater background, I got pulled into, and I met Rick Rothschild real early. We became good buddies and everything. He was always saying, no, I don’t want to have Karen do your curtains. She’s the only one that knows what the stuff is.
Dan Heaton: Wow.
Karen Connolly Armitage: So I just wove in and out of it, stuff like that. But yeah, that’s how I got to California.
Dan Heaton: So Epcot, I know you did so much.
Karen Connolly Armitage: No more than anybody else. There were so many brilliant people there. Oh yeah. I didn’t do any more than anybody else. I mean, it was a huge, huge, huge undertaking. Probably the biggest construction going on in the United States at that time, if not the world, literally. And everybody was up to their earlobes. I actually left the project really early because my father died and I had finished, I think I had finished the American Adventure of what I was supposed to do for that. And actually on the American Adventure, all I did was the actual theater interior, and then figured out with Rick how he wanted the main drape to work. And that was true.
In fact, I was working on the France pavilion. I was down there working on the France pavilion when my new husband at the time called me and said that my sister had called and said that our dad died in Washington, DC and she was putting him on a train to go back to Boston. And the company was very different then. They flew me first class to Boston and was going to put me up in a hotel, which I refused because I had so many relatives there. And they were going to rent me a car, which I also refused because I was shocked that they did that for me. They packed up all my stuff in Florida and shipped it back to Glendale, and I just picked up one suitcase and they had an employee for life. You know what I mean?
Dan Heaton: Oh, yeah. What was the atmosphere like at wed when you joined? I mean, obviously you mentioned very different in a lot of ways, but for you going in there, there was a lot of old school people and then a lot of young people coming in. What was that like?
Karen Connolly Armitage: It was fun. The heart of it was the model shop. There were young people there, as well as people from the very beginning of Disneyland. Harriet Burns had a cubicle in the model shop. Fred Joerger, a guy by the name of Jack Burgess, this huge, wonderful teddy bear, huge man who could do the most intricate tiny little thing, Kimmy Tombs within the model shop. Kim is, I don’t know what her last name is now, but…
Dan Heaton: Irvine. Yeah.
Karen Connolly Armitage: Is she still going with Irvine?
Dan Heaton: I think so. At least that’s what I hear. Yeah.
Karen Connolly Armitage: Okay. Because I remember when she married George, Maggie was sitting right next to her. It was Maggie Irvine, and she married Jimmy Elliott. And they became sisters-in-law and everything. They had cubicles in there. God, Scott Hennesy, the Kirk brothers were in there for a while. I mean, it was just, especially during the building of Epcot, because that model, that eighth inch model got built right in the middle of it. There were all kinds of great things that happened.
I don’t know if anybody ever told you this story, but there was a decision made by, I have no idea who made the decision, but they were looking for efficiency in the Model Shop and the way it was laid out. Could we make the whole work product happen faster if we arrange some things differently? Well, all the kids in the Model Shop, and most of ’em were adults anyway, there were cameras set up so that they would track what their patterning was and stuff like that. And back then, I mean, you were encouraged to walk around and chit chat with everybody because that’s where you might be talking about your Saturday night date. But you were also talking about, hey, look, I just figured this out.
And that’s how the stuff happened. There was always cross-pollination, was always encouraged. And so everybody in the Model Shop knew that all these cameras were on them and everything. And so they figured out exactly where the cameras were pointing. If you look at the tape from the cameras, you see this big model and you see people walking around and very slowly over the course of a couple of days, an entire pyramid is being built by plastic cups just being stacked.
Dan Heaton: Time lapse pyramid.
Karen Connolly Armitage: Yeah, time. I mean, it was hilarious. It was just hilarious. And people were always helping other people out. It was before anybody could sign any of their artwork. So the whole idea is that you were involved in this secret society making these wonderful things that eventually everybody was just, you signed documents of confidentiality. You can’t even go home and tell your family; you can’t brag to your family. You can’t. And that was long before iPhones, and if you brought a camera into work, you’d get fired. So yeah, it was this kind of special group that you belong to. I’m sure you’ve heard that from other people.
Dan Heaton: Oh yeah. Not about the cups though. Nothing about the Pyramid of Cups. So I know that you also worked a little bit later on Disney/MGM studios, and you were part of those early concepts. So I’d love to know a little bit about that experience and what you did as it kind of move forward.
Karen Connolly Armitage: Oh, dear. Me and the boys, great group of people. As you know, you probably heard from some of the other people. It started out as a pavilion for Epcot, an entertainment pavilion. And Al Weiss and I forget who else pitched it to Frank Wells and Michael Eisner, they just looked at each other and said, this is a whole separate theme park. So then we were off and running, and I was in show set design at that time. The company used to bounce me around from show design, show set design. And then finally they invented concept design and put me in there. That’s where I stayed. They put me in the architecture department for a while.
Dan Heaton: A lot of job titles.
Karen Connolly Armitage: I didn’t care. I really, really didn’t care as long as I had the interesting work to do. But anyway, I was in show set design. The team started out with Trevor Bryant, the two Kirk Brothers and myself. And I can’t remember if John Kalan was in that or not, but Eric Jacobson had not. He was not part of the team yet. And so it was the Kirk Brothers, I think, who came up with the hijackings, the whole idea of the hijackings.
So it was my job, my initial job to figure out how big this, do the plan, do the ride layout. And I mean, I’ve been around enough of that, of the folks that did that. I mean, once you learn sort of how it works together and stuff like that, you just got to start and you work your way through it with the, oh, Michael Sprout was writing a script. You work it through with the people who just like a film who are doing it. You kind of feel your way through. So with the hijackings, the concept, and I went to talk to a couple of ride engineers that I knew who worked on the roller coasters because I knew it had to be a zone ride, like a roller coaster, that this ride was not going to go uphill and down.
Because in two different spots, the cars had to stop while other cars were moving along through different scenes. There had to be X number of zones so that a car couldn’t enter a zone ahead of its time, otherwise you’d have a pile up. Well, we got that figured out and everything, and everybody was pretty happy about it. And so I think it was Bob Weis that asked me to do the model for Gangster Street.
And then the Kirk Brothers were going to do the model for the Indiana Jones scene. I eventually picked up the Western hijacking scene also. So I started on the gangster street. I knew it had to look film noir, so I didn’t want to paint it in black and white. So I used complimentary colors that gray each other out so that when they lid it, it wouldn’t go dead, that there would be color in the air.
And it was a lot easier. It was a lot easier for the lighting designers to get it to look dramatic. It was painted more like a theatrical set rather than just painting it black and white. And I moved down to the Model Shop to do that and everything and moving, just going right along and started painting it. And then I think that there were three or four other people that were brought onto the team, Eric Jacobson being one and two others. I am fuzzy on who it was. And so Eric got a couple of scenes to do because he could build models. He had come from entertainment and we were kind of moving right along and everything. There started to be some hiccups and we worked through that and everything.
And then there came a request. I actually don’t know how this happened because the two guys that ran the Model Shop, Matt, and Michael, God, I can’t even remember his last name, came to me and said, we’re going to take you off Studio Tour and we’re going to Tony Baxter needs you on Paris. Jeff Burke needs you on Frontierland. Okay.
So they moved me. They moved me. I spent actually the next three months going back and forth between the two teams because I had so much information. And in the very beginning, Eric and Brock Thoman, who took over the running, the development of the ride and everything, they didn’t really understand why I kept saying, when they said, well, we want to do this in the scene. I’d say, well, yeah, you can do that, but not at that speed. It has to stay in the zone.
It was hard for them to understand and everything. So there was a little friction there, and I was getting absorbed into Paris and stuff like that. And so I finally just said, guys, you’ll figure it out. Go talk to the engineers, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so I just kind of left and I was being encouraged by management to leave the studio tour. So that was fine. And the Paris team opened me, God, you’re finally here. And I have never worked so hard in my entire life as I worked on that Paris job.
Dan Heaton: It’s an amazing land though. I mean, the results are incredible. That’s such a cool Frontierland.
Karen Connolly Armitage: It’s probably one of the better, if not the best Frontierland. Because Jeff Burke said to me, I want this to feel like a real town. So we’re going to weave the story in and out. The layout got going, the architects got going on the layout, and they put Big Thunder on the island and you go underneath the water and have you been there?
Dan Heaton: Yes, one time we got there. And Big Thunder and Phantom Manor and everything.
Karen Connolly Armitage: Yeah, that’s all Jeff Burke. That is all Jeff Burke. I mean, just masterful man. Masterful, masterful man. And we had almost a completely female team in every division. Graphics, show set design. The two gals from show set, Maureen O’ Sullivan, and oh gosh, I can say Claudette, wonderful, talented people. Leticia Olivier did all the graphics. Pat Burke of course, went and found all the props, all the mining stuff, and he had the cubicle right behind me. And when I told him, I said, I want these shops to look like they were part of the mining operation, and now retail has come in, and so you have to teach, work with me and tell me where these things could be logically. So we did all of that and I mean, it was just fun. It was just fun.
Dan Heaton: There’s so many other cool projects you worked on and there’s too many that we could cover, but I’m curious of the other things we haven’t talked about. Is there another one that’s really stood out to you or was really memorable for you from your career that was a great experience or something interesting?
Karen Connolly Armitage: Hong Kong was interesting, but it was difficult because if you talk to people who were there during the construction, it was the most, at that particular point, the most difficult project anybody had ever worked on and did a lot of physical damage to people because they were working so hard. It was brutal. I was up here by the time it opened, I worked a little bit more on it; I did the dollhouse on Main Street, but we had 25% of a normal budget to do everything, and so we had to pull all the stops out.
I mean, the main thing that I was so thrilled about with Hong Kong was Tori McCullough’s Interiors department. They had all come back, all come back off of Tokyo Disney Sea, and that was another like Paris, God, look what we created that part breathtaking. And that was another moment in time because it was on, going back from one of my Hong Kong trips when I was talking to Kelly Ford, he was my show producer on Main, and he said, I’m sending you back through Tokyo.
You haven’t seen Tokyo DisneySea yet? And I said, no, I haven’t. And he said, I’m giving you two days. I said, can we afford it? He says, don’t you worry about that. I’ll make sure we can afford it. I’m giving you two days there. So that was another one where I walked in and I turned around and I looked at that lagoon. I looked at that hotel and I went, holy crap. I did a little bit of work on that project and I saw the stuff that I’d done mostly in the hotel, but just knocked your socks.
It gave me chills, knocked your socks off. But what I mostly appreciated about Hong Kong is those people came back and they were really bummed to be assigned to Hong Kong. It was nothing new. They couldn’t. And so I got my caretaker pitch together and said, yes, you’ve learned all this stuff. Now we’re bringing Tinker Bell and the mouse to communist China. If you think about it, it’s when you wish upon a star, which has not been allowed in China since Mao.
You have to caretake it. And I remember when Tori assigned the people who were going to work on Main Street, and I hauled out drawings from the original Disneyland and said, all right, I know you guys have looked at these, but maybe not in this way. See how they took this one molding and it’s used in all these different shops, flipped over, put together with something else. I said, I want you guys to get together for all these shops and restaurants in Main Street. You have five moldings, five mix and match ’em. Figure out what they are.
And we’re going to have going to have stone base boards and just do a little rails. You’ve got plate rails, you’ve got cornices and dah, dah, dah, dah and some of this. And watch your scale, make it, make the streak get lighter as it goes towards the castle. They did wondrous things, just wondrous things. They got so damn clever. I mean, it was just a delight to watch them literally reinvent the wheel.
Dan Heaton: Well, we could talk all day, but I want to finish with a few quick, quick questions. I know you’re featured in the upcoming book called Women of Imagineering, along with 11 other women from a similar era. I’d love to know a little bit for my listeners, know a little bit about that book and just how you got involved and kind of what the concept is behind it.
Karen Connolly Armitage: It is the brain child of Eli Erlandson who thought that she was going to write a book for her kids and her grandkids and all of her grandnieces and stuff like that about her life. I don’t know. Have you interviewed Eli?
Dan Heaton: I have not, but I would like to definitely someone I would want to.
Karen Connolly Armitage: She speaks five languages. She was born in Eastern Europe, but grew up in Brazil. She is an incredible woman and an incredible architect. Okay. That’s what she is. She’s a spectacular architect. And she was one of the first people. She was there in ‘77. She was one of the first people I met, and she didn’t have her architectural license yet. But anyway, she got thinking about it and started making a few notes and stuff like that. And it just occurred to her that she wanted to ask some of the women that she knew to write about this era because it was the Mad Men era.
So she’s the one that said her parameters were in order to be part of this book. And every person would get a chapter all equal. Nobody’s bigger, lesser than anybody else. You had to be retired, no longer working for the company. You had to have 25 years or more with the company. That was about it. There may have been a couple of more. So she just called me one day and asked me, and I said, God, that sounds like fun. And so the group, we all really know each other. We’ve known each other for a long time. The person with the most years is of course Peggie Ferris that you’ve interviewed.
Peggie also maintains that she’s the oldest. She may be. I said, I’m right behind you. I am right behind you. So we would get together every few months or so and chit chat and read the stories to each other. And I will say that it is a very diverse book, very, very diverse book. And some of it is hilarious, absolutely hilarious. Some of it is very poignant. All the chapters do illuminate some of the hurdles, some of the circumstances, some of the challenging positions we found ourselves in because of the era. But it’s not in any way man bashing in any way because none of us had that experience. We all grew through a time, and yeah, there were difficulties, but the whole world was learning.
I ended up in a lot of situations when I thought, well, I guess I can’t do it that way anymore. And I will be perfectly honest, when I initially arrived at WED, I went about doing things the way I had done with Grady and Anheuser-Busch and that theme park. What I didn’t realize is I had far more experience at that particular time than most of the gentlemen I was working with. I assumed that they knew. So I did some missteps. And being from the East coast, I was very blunt and I was coached by a couple of women there. You can’t talk to them like that. I said, so anyway, those things are talked about and stuff like that, but some wonderful, incredible stories. Wonderful. We had a great time putting it together and we’re thrilled that Disney Publishing grabbed onto it.
Dan Heaton: Yeah, I can’t wait for it to come out. Just having talked to Peggie and now to you that if that’s any indication that all 12 stories, I’m sure just going to be so interesting. So I think it’s great that, because a lot of stories haven’t been told before, there’s still a lot of people that aren’t like we hear a lot. I mean, they’re amazing people, but they’re Tony Baxter or people like that. We haven’t heard about a lot of the other people that did so many important things. Well, before we finish, I would love to know a little bit about what you’re doing right now in California. I know you’re still involved in some really cool projects.
Karen Connolly Armitage: Frank and I designed this house together. I hired a architectural firm here who also had an office in Santa Barbara because I was going back and forth to Hong Kong. This guy, a great architect, teaches at Cal Poly. And when I would come up here for meetings, they really didn’t get what we were going. He had used some Cal Poly students. So I have an old California home. Skip Lange came up here when he was still alive with Janice, and he stood outside and said, my Lord, you can take, what did he say? You can take the girl out of Frontierland, but you can’t take Frontierland out of the girl.
It’s an old California home. It’s rustic and big beans and stuff like that. We had a good time doing it, and people up here, we got to know some people and they saw it and introduced us to people. And I ended up the first six or seven years up here doing two mega mansions, multimillion dollar homes from scratch because it never occurred to me that I couldn’t, you understand what I’m saying? And one of ’em has been on a home tour here. I’ve done a lot of remodels of, well, a handful of remodels down in SLO of some of the arts and crafts homes and Queen Anne Victorian things.
And I’ve gotten hired by a lot of architects up here because they don’t sketch and draw. They don’t throw color on paper. They do it in the computer and it looks, they don’t actually do a painting, and a lot of them don’t really draw, draw. So there’s a lot of period architecture up here, and a couple of architects have gone after that work. They know they can call me and get a drawing and get a sketch and everything, and once they have the sketch, they can have their company do it and everything. So there’s that. I’m now working on a big remodel down in Pismo Beach, which is what I’m doing right now, trying to finish up the contract drawings and get samples and stuff like that.
Dan Heaton: Well, excellent. All that sounds perfect given your background, and like you said, because technology’s changed, but a lot of younger people aren’t doing it. But regardless, it’s been so great to talk with you, Karen, thanks so much for all the time, and this has been amazing here on the podcast.
Karen Connolly Armitage: Well, thank you for, I mean, as you can tell, you get me talking. I just won’t shut up, so you have to say stop. So I apologize for that.
Dan Heaton: Just wanted to give a big thanks to Karen. This was one of my favorite interviews that I’ve done so far on the show, which is saying a lot because there’s been a lot of fun conversations.
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