Mama, who only finished the eighth grade, thought great things where to be had within college walls. Dad, who wished that he had finished college, thought the same.
“You'll be able to do anything if you go to college.”
“I don't want to do ‘anything'. I want to be an actress”.
The summer after graduating from high school, I enrolled at the University of Washington majoring in drama. If I'd go early, I'd get out fast, I figured
Right away, I was cast in my first college play, The Miser by Moliere . I had a walk-on part of the maid Mme Claude.
On opening night there was a gift on my make-up table. It was from Diane, a senior drama major who had taken me under her wing. Her husband-to-be, Jerry Sando was playing the lead role. I untied the gold string and tore off the pink wrapping. “An Actor Prepares” by Konstantin Stanislavsky. I read it that night waiting for my cues.
It resonated with something inside me. The person, the actor, and the character are all one. And they are also separate. Something like kissing. One comes to together with the other, melds into one being, and then separates again. There's also “the witness' that regulates ones technique. The undulation of life and art.
Diane and I shared the women's dressing room during the run of The Miser . We were performing in the Penthouse Theatre on campus. The 1940's construction was the first theatre in the round in the world. The live performance was piped into the dressing rooms. We would listen for our cues from that little box above the door. Listening to the laughter of the audience I found that acting was a harmonizing power. I had discovered a secret about life.
Encouraged by Stanislavsky, I would sit in a dark alcove and transport myself into the character of Mm. Claude. Since I only ran across the stage and stood in front of the Miser for two minutes in another scene, Diane thought I was overdoing it.
After the The Miser I was cast in the leading role in the next play, All for Mary. I decided this college wasn't so bad after all.
I was also fascinated by the opportunity to learn. But academia was not my forte. The fall semester I took Philosophy and Logic along with drama courses. Aristotle, Plato and that French fellow began zigzagging in my head. The French one said, “I think, therefore I am.” That sounded like Stanislavski. But there were so many ideas to process and too many “ams' to become.
The next semester was even more complicated. The History of Western Civilization. How to make all that information mine? I was pulling C's. I was missing something.
In the Survey of Physiology, the professor showed a movie on birth. The camera projector rolled. All three hundred of us looked into a vertical eye. The eye was between two legs. It kept slowly blinking. As it blinked, brown and red and watery juice oozed out of its lids. The eye kept getting wider and wider. I only could hear the relentless hum of the movie projector and the rattatattating of the film. We all were breathless. Then I heard a cough and more coughing. It was the young woman next to me. She was throwing up. I took her outside for some fresh air. A salesman was there to greet us. He gave us each a free packet of Kent cigarettes. The young woman and I contemplated the miracle of birth under the influence of nicotine. Then she threw up again. I got a B in that course. I had asked for private tutoring.
Professors of the academic variety didn't shed light on my intellectual underachievement. They seemed to be in a world that I couldn't enter. One, in particular was a scruffy codger who had yellow and brown-stained fingers, in which he always held a pipe. He imparted wonders of the Scandinavian playwrights, Strindberg and Ibsen.
Cognition was the almighty force. I wished I had a firmer grasp on it. Intuition was my strong suit whenever I paid attention to it. But one needed more than intuition for good academic marks.
#
There must have been two hundred of us young hopefuls who gathered in the dormitory for the week. We were preparing ourselves for intense scrutiny. We would be invited to sorority houses. We were to take a look at the young women living at the house and they were to take a look at us. This was done amidst chitchat, singing and some entertainment. We were auditioning to be liked and to be chosen. This happened within a matter of thirty minutes. They – the Sisters – called it “Rush.” We would get bids as to who would want us back. Our dormitory group began breaking up into clusters. The once happy, optimistic atmosphere receded into pockets of hushed separation. It was survival of the fittest. Every girl for herself.
Classification: the cognitive activity of grouping concepts together with like characteristics. The ability to do this begins between 11 and 13 years of age, or so I learned from developmental psychologist Piaget. If only I had done that with my academic studies. However we girls were being classified and grouped.
Every sorority house had its own personality. A new friend of mine was being wooed by The Theta House. She was beautiful, rich, and blonde – just like the rest of the Thetas. Until someone noticed the scars on the underside of my friend's wrists, that is.
I ended up with two choices: the Jewish House, where Judy, from the Drama Department was and a bid from the Alpha Phi House. “What does it mean: Jewish?” I asked my friend Gretchen, who belonged to a very social house, and seemed to know all sorts of people. “Well,” she explained, “It's like being Protestant or Catholic.”
“Then why don't they have a Protestant or Catholic House?”
I pledged Alpha Phi. It was a Heinz 57 – a little bit of everything. There was Mardi, who was adopted, blonde, beautiful and a ballet dancer. She could raise her leg to the heavens without effort. There was Connie, my “big sister” who had dark circles under her eyes and was gangly and thin. She was always sitting on her bed reading poetry. I wondered if her parents hadn't recently divorced. There was Karen, the effortless A student; Jean, almost six feet tall, who would take a full-size alarm clock on a date. She didn't want to miss curfew (she had very few dates). And there was Jill, my roommate. Jill came from a wealthy family in Alaska. She spoke her mind, majored in Drama, and married as soon as she graduated. These and about three dozen others such as myself lived on Sorority Row. The best was when around midnight, a fraternity would come to serenade. All difference became a melody.
There was another tune at the Alpha Phi House: the song of the east coast. The east seemed to do something to people; it left its mark. My friend, Susan, who had gone, quote, east every summer to visit her father, had an air of authority about her. She seemed sophisticated and self-assured. Another girl, Lolly, had been to Vassar for her junior year and she said the competition was like training for the Olympics. And then there was Susan B.: she wanted to enroll in a Fashion Institute in New York City and for three months holed up in her room preparing her portfolio. She never worked like that for her college studies! What was this east? I wondered. All my family went west. The east seemed…. more. More of what I didn't know. More of what I wanted to be. More of what I wanted to “am.” Therefore, I would go.
All I needed was my talent and my dream.