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- Melanie
This story was too long to leave in the comments for purplechai�s entry, so I�ll tell it here.
The summer after I graduated from college, I did summer stock at a certain university that has a really good basketball team (though not as good as my alma mater) whose mascot is a certain cute blue-eyed breed of dog. I did A Little Night Music and Oliver! A woman named Judy Somethingorother was the choreographer for Night Music and director of Oliver! She was�interesting. Always smelled of hair dye. Drew her eyebrows on differently every day. Wore black men�s jazz pants, rolled up at the hems (which constantly unrolled on her) and a t-shirt that read �I spent the night with Burt Reynolds,� since she�d apparently worked on a production of Nunsense at his Florida dinner theater. And then there were the claws. She couldn�t tell you where to move onstage � she had to physically drag you there. So she would grab you with her old croney, claw-like hands with their pointy fingernails. It got so I would stand with my hands behind my back like Degas� little dancer so she couldn�t get at me. All in all, a weird woman.
And not that talented. The rumor was that she�d suffered a breakdown and hadn�t fully recovered, but since she was a friend of the Artistic Director, she got the gig out of pity. We had to add an extra Liebeslieder to Night Music because she couldn�t choreograph for an odd number of people. In Oliver!, she had orphans lying around in inappropriate places (like in Widow Corney�s parlor). She had Nancy sitting on a stove in Fagin�s den. When tech week came and the girl playing Nancy saw that the stove had been rigged to look like it was glowing hot, she asked Judy whether she shouldn�t sit on it. Judy yelled back, �This is musical theatre � it�s not real life!!!� Apparently the concept of verisimilitude was lost on her.
But she was also racist. And it became glaringly apparent during tech week for Oliver! The boys we used for orphans were all local, not �theatre kids,� and were generally really well behaved. Some went to private school in the area, including our second �Oliver� (it was double cast), his older brother and a friend of theirs who was the only black boy in the cast. His name was Rayfort; Ray for short. Very intelligent, quiet, nice kid.
She had him bouncing a basketball across the stage during a street scene. Let�s leave the origins of basketball aside, and just let the symbolism hang there for a bit like Jordan going for a slam dunk, shall we?
But the best was the opening number. There�s a bit of a musical interlude before the workhouse boys break into �Food, Glorious Food.� Our set had a loft unit, and she staged the number with kids passing bundles to each other, throwing them out of the loft and catching them, and passing them on some more, all in time with the music. The bundles were large and unwieldy, and it wasn�t easy for the kids.
First night of tech week. The adults are standing backstage, and the kids are doing their thing, and it�s not going especially well. Suddenly we hear, from the back of the house, �RAYFORT, HOW CAN I EXPECT ANYONE ELSE UP THERE TO HAVE RHYTHM IF YOU DON�T?!� Twenty some-odd heads whip around, twenty some-odd jaws hang open. Unbelievable. We tried to have her fired, but being that she was the A.D.�s friend, and seeing as we opened just a few days later, it didn�t happen. The only saving grace was that once we opened, she was gone and we never saw her again.
But good G-d! The blatant bigotry, and in the traditionally hyper-tolerant theatre world, no less! Thankfully, that�s the only incident in my long, storied career that comes to mind.
I�ve often wondered how different I would be as a person if my family had stayed in Brooklyn. We moved when I was 7, to the white bread world that was Lawn Guyland at that time, where I lived down the block from two churches and was one of less than a handful of Jews in my grade. I think we moved at just the right time in my upbringing. I had had friends of many different races and religions in my old school, and I think I was both old and young enough to learn to pay our �differences� absolutely no mind. My brother, who was just three, didn�t have that exposure, and I think he�s a little more closed-minded as a result. Of course, my extended family was no help in the matter, as scottmichael, who has met some of them (�How�s your Uncle Ira, the Bigot?�), can attest. I can never understand when my family complains about various �undesirable elements� moving into the neighborhood. As Jews, how can they rationalize that? I was picked on in school for being Jewish. Maybe my cousins, who were in a more Jewish school district, had it easier. But look at it in the grander scheme. We�re a nation of immigrants. People of all races and religions came here looking for a better life, often escaping discrimination and worse in their homelands. How can anyone in their right mind do that to anyone else? It�s just something I personally cannot rationalize. And the fact that it occurs in my own family? Maybe it�s nature v. nurture � maybe there�s some racism �gene� that somehow I (even with my Southern Baptist �roots,� if you will) managed to escape. It�s something I�ll never understand.
So the
West Wing season finale? Let�s just say I was bawling for the last fifteen minutes, and beyond. Seriously,
bawling. I won�t spoil it for anyone, but I guess it was a big ol� case of post-election traumatic stress-induced catharsis. That was how politics
should be done. And I just think we�ve gotten it all so wrong lately.
Two shows tomorrow, and four hours with my idiot boss in between. It was a banner day today, and I would have been ranting about that if chai hadn't distracted me. But time enough for that later - now it's time for bed.
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a very fine cat indeed - Friday, Jan. 17, 2014
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