An interesting thing happened to me this week. In my Yahoo inbox was an email from a total stranger who gently enquired if I would be willing to share my impressions of a mutual friend for an article he was writing. Within 24 hours it seemed I had time-travelled back to the mid 1960’s, and shared stories, memories, and bittersweet reflections with this well-known writer about our friend. More of this experience shortly.
This led me to all sorts of musings. With the 315 million people who live in the United States and the 35 million who live in my former country of Canada, it astounds me how often paths of certain people cross, nearly cross, and re-cross, mostly within the theater, film, and show-business community. The entertainment business is truly a family, an extended dysfunctional family at worst, a close family at best. Sooner or later we all meet each other! The cliche “small world isn't’ it?” might be apt, but hardly explains the remarkable and unexpected connections we often discover by chance.
A couple of years ago I was visiting with fellow Costume Designer Albert Wolsky and we were talking about his early career when he was assisting famed designer Ann Roth. We realized he had outfitted ME for my role as Gwendolyn PIgeon in the National Company of The Odd Couple many years ago. We did not remember each other.
My sense of family has always come from the work I do, the performing companies and film communities I have been part of. I grew up in England with virtually no cousins and no family other than parents near by. My English grandmother died before I was born. My Canadian grandparents were an ocean away, and I did not meet them until I was six.
Dancers, in particular, have a strong bond. We all know how hard it is to train to become really good at what we do, and how short our careers will most likely be. Dancers of any age speak a common language, a language of sore muscles, intense and disciplined training, and the pure joy of artistic expression through dance.
A few years ago I was in the fitting room of my costume department at CBS Radford Studios with actress Leigh Taylor-Young, ready to fit her for her costume in the NBC daytime drama Passions. She looked at me strangely and said “were you ever a dancer at the National Ballet School in Toronto?” I was, in fact, at about age 14 and Leigh, a younger dance student, remembered me! How extraordinary! And I thought I was so dull and invisible at that age.
My closest friend as an adult was a dancer I met at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival when we were both still teenagers. We went on to perform together, room together, and go to each other’s weddings. I am still in touch with two other dancers from my earliest days of professional dancing in My Fair Lady. One is now a licensed family therapist living in Pasadena, another is retired and living in North Carolina, but we still email and check on each other frequently, some 50 years later.
Dancers Over 40 is a group in New York, formed to provide a community to support the needs of “mature” dancers and choreographers. I know board member Harvey Evans from when we were both performers on the road in Chicago in the 60’s. In Los Angeles I am a member of the Professional Dancers Society which keeps us, haha, on our toes!
Some companies, like the aforementioned My Fair Lady, form strong “families”. Others not so much. Ann-Margret to this day surrounds herself with her dancers and friends from her days of performing live; many still walk together on Saturdays for exercise. The soap opera Passions has a core group that still stays in touch, and Facebook has certainly facilitated that. I used to suffer terribly at the end of a show, as I was constantly losing my families and having to find new ones. We are all scattered and have to go on to other cities and other shows, hopefully to still feel part of a larger community.
Another interesting story (which I have written about before) concerns a young girl who lived in Belarus when Santa Barbara was the first US show to be shown on Russian television. It was an enormous hit, and the bright colors and somewhat unrealistic rich lifestyle was very appealing to those still barely out from the grayness of communism. This young lady, Antonina Grib, reached out to me via email and I responded. After getting a scholarship to study costumes in the US, she eventually came to intern with me on Passions and has since gone on to a very successful career in costuming, working on major TV and film projects. For all the negative things that are written about the internet, without it Antonina and I might never have connected, let alone formed a deep friendship and mentorship.
So back to my new journalist friend: it turns out that as a 17 year old he was a ticket-taker at the National Theater in Washington DC, his home town, and was “introduced not only to the backstage magic but to a real-life cast of charismatic and eccentric players who would become his mentors and friends”. Though I can’t claim to have been either, since we did not know each other, our paths crossed a number of times over the years. He saw me at the National Theater in My Fair Lady, later in the out of town try-out of the Broadway musical Hot Spot, and later at the Blackstone Theater in Chicago where we shared, unbeknownst to us, a friendship with a wonderful man, Clayton Coots, who was a mentor to young Frank, and a dear friend to me. So Clayton was the catalyst, the internet the instrument of Frank finding me, and the telephone made possible our sharing so many of our stories about so many mutual friends.
Here is the link to Frank Rich’s touching article in The New York Magazine
