to the closed door, turned the brass knob, and looked inside. Sandy looked up, annoyed.
“I want to tell you why I’m late.”
“It better be an interesting story,” Sandy said.
“I think it is.”
And so began an Arabian Nights saga. I was learning to use my fears and real experiences to entertain. At least once or twice a week, the well-dressed man with the newspaper loomed over me. He found me in whatever car I was in, on whatever train. I tried to elude him. Heart pounding, I thought,
I’m using you, scary man. And you’re almost as afraid of me as I am of you.
I could see that he couldn’t confront me, any more than I, at seventeen, could confront him. But knowing I could use my fear as an actor, to basically entertain Sandy and the class, was a great outlet. My stalker abruptly disappeared for one week, two weeks. And then he was gone, and I was free. I had a mini nervous breakdown in the girls’ bathroom.
• • •
T he summer after my first year at the Playhouse, I got a job at Tamiment, a famous summer resort in the Poconos with a huge and famous summer theater and a great history of talented performers. Mervyn Nelson was the director, my first gay friend. At Tamiment, at seventeen, I played the mother in
Ghosts
to Mervyn Nelson playing my son, at thirty-seven; then played a thirteen-year-old in a Tennessee Williams one-act; then singing, dancing, and musical comedy on theweekends. Singing alone for a huge audience gave me my first stage fright. I started drinking martinis before I sang and ended up a very scared kid sobbing in Mervyn’s lap at the end of the season.
Also hired that year was a cute Irish hoofer, Buster Burnell. Buster and I fell in summer love immediately. This is where my Uncle Raymond’s joke comes in, about the midget lady and the giant in the circus.
I shared my two-cot bungalow with Mildred from the Tamiment office. She was a large young woman, with one wiry dark hair growing from her breast near the nipple. I always wanted to pluck it out.
The fact that Buster entered the tiny bungalow every night to share my cot didn’t seem to bother her. She snored softly through our lovemaking. In my mind I was still a virgin. I knew there was a hymen, and I looked anxiously for bleeding many mornings-after. It never occurred to me that a childhood of ballet and the hard handlebars of my boy’s bike might have deflowered me. Buster strenuously and rhythmically hit my insides while I lay there, kind of liking it but pitying him for not having a large enough, long enough member to devirginize me, to draw blood and reach my throat, like the lucky midget lady. I was seventeen and biologically really stupid. Unfortunately, the little bungalows were very close to one another. Next to mine was a bungalow with four mariachi players. The raw squeaking of the cot disturbed their sleep; they banged on the walls and cursed me in Spanish.
As July slid into August, Buster said, “I thought you said you were a virgin.”
“I am.”
“You’re not.”
“Oh yes I am.”
I began telling him, with as much sensitivity as I could manage, how and in what way he was falling short. He regarded me in stunnedsilence, uncertain if I was sane or putting him on. And then he kindly put my mind to rest about the biology and the mythology with which I had deluded myself.
• • •
A ll the girls in the second year at the Playhouse were hot for Herbert Berghof, a Viennese actor then learning the Method from Sandy Meisner. Despite the fact that he was bald, Herbert was a fascinating, sexy man. All of us in Martha Graham’s class fell like flies, writhing in our jersey uniforms under his tolerant and, yes, interested gaze. Somehow he promised each of us a great romance, without a touch or a word. He was an accomplished tease.
Herbert was always fascinating. A lit cigarette never left his mouth. His students watched, hypnotized, as the ash got longer and longer, before collapsing onto
“I want to tell you why I’m late.”
“It better be an interesting story,” Sandy said.
“I think it is.”
And so began an Arabian Nights saga. I was learning to use my fears and real experiences to entertain. At least once or twice a week, the well-dressed man with the newspaper loomed over me. He found me in whatever car I was in, on whatever train. I tried to elude him. Heart pounding, I thought,
I’m using you, scary man. And you’re almost as afraid of me as I am of you.
I could see that he couldn’t confront me, any more than I, at seventeen, could confront him. But knowing I could use my fear as an actor, to basically entertain Sandy and the class, was a great outlet. My stalker abruptly disappeared for one week, two weeks. And then he was gone, and I was free. I had a mini nervous breakdown in the girls’ bathroom.
• • •
T he summer after my first year at the Playhouse, I got a job at Tamiment, a famous summer resort in the Poconos with a huge and famous summer theater and a great history of talented performers. Mervyn Nelson was the director, my first gay friend. At Tamiment, at seventeen, I played the mother in
Ghosts
to Mervyn Nelson playing my son, at thirty-seven; then played a thirteen-year-old in a Tennessee Williams one-act; then singing, dancing, and musical comedy on theweekends. Singing alone for a huge audience gave me my first stage fright. I started drinking martinis before I sang and ended up a very scared kid sobbing in Mervyn’s lap at the end of the season.
Also hired that year was a cute Irish hoofer, Buster Burnell. Buster and I fell in summer love immediately. This is where my Uncle Raymond’s joke comes in, about the midget lady and the giant in the circus.
I shared my two-cot bungalow with Mildred from the Tamiment office. She was a large young woman, with one wiry dark hair growing from her breast near the nipple. I always wanted to pluck it out.
The fact that Buster entered the tiny bungalow every night to share my cot didn’t seem to bother her. She snored softly through our lovemaking. In my mind I was still a virgin. I knew there was a hymen, and I looked anxiously for bleeding many mornings-after. It never occurred to me that a childhood of ballet and the hard handlebars of my boy’s bike might have deflowered me. Buster strenuously and rhythmically hit my insides while I lay there, kind of liking it but pitying him for not having a large enough, long enough member to devirginize me, to draw blood and reach my throat, like the lucky midget lady. I was seventeen and biologically really stupid. Unfortunately, the little bungalows were very close to one another. Next to mine was a bungalow with four mariachi players. The raw squeaking of the cot disturbed their sleep; they banged on the walls and cursed me in Spanish.
As July slid into August, Buster said, “I thought you said you were a virgin.”
“I am.”
“You’re not.”
“Oh yes I am.”
I began telling him, with as much sensitivity as I could manage, how and in what way he was falling short. He regarded me in stunnedsilence, uncertain if I was sane or putting him on. And then he kindly put my mind to rest about the biology and the mythology with which I had deluded myself.
• • •
A ll the girls in the second year at the Playhouse were hot for Herbert Berghof, a Viennese actor then learning the Method from Sandy Meisner. Despite the fact that he was bald, Herbert was a fascinating, sexy man. All of us in Martha Graham’s class fell like flies, writhing in our jersey uniforms under his tolerant and, yes, interested gaze. Somehow he promised each of us a great romance, without a touch or a word. He was an accomplished tease.
Herbert was always fascinating. A lit cigarette never left his mouth. His students watched, hypnotized, as the ash got longer and longer, before collapsing onto
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