Read Online Saturday's Child by Robin Morgan - Free Book Online Page B

repeatedly told by others how good a child actor I was, and how that must mean I loved what I was doing. I would smile politely and ponder this in my little heart. Meanwhile, the notion that it was possible to love one’s work lodged somewhere in me and excited me tremendously. Gradually it dawned on me that what I loved, in fact what I’d most loved doing as far back as I could recall—making up stories and poems, playing with the magic of words—could be a life’s work.
    I knew how passionately I would love that. And I wasn’t wrong. Chosen, meaningful work has been the consistent exercise, luxury, pleasure, challenge, and regimen of my life.
    Later, other legacies would surface, but not until I was ready to claim them as my own and apply them for my own purposes. A sense of self-discipline (handy for a freelance writer working mostly at home). A sense of professionalism (practical for a freelance editor). A respect for drama and for humor, a sense of timing, and a well-modulated voice with the knowledge of how to project it (valuable for poetry readings and advantageous for political speeches). Ease with reporters, microphones, cameras, and audiences (convenient for political organizing and useful for book tours).
    But the process of learning that such skills were in a sense value-free was difficult. At first I refused to avail myself of any of them. To my mind,they’d been inflicted without or against my choice, so they were painful, cheapening reminders of what felt like years in unwitting servitude.
    It wasn’t until I discovered that I was also infatuated with making social change—infatuation being markedly different from love but damned potent in its own right—that these skills reappeared in a more flattering light. Politics had to wait, however, until I connected with the concept of rebellion itself. For someone who never went through “the terrible two’s,” because she was already busy modeling tot fashions, making that connection took time.
    But once it happened, and that energy became linked to the love of writing, I never looked back. In this I’ve been extraordinarily fortunate. Finishing a poem that I know is strong and moving has been for me that high only achievable for many of my child-actor contemporaries by other, more destructive means. Helping to inoculate others with the healing virus of resistance to injustice has been for me the outlet for rebellion those colleagues could express only in car crashes and substance abuse.
    Not too long ago, I found myself remembering when my defiance first broke the surface.
    I had forgotten that defining moment until 1994, when I saw Robert Redford’s movie Quiz Show , based on the TV program The $64,000 Question . That 1950s show—notorious in broadcasting history for its fixed answers and corruption of contestants—had been presented by Barry and Enright Productions.
    Those names brought back more than a few memories. Dan Enright (in the 1940s, pre-name change, it had been Ehrenreich) had produced and directed my half-hour weekly national radio show, Little Robin Morgan , on WOR for two years (age four to six). “Pop Goes the Weasel” was my theme song, and I played records, told stories I’d made up, chattered on about my “adventures,” and sometimes interviewed “children from other lands,” tapping into the resource of United Nations publicists (and, friends now joke, presaging my later involvement with the global Women’s Movement). I apparently did not appreciate being referred to as “the world’s youngestdisk jockey,” because a Chicago Tribune clipping quotes me as firmly correcting the reporter: “I am the world’s youngest story-teller .”
    I loathed “Mr. Ehrenreich,” whose body odor, nicotine-stained fingers, and whinnying laugh seemed to be all over my life. He also produced Juvenile Jury , and his business partner Jack