Free (My Travels with) Agnes Moorehead – The Lavender Lady by Quint Benedetti

wanted, although the awareness of that was only subliminal. I did know, though, that I needed strokes from her and I just wasn’t getting them. Believe me, I spent hours thinking about it, planning, scheming. Nothing worked.
    One day in a lovely little garden at Sutro’s, I caught her after class.
    Boldly I said, “Miss Moorehead, I just want to reassure you that the reason I’m not so good in class, if you didn’t think I was too good . . .” I was already putting myself down without knowing what she thought. But I wanted so urgently for her to know. “The thing is, I’m in therapy and I’ve been quite upset and distraught. But I’m growing and I’ll do better. I just want you to know that.”
    It really caught her by surprise. I had finally broken the barrier.
    “Therapy? What do you need with therapy? Oh, my dear,” she scolded high-handedly. Then she proceeded to give me a ten minute lecture. “I’m a great believer in making your weaknesses your strengths. I have practiced to good advantage, turning my problems over to prayer. You don’t need therapy. It will ruin your eccentricity and creativity. All you’ll need is God and the Bible.” (Only she pronounced God as Gawd.) She continued, “And you just have to know what you are about.”
    As she always did, it was the old story—if you asked what time it was, she told you how to make a watch. She went on and on. That was not what I needed at the moment and I felt lousy. I was unhappy with myself for opening my mouth. It was sort of like when my mother would send me to church for her own convenience. “The nuns are good ladies and they work themselves to a frazzle trying to make something of you. So you just go to church and do what they tell you, do you hear?” my mother would say. All that she could worry about was herself and she had us kids and had to let the nuns worry about us. Babysit. And the nuns just heaped these dogmas and bullshit on us. Hell and the Madonna, and all.
    I had this talent and my impressionability which could have been directed into theatre, but it was all turned into fear and guilt. Now, here was Agnes and I wanted her to do what my mother and the nuns had never done. Instead of being supportive, Agnes was very facile about throwing her own religious dogmas at me. I needed her encouragement for the theatre and here she went and brought God down on my head. It was very unsatisfactory—mostly because she didn’t understand me. Oh, I don’t know, I thought with a sigh. I guess I’ll just have to try and reach her some other way.
    The next week that she was there (it wasn’t very often). I did a pantomime for her. The reason for that was that she loved pantomime. It was her big thing. Everyone had to do pantomime and I really hated it, actually because I never really knew what I was doing. But I tried. I was enthusiastic, because Agnes said that pantomime was the basis for all acting.
    “Pantomime makes you think on your feet,” she informed us in her no-nonsense voice. “You take the word circus. You can be anything you want in the circus. An animal, a clown. You can do trapeze.” I once did a little boy being taken to the circus by his father, though later in the semester and not for Agnes. “But you will never know what the pantomime is going to be until you get up there on the stage.” She really had her own way of teaching. She would give us a variety of words: “circus, church, park” and when she gave it, you had to be finger-snapping quick to decide what you were going to do and just to do it.
    “You should be alert. You should be imaginative. You should be able to think inventively on your feet. And you should be able to relax through nuances, the whole story. To do effective pantomime, the audience should know what I’m doing without any words. When you can do pantomime well,” she explained, “then you put props, lights and words, then you are well ahead of the game.”
    Then she would talk about