Free atta girl: Tales from a Life in the Trenches of Show Business by Peggy Pope

whispers, but Hallie was fearless. Under the Works Project Administration umbrella, the Federal Theatre was the only project that earned a profit as long as it existed.
    Hallie attracted the attention of the entire nation. Senator Joseph McCarthy of the House Un-American Activities Committee, in his pursuit of celebrities in the arts, wanted her name on his blacklist. When she took the stand during the hearing that ensued, he asked if it was true that she had presented a play called Dr. Faustus written by the communist Christopher Marlowe. She replied that Marlowe had been a contemporary and friend of William Shakespeare and had written plays three centuries before Karl Marx was born. McCarthy immediately declared a recess, and Hallie Flanagan was through with him in time for lunch. It was imperative that I take a seminar with this extraordinary woman.
    Unfortunately, by the time Hallie got to Smith, she was fighting Parkinson’s disease and was not able to teach the three of us in her playwriting class, who had no idea how to write anything at all.
    At the end of the term, when we had to hand in some evidence of our work, I was in a state of alarm. I had nothing to show her. I was going to flunk the course. I was saved by a girl in my dorm who suggested a little-known author whom I could “adapt.” She’d read his first book of short stories, and said there was one that was practically all dialogue. It was called “My Side of the Matter.” I could get it out of the library. It was by a fellow named Truman Capote.
    Hallie gave me an A minus. Soon after, she stopped me in the hall outside her office and looked at me curiously. I always felt she could see right through me.
    “You know, I’ve never read that story. I must go over to the library one day and take a peek at it,” she said.
    I quickly pedaled my bike to the library, grabbed the only copy on the shelf, stuck it inside my jacket, and never looked back.
    Truman Capote was at the time sharing his life with an English professor at Smith. That’s probably why his book of stories was in the campus library; he had yet to become the talk of New York. I owe this then-stranger a lot. I had never met him, yet, through my college chaos, he reached out to me from the world where I longed to be more than any other. He pulled me through to my graduation as if from prison to a life that had been on hold for the previous sixteen years. The safe deposit box was cracking open.
    The last obstacle to getting a degree was the final exam in the History of the Theater from the Greeks to Modern Times, which was also taught by Hallie. Her idea of teaching this course was to hand out a twenty-page reading list and, while we read the books, let us discuss projects we wanted to take on after graduation. I chose “How I Would Start a Community Theater in my Community.” I found a book I could copy out of to produce the required paper.
    The afternoon before the final exam, Hallie threw out a few trial questions, and it immediately became obvious that none of us had done any of the reading. How could we? We had been lugging furniture around the stage in a production of Franz Kafka’s The Trial, which featured a male-dominated cast made up of various campus gardeners, associate professors, and a fellow from Amherst. Women were no longer playing men as they had in the previous decade. We were moving the scenery instead.
    Smith was the first of the gender-segregated colleges to put men and women onstage together. It was a huge step. There were no more young women dressing up in suits and pasting mustaches and sideburns on their faces. While Harvard clung to its Hasty Pudding shows, we were making history. Yet plays at that time were focused on men, who outnumbered the one or two lucky women onstage with them, as in The Trial. So once again, we were trumped. The show must go on, however, and Hallie’s reading list never got read. When Hallie grasped this fact, she seemed stunned and ended