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

the last session early with “Well, good luck.”
    Back in the smoking lounge at Gardner House, where most of the theater majors lived, we gathered in a panic. “What are we gonna do? How are we going to pass this? What the heck is the Commedia del’Arte?” We made such a commotion that Helen Slotnick, a junior who later became a lawyer, approached us and said, “I think I can help you. Wait right here. I need to go up to my room. I’ll be right back.”
    I felt like I was on the Orient Express and someone was about to divulge a major clue to me. In a few minutes, Helen returned with a book she’d used in seventh grade. It was called History of the Theatre. Inside, the pages had wide margins. Each century was covered in two pages: one page of print facing a one-page illustration. For example, a picture of an actor in costume for Hamlet faced a page of big-print text that was titled, “The Elizabethan Age.” We each got a half-hour with the book, and we all earned A’s and B’s on the exam.
    I asked the college registrar to mail my diploma, and it arrived in a nice leather folder. I figured someone else might have use for the folder, maybe as a table mat for a hot plate. I gave it to the Salvation Army. I didn’t go to the graduation ceremony, and I didn’t say good-bye to Hallie. I headed straight for New York.
     
    Disclaimer:
    Sophia Smith founded Smith College for Women in 1871 with the help of her advisor. Single women had male advisors in those days—I know about this because my great-aunt Addie had one—and these men were usually ministers, counselors, or other men of that ilk. My mother had an advisor, a lawyer she couldn’t understand, and she’d often make the trip into the city again to clarify what he’d told her in their previous session.
    Sophia Smith lucked out. Her advisor gave her a newly invented stereopticon. When she looked through it for the first time, she said, “Why, Reverend Brentlow, ‘An Enlarged View of the World.’ That will be my motto for the college.” Smith became a formidable school and today is coeducational, with a graduate program, a junior year abroad program, and a strong school of social work.
    When I was there, Theatre was known as a “gut” course, an “easy A.” Every college has them. One of the girls in my class had picked it for her major because she fell asleep in the T’s while browsing the catalogue. The college was swarming with women whose goal in those days was to get married as soon as possible after graduation.
    There were good teachers at Smith, and very smart students took their courses. Bobbie Fatt was one of them. But even Bobbie Fatt, bright and independent as she was, worried about what people might think of her. The society page of The New York Times announced engagements by heading the story with the bride-to-be’s last name joined by a hyphen with the groom-to-be’s last name. Because of this practice, Bobbie Fatt almost didn’t marry Andrew Heine, the man she loved. Well, can you blame her?

A CT II : N EW Y ORK 
     
     
. . . and the Boulevard of Broken Dreams, wherethere is ‘for every broken heart a lightbulb.’
    A fair exchange, I thought.
     

Judith Anderson 
    “But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends.” I saw Judith Anderson in Medea on Broadway.
    It was 1947. I was fresh from a Greek drama class at college that had left me cold. I had expected to experience the great catharsis around overweening and hubris that I had heard so much about in these dramas. Didn’t happen. The professor was beyond dreadful. I sat next to a girl who was using her mother’s notes from his class twenty years ago. She even had his exams, with the same multiple-choice questions. The translations read like a road map, and the professor stuttered. Why the Greeks of the day had flocked to the theater, as they did centuries later to see Melina Mercouri in Never on Sunday, was beyond me.
    Then Judith Anderson and Robinson Jeffers, the poet who adapted