Free Naked in the Promised Land by Lillian Faderman Page A

money with aplomb. I wrote receipts with a secretarial flourish
that Fanny would have approved of. I greeted all comers with grace and verve.

    For three years, there was nowhere in creation I would rather have been than behind the desk at Theatre Arts Studio, inhaling Emir and feeling soft Orlon between my fingers while I worked to pay for my lessons.

    Eddy St. John (I later found out his real name was Edward Fromberg) walked through the door one Saturday morning. "I have a singing lesson with Mrs. Sandman at twelve o'clock," he said, his voice fluttering up and down. He took the chair closest to me and flipped through the stack of sheet music he'd brought with him. I could see that the one that crowned the pile had a picture of a sequin-gowned Marlene Dietrich on the cover sheet. "See What the Boys in the Back Room Will Have," it was called. I watched him as he studied the music. He had the longest eyelashes I'd ever seen on anyone, and his hair was a coppery color I'd never seen before. He moved his head in time to the music in his mind, and he waved a long, slim hand, totally without self-consciousness. His lithe shoulders swayed.
    He looked up to see me watching. "I just love Dietrich songs, don't you?" He flashed me a disarming smile.

    "Let's try something else for a change. How about 'On Top of Old Smokey'?" Irene threw out to Eddy from time to time over the next months.
    "Not my style," he'd rebut. "Let's do 'The Man That Got Away.'"
    "How about 'The Tennessee Waltz'?" she'd suggest.
    "How about 'Stormy Weather'?" he'd insist. He was only three years older than I, but what self-possession! Maybe he didn't know that Irene Sandman was a goddess.
    Eventually she gathered several of us together into a troupe that performed at homes for the aged, Hadassah luncheons, mental hospitals, and other such places. Eddy was the star, dressed all in black, with a fedora tipped just above his eyes, singing dramatic, breathy torch songs. He had an expressive high tenor that he could make husky and intimate
à la Dietrich or heartbreakingly plaintive like Judy Garland. There were also the Starlets, two twelve-year-old girls with matching fat brown Shirley Temple curls, who sang in harmony while they shook silver-dusted maracas. And there was a fourteen-year-old with her seven-year-old sister, both dressed in powder blue leotards, with dark blue stuffed-cloth tails attached to their pant seats. They did a monkey act, balancing acrobatically all over each other.

    And there was me, Lillian Foster, Mistress of Ceremonies, introducing each act with the energetic, smiling spiel that I'd rehearsed with Irene. "And now Theatre Arts Studio is
dee
-lighted to present the
fab
-u-lous (or mag-
nif
-icent or a-
stound
-ing)..." Irene said that a Mistress of Ceremonies needed a gown, so my mother gave me ten dollars and I went to Brooklyn Avenue to buy one—pink satin, strapless and backless, with pink netting over the skirt. When it was time for my monologues, I quickly slipped into the Hadassah kitchens or rest home bathrooms and changed to adolescent-girl clothes. I acted Rachel Hoffman as well as another piece that Sid wrote for me about a French orphan who is adopted by a kindly couple
("zz-zz-zz,
" he instructed me whenever I forgot and sounded a
th),
and I did a monologue that he pieced together from Lillian Hellman's play
The Children's Hour.
I was a twelve-year-old named Mary who fabricates an accusation against two women, her teachers. "Unnatural!" I was supposed to yell in a disgusted voice.
    "We have a show to do next Sunday!" I would come home with the gift of the news, and it seemed like a wonder tonic for my mother. Eight of us squeezed into the Sandmans' green Ford, and Irene drove us to our shows. Even if it was a spell-time, my mother's anguish was suspended for a while. Whenever I came out onstage, I could see her in the front row, her head cocked birdlike at me in rapt attention. I worried a lot that Irene might mind that my