Free Life Is Not a Stage by Florence Henderson Page A

for the whole theater. You only had to concern yourself with how you looked to the people in the first ten rows. Beyond that, they would need binoculars to see your face in any detail. An actor who doesn’t do this will look pretty grotesque to those up front.
    The key thing is to learn your flaws and find a way to correct them. When I started doing television, my education took a greater leap forward. I learned more techniques and asked a lot of questions. Soon I was doing my own makeup because I didn’t like being fussed over, and still do to this day. I start with a base and then apply different tones from there. You need to be very careful to blend so your rouge doesn’t make you look like a circus clown. With putting on eye shadow, try not to go too light in the shade. It will give you a big flap when you close your eye. My biggest pet peeve is reserved for those who do a great job on their face but neglect to also do their ears. You see it a lot on television newscasters—lovely faces framed by big white ears. Drives me crazy! Last but not least, if you care about your skin’s long-term health and appearance, make sure you clean your face extremely well before you go to bed. Don’t slack on this one. I don’t care how tired (and/or drunk) you are.
    Body movement and how you carried yourself on the stage was also an art like choreography. We trained how to faint without killing ourselves in the process. There was a specific way you could gently go down so as to not crack your head open. In another class, we trained on how to look like you were straining to push against something very heavy like a huge rock. Anytime I find myself standing with my shoulders slumped and my posture looking more like a question mark than an exclamation point, I still hear Sarah Mildred Strauss barking at me with her aristocratic rolling R’s, “Rrrrribs up!” I will also never forget a comment she made to the class that I think she did for my specific benefit: “Remember that the boy you think you love at eighteen is the same one you won’t spit on at twenty-one.”
    On the singing and comedy front, the instruction at the academy didn’t add all that much to my skill set. George Burns used to say that you can’t teach comedic timing; you can improve upon it with practice, but you either have it or you don’t. I think the same goes for having a good sense of humor. You can’t teach it if it’s not already there. Looking at some of my earliest childhood photographs, you can see in my face that I was born with the desire to make people laugh. And all those times I got in trouble for mimicking my teachers at St. Francis were now being put to good use.
    What was more challenging was learning how to work with the sadder spectrum of feelings. They taught us about sense memories—how to go back in time to mine your own experiences to bring forth in your performance a desired emotional state. I got depressed in one of the classes because I started thinking too much about my father. “I don’t want to do that again, it’s too hard,” I thought.
    Learning how to cry was harder. It too was about getting in touch with your feelings, specifically about something that made you very sad. You would think that I had a reservoir that could unleash a torrent of tears. Just flick the switch. There was one problem, though, and it is a reason why I still have trouble crying today. As a child, it was not permitted. “Don’t you cry, don’t cry,” my mother would warn me, with the unspoken threat that if I did, then she’d give me a real reason to cry by whipping the gizzard out of me. So I’d suck in whatever was bothering me, take a deep breath, and say, “Oh, all right.” In fact, I had only seen my mother cry once, when I was a little girl and had accompanied her to church on Mother’s Day. The priest gave a sermon apropos of mothers. Whatever the priest said penetrated the barrier she constructed to help her get through her hard