Free Wendy and the Lost Boys by Julie Salamon Page A

liked Miss Lesser. They thought she was hip, with appropriately “intellectual” looks—short pixie hair, dark-rimmed glasses. She encouraged them to experiment. It was the 1960s, after all. They did lots of theater of the absurd. “Existentialism was in,” she recalled. They took scenes from short stories, put them to music, and performed an antiwar piece.
    “This was an all-girls’ school,” she said. “You either did the one or two bad plays that were all women characters or you do other stuff and bother some boys from McBurney to help out and watch them get destroyed by our teenage girls.”
    As an adult, speaking at the dedication of a new performing-arts center at Calhoun in 2004, Wendy talked about Miss Lesser’s productions:
    One year, she had an idea to put on a play in our auditorium, which was at that time the Jewish Community Center on West Eighty-ninth Street. The play she chose was Günter Grass’s The Wicked Cooks. Günter Grass, for those of you who don’t know, had two major claims to fame. The first was that he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999. The second was that he had an all-girl high-school production of the absurdist play The Wicked Cooks.
    My parents were in Europe during our rehearsal period, and my big sister Sandy, who was an executive at General Foods, came to stay with me. At night I would rehearse my lines with her, and she would make her Maxwell House account-executive buddies listen to it and ask them if it made any sense to them. There would be a stunned look on their faces, and they would ask me, “Why isn’t your school doing Annie ?”
    The day of the performance arrived, and the proud parent body sat in the theater as we came out onstage with giant chefs’ hats and aprons and began reciting lines in unison, like, “The moon is a potato / The star is a tomato / And everywhere are cooks / In all the halls and nooks.” I distinctly remember seeing jaws dropping and a hushed silence, and at the end a burst of parental applause for the completely incomprehensible event.
    Miss Lesser was amused by Wendy’s account, which became part of the school’s lore, eventually appearing on the Calhoun Web site, but Miss Lesser had a correction. After pointing out that the Wicked Cooks production was the handiwork of the previous drama adviser, she observed that Sandy’s Maxwell House colleagues couldn’t have asked why the students didn’t do Annie instead of Wicked Cooks.
    Annie didn’t premiere until 1977, a decade after Wendy graduated from Calhoun.
    “It’s still a great story, but there is a bit of poetic license,” said Miss Lesser.
     
    W endy had the most interesting mind of any student I ever had, ” said Ann-Ellen Lesser. “There’s smart, which is what comes up on the IQ test. And then there’s intelligence that has the element of imagination in it. Wendy had real intelligence, imagination, the ability to see beyond what was in front of her.”
    Yet during her years at Calhoun, no one was predicting a Pulitzer Prize for Wendy Wasserstein. Of more immediate concern: would her grades improve enough to get her into a good college?
    School records report tardiness twelve times in a single semester one year. Her math grades hovered between C-plus and B-minus, and she consistently received C’s in French and D’s in gym.
    The curriculum was rigorous and the teachers demanding. They were quick to point out weaknesses—a slapdash quality to her work—even in subjects where she excelled, like history and English. “Wendy’s knowledge of history is extensive,” wrote a teacher in her midterm report junior year. “The mechanics of her writing are poor—a fact which belies the intelligence of her thinking.”
    To escalate her prospects for college, she was encouraged to take summer courses at elite boarding schools. The programs were known to be exacting, and, Wendy understood, it wouldn’t hurt to have names like Exeter and Andover on her application.