Free The Bridge Ladies by Betsy Lerner

at the time, but Shubert’s had all the opening shows. Everything started here. Oh, I used to just drool over it.” An actress has to do what an actress has to do. It isn’t hard to imagine Bette playing the part of Ginger’s new best friend, sharing the family box with its gold-leaf garlands and plush red seats, waiting for the curtain to rise while off-kilter notes filled the air from the orchestra pit below. “They were always the best two hours of my life.”
    When it came time to go to college, most kids from the 1949 graduating class of Hillhouse High were on their way to the University of Connecticut. Not good enough for Bette. She convinced her mother that Skidmore was the place where her youthful goals would be realized, and Sylvia Cohen made it so. She had lost a six-year-old daughter, and when Bette was born a year later, she arrived as a miracle. Her mother called Bette her charm and maneuvered around her husband to find the money to send her. She would do anything for her bright, beautiful, and talented girl. And Bette rewarded her throughout high school with one successful show after another, and to cap it all off, delivering the senior class speech. Bette was poised to step onto that college stage and shine.
    Freshman year, the theater department staged Our Hearts Are Young and Gay , the very play Bette had just starred in during her senior year. She thought she had the lead sewn up.
    â€œOh my god, that’s an easy one for me.” But she got the second lead. She had no idea then that it would be the best part she would get during the next four years, when she was uniformly cast in one insignificant role after another. And with each defeat came eroded confidence. Every rejection was followed by days of dejection.
    Her first year of college had brought with it the single, debilitating fact that would inform the rest of her life. All of the girls at Skidmore who had been the stars of their high school were now competing for the lead parts in the plays. “I was no longer the star, and I also was no longer getting straight A’s because the competition on the curve put me further down.” Bette lowers her head, closes her eyes, and takes a beat, only she isn’t acting. It was the awakening that would come to define all of life’s disappointments, only this one the first and most crushing. Bette looks up, shrugs. “There were a thousand Bette Cohens.”
    Of course I know that Bette didn’t go on to become an actress; instead she became a wife and mother and, as I always knew her, a Bridge Lady. Only sitting with her now, in her spotless living room, I feel her disappointment as if it happened days instead of years ago.
    â€œThe whole thing was such an awakening to me that I shiver when I think about it. I would try out for parts and not get them. And it broke my heart.
    â€œMy poor roommate,” Bette says. “I was so glum, trying to get it into my head that I wasn’t going to be an actress.”
    The Importance of Being Earnest was the final play of her college career. During tryouts, the all-too-familiar feeling of dread crept in. Once again, anxiety conquered confidence, and Bette left the audition utterly devastated. Driven by despair, the clock on her college career ticking down, she did something she didn’t know was in her: she went back to the director and pleaded for the part. “It was a huge risk. The audience would be full of parents. I was an unknown quantity for a lead as pivotal as Lady Bracknell.”
    â€œYou begged her?”
    Bette knew the director couldn’t take the risk, but desperate not to see this last chance fall away like all the other roles she’dlost during her four years, she went back and begged, and astonishingly the director relented. Bette would play the part, reprising the high falsetto of her second-grade performance as Mrs. Upper Lip. The performance was a smashing success. The director