MAYA ANGELOU AND
MAY MILLER MUST NEVER BE
FORGOTTEN!!!

Celebrate their poetry, their contributions to the Harlem Renaissance, education, African American culture and their storytelling brilliance.

May was born in Washington, D.C. in 1899; Maya was born in 1928 in St. Louis, Missouri.  Both women were civil rights activists and  their extraordinary achievements as poets, playwrights and teachers reflect their dedication and commitment to the betterment of all Black lives.  

As we have seen recently all lives matter but these two pioneering black women understood the need to write about the pain of separation and loneliness and struggle and challenges which their race were forced to endure.  I think there is no better evidence than to read some of their magnificent and visionary work.
                                               THE WASHINGTONIAN
                                                        May Miller

Possessed of this city, we are born
into kinship with its people
Eyes that looked upon
Cool magnificence of space,
The calm of marble,
And green converging on green
In long distances,
Bear their wonder to refute
Meaningless dimensions,
The Old-World facades.

The city is ours irrevocably
As pain sprouts at the edge of joy,
As grief grows large with our years.
New seeds push hard to topsoil;
Logic is a grafted flower
From roots in a changeless bed.
Skeleton steel may shadow the path,
Broken stone snag the foot,
But we shall walk again
Side by side with others on the street,
Each certain of his way home.

(http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem236688)

                                                  STILL I RISE    
                                                  Maya Angelou

You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I'll rise.

Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
'Cause I walk like I've got oil wells
Pumping in my room.

Just like moons and like suns,
Withe the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I'll rise.

Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops.
Weakened by my soulful cries.

Does my haughtiness offend you?
Don't you take it awful hard
'Cause I laugh like I've got gold mines
'Diggin' in my own back yard.

You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I'll rise.

Out of the huts of history's shame
I rise
Up rom a past that's rooted in pain
I rise
I'm a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.
Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that's wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave....

LEST WE FORGET HELEN GAHAGAN DOUGLAS
IN HER OWN WORDS

TODAY'S WOMEN STAND ON HER SHOULDERS

As we have just been through a turbulent chapter in American political history regarding the selection of nominees for the next president of the United States, with more anticipated upheavals at the conventions and during the campaigns, we must remember one of the true democratic women who loved her country so much that she left a prosperous stage career in the dust to run for Congress in 1944.  Due to her liberal views about what needed to be done for social change and justice, she was branded a Communist sympathizer along with her well known husband Melvyn Douglas.  

"Immediately after my election, newspapers took up the theme that had been created in Chicago and spoke of the coming 'battle of the glamor queens' between me and Clare Boothe Luce.  We were two of the nine women in the House of Representatives in the Seventy-ninth Congress and there were none in the Senate.  Unlike the other seven, Mrs. Luce and I both were associated with the Broadway stage and both of us mingled with what was regarded as high society.
(Note: She determined not to let silly rivalry get in the way of her important job.)
    At a dinner hosted by the women of the Washington press corps, she looked forward to "an end to irresponsible stories that she and Mrs. Luce were feuding."
          "I stood for a long moment considering what I would say.....Then I began.
               'We're in a war.  My husband is overseas.  I will be in Washington with two small children. I came here to support our country's war effort and to do what I can in Congress to help bring the fighting to a successful end as soon as possible. I'm not here for petty quarrels or a competition with anyone, and certainly not with Clare Booth Luce."      Clare jumped to her feet, leaned across the distance between us and extended her hand.  We shook, grinning.

OBSERVATIONS    
      CAMPAIGN FINANCE
        "Politicians when elected tend to put on blindfolds and vote in ways they believe will get them support and campaign contributions.  This dependence on large private contributions is demoralizing to elected officials.  We've got to put an end to it.  Campaigns should be financed from tax money if we really mean to maintain a democratic system.  Television and radio should be available to candidates on a fair basis without the impossible costs that are being charged today.
       Politicians aren't any more wicked than other citizens but the situation in which they are placed warps their judgment.  Wealthy self-interest groups such as the oil barons or Associated Farmers have a lot of power. If you're in office, you don't want them working against you in the next election. Unless you are very deeply committed to a program, as I was to reclamation, the temptation is to make concessions and even to reverse your position."

EMPOWERMENT OF WOMEN
           What we want to get at is the root of woman's problems---inferiority. At the beginning of the century a few women tenaciously worked, struggled, endured ridicule--even imprisonment--to obtain the vote. They believed we must share political power if we were to gain independence. They won the first round.....
          The female has to be trained from childhood to develop interests and abilities, to be aware of her capacities.  A woman must be given the resources necessary to build an inner life so she can respect herself.

THE POWER OF LIVING THEATER
             Everything one does that is verbal helps to make the mind function. When we attend living theater we make an effort to get there.  We set an evening aside for a special entertainment, rather than having it come into our homes via a television set. We purchase tickets. Then, there is the impact between the actor and the listener. The more knowledgeable the audience is about itself, and about the world, the better the actor".

AN EXCERPT FROM HER MEMORIAL BY ABE FORTAS. (U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice 1965-1969)

"In the paranoia of 1950, there was no chance that Helen could survive an attack of the intensity which was launched against her largely on the basis of her civil rights record.
     Even as the sordid events of Watergate were unfolded and it became common parlance to point to the evil aspects of Mr. Nixon's record, Helen remained silent and aloof--a gentlewoman, a person of impeccable taste and essential kindness in vindication as she had been in battle and in defeat...
     On the night of December 10, 1977 she rose before a large audience in a New York theater. Radiant in spite of her terminal illness, she read the magnificent words of the Fifth Amendment to our Constitution, followed by a standing ovation.

Postscript: If only Mrs. Douglas could have witnessed the victory of Hillary Rodham Clinton for the first female president of the United States, what an endorsement she would have written as a testimony to HER belief in the power of women.

Resource: A Full Life. Helen Gahagan Douglas. Doubleday & Company, NY 1982

Dear Readers,
      I am writing to you as Clara Morris, (an actress of the 19th century who I have chosen to portray in the program Stage Struck).  Mark Twain, the legendary American humorist, was a fan of mine. He introduced me at a lecture event where I was talking about Life on the Stage when the original person assigned failed to appear.  He was extremely complimentary and I was very grateful for his ability to improvise on the spot without rehearsal.  Mark Twain loved the theatre and those who were a part of it.

He loved women and indeed was an advocate for women's rights.  On January 21, 1901, he spoke to members of the Hebrew Technical School for Girls at their annual meeting on the issue of female suffrage.  I am pleased to share with you what he told the packed audience.

"I know that since the women started out their crusade they have scored in every project they undertook against unjust laws. I would like to see them help make the laws and those who are to enforce them. I would like to see the whiplash in women's hands.  The suffrage in the hands of the men degenerates into a couple of petrified parties. The man votes for his party and gets the city in the condition this one is in now - a disgrace to civilization.  If I live seventy-five years more - well, I won't - fifty years, then, or twenty-five, I think I'll see women use the ballot. It's the possession of the ballot that counts.  If women had it you could tell how they would use it.

Bring before them such a state of affairs as existed in New York City today and they would rise in their strength at the next election, elect a mayor, and sweep away corruption.
                                              True, they might sit ten years and never use it, but on such occasions they would cast it. Or in the case of an unjust war. Why, war might even pass away and arbitration take its place.  It never will so long as men have the votes.
                                           
                                             The contention that only vicious women would vote is absurd. How many of our 600,000 women are vicious?  Not enough to amount to anything. If women could vote, each party would feel compelled to put up the best candidate it could or take the risk of being voted down by the women.  States are built on morals - not intellects And men would never get any morals at all if the women didn't put it into them when they were boys.  If women could vote the good women would all vote one ..Men won't do that. It's a choice of evils with them."

According to  President Nathaniel Myers who introduced Mr. Twain, the Hebrew Technical School for Girls (2nd Ave. and E. 15th St.) was in the midst of ongoing expansion. He explained that the unique purpose as the single society in New York City was to offer a vocational education to Jewish girls.  He declared the work of the school to  be vital in a world where girls were too often forgotten.   (Reference:  www.jfew.org/?history_mark_twain)

Dear Mark Twain, he passed away from us on April 21, 1910 just nine years short of its passage by Congress and ten years short of is ratification as the 19th Amendment.  But I feel he was smiling on high for the women finally getting their right to vote.

                                                                 Respectfully,
                                                                                                   Clara Morris Marriott

May Robson roles as of 1905

REMEMBERING MAY ROBSON
April 19, 1858 - October 20, 1942

"I was born in the Australian bush.  I remember when I was a young girl fishing from the St. Kilda Pier in Melbourne.  At 13 my family moved from Melbourne to England across the Pacific. We sailed in a vessel modeled after my grandmother's rocking chair in movement and it was dubbed the "Rolling Moses."
       She attended La Sainte Union Catholic School on Highgate Road. "From the Sacred Heart Convent, Highgate, I was sent to school at Brussels, and there I studied the languages. I went to Paris for my examinations in French and returned home for a vacation.  I ran away from home to marry a boy of eighteen and we went to Fort Worth, Texas and tried to live up to our dignified name as inscribed on our cards, 'Mr. and Mrs. Charles Livingston Gore'."
                                                                                                                                                                                     From an article that appeared in Theatre (1907)                                                                                                                    
She arrived in New York in 1880 with her young husband and three children and had to begin life anew after severe financial losses.  Her husband preferred to return to London to recoup some of his finances; May decided to stay in New York.  To survive she produced crocheted hoods and embroidery, designed dinner cards and taught painting to support her three children. Her youngest son and daughter died in 1882.

A LIFE ON THE STAGE
     She debuted as an actress on September 17, 1883 as Tilly in Hoop of Gold at the
Brooklyn Grand Opera House.  Heretofore her maiden name was Robison, now an
incorrect spelling on the playbill as Robson became her chosen last name for "good luck".

      Her success was partly due to her affiliation with Charles Frohman and the Theatrical Syndicate. By 1911 she established her own touring theatrical company.

According to the bio in Who's Who in the Theatre by John Parker, between 1884 and 1921 she appeared on Broadway or on tour in over sixty productions.  To name a few,  Mrs. Chapstone in
Jim the Penman, Mrs.Van Buren in The Charity Ball, Audrey in As You Like It.
                        Between 1893-1896 she was engaged at the
Empire Theatre under the management of Charles Frohman in the following productions: Liberty Hall, The Councillor's Wife,
Sowing the Wind,  Gudgeons,  The Luck of Roaring Camp, 
The Importance of Being Earnest, Bohemia, among others.
Theatres who engaged her included Palmer's, Miner's Fifth Avenue,  Hoyt's, the Lyceum, Daly's and Wallack's and the
New York.  She also appeared in a vaudeville sketch entitled "Cinders" at Lew Fields' Theatre in 1904.

DEBUT AS A STAR
      She originated the role of Aunt Mary Watkins in
The Rejuvenation of Mary appearing in New York after a tryout at the Garden Theatre in 1907. She debuted in London with the same role at Terry's Theatre in 1910.    There would be at least ten more character roles by the end of 1922.      For a woman with no apparent training, except for life experience, she had phenomenal luck as a working actress and so many roles that were just right for her comedic timing and instinctive characterizations.

She performed a cameo in the 1915 silent film, How Molly Made Good and in 1916 starred in the film  A Night Out, an adaptation of a play she co-wrote The Three Lights. Other silents included roles in the King of Kings (1927), The Rejuvenation of Aunt Mary (1927) and Chicago (1927).

HOLLYWOOD TALKIES COME A CALLING
       With her distinctive speaking voice and extensive stage experience, it is no wonder that Hollywood moguls and directors would request her for her brilliance as a solid character woman and comedienne.  In The She Wolf (1931) she was a miserly millionaire businesswoman; in the final segment of If I Had A Million (1932)  she was a rest home resident who gets a new lease on life when she is given a million dollar check by a dying business tycoon. She played the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland (1933), Countess Vronsky in Anna Karenina (1936), Aunt Elizabeth in
Bringing Up Baby (1938), Aunt Polly in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1938) and a sharp-tongued Granny in A Star is Born. (1937)
     

In 1933, she was nominated for an Academy Award at age 75 in the Best Actress category for Lady for a Day but lost to Katharine Hepburn.  She was the first Australian-born actress to be nominated for an acting Oscar, and for many years she held the record as the oldest performer nominated for an Oscar.

She wrote an article entitled "Make-Up--A Paradox"
for Making Up A Practical and Effective Treatise on this Art for Professional and Amateur by Actor James Young (1905)

"Let me say that I do not think that I have ever met two faces that should be made up exactly alike. I am talking about "straight make-up." You often see a girl who looks remarkably pretty on the street and who is comparatively a fright when she gets on the stage; and a girl really plain who seems pretty behind the footlights.  Make-up can be very cruel or very kind........
                                                  "As to costumes, my advice is to get the real thing when you can. The old coat I wore some years ago in  Lady Bountiful  (1892)I remember I bought from a woman in Newark, who was very glad to exchange it for a new one. When I cannot get the real thing I reproduce it as closely as I possibly can."

After her death at age 84 the New York Times obituary called her "the dowager queen of the American screen and stage."

Resources: Watch as many of the 34 motion pictures which starred or featured this iconic and brilliant woman.  My favorites are  Lady For A Day, Bringing Up Baby, Four Daughters, Irene, 
Wife vs. Secretary and Reckless.

Reference:  May Robson  Wikipedia

EDWIN BOOTH AT 19

The year was 1852, a young rising star, the son of the great Junius Brutus Booth, was in financial straits.  Most of the money earned from touring had been squandered by his father's self-indulgence and addictions.

However, there was an inner strength and instinct for survival in the rugged mining towns of Northern California that only fueled the young man's passion for succeeding on the stage--the only occupation he knew anything about, the one true love in his lonely life.


Eleanor Ruggles wrote a well-researched narrative about him entitled The Prince of Players and this excerpt defines how that phrase applied to him and to the miners for whom he performed.

Excerpt from  Prince of Players Edwin Booth by Eleanor Ruggles

Norton,  New York. 1953  pp. 57-60

SEEING THE ELEPHANT

Miners and travel obstacles in the 19^th century

         California had an expression: “Seeing the elephant.” It had been the  title of a skit satirizing the gold rush that had run in San Francisco for months. “To see the elephant” meant to trek hopefully to the gold country and be (what most people were) viciously disappointed.  The West took up the ironic idiom.   All rugged travel, hunger and heartbreaking bad luck were “seeing the elephant.”  Miners had elephants stamped on their letter paper and daubed them in red and black on their cabin walls.

         The Booths had caught a glimpse of the elephant in Sacramento. Now Edwin got a good look from trunk to tail.  At first his his father (Junius Brutus Booth) had left, he lingered on with Junius (his older brother) and Harriet in their house on Telegraph Hill, an exasperating guest.  Having no work, he spent his time drinking in saloons where the bars were still warm from his father’s instep. His nineteenth birthday (November 13, 1852) came and went. Junius was mightily relieved when Willmarth Waller, an actor-manager organizing a company to play the mining towns engaged Ted for the tour. “The name will help me anyway,” said Waller.

         Junius had learned a thing or two about how to survive in California. It was the survival of the cautious. His brother was a brash kid, and Junius advised him before starting out to “put a slug” which was a piece of gold worth fifty dollars, “in the bottom of your trunk, forget you have it, and when things are at their worst bring out your slug.”

                  At Sacramento they all changed steamers and churned up the Feather River to Marysville.  Then, piling into a coach, they jolted for miles across plains whose horizons were ringed at night by the red pillars of campfires. They inched in silence, muffling all harness noise, through bandit country where mustachioed highwaymen like Joaquin Murietta could be expected to take shape silently out of the brush.  Now and then a grizzly lumbered across the trail.  Through the night the coyotes howled. The sturdy horses braced their hoofs as they picked their way down pebbly forest paths. From the hillttops the swaying, singing coachload glimpsed an occasional white tent roof or a thread of smoke showing the whereabouts of some lonely fortune hunter.

         Some of the mining towns had real playhouses with a sign over the door announcing THEATER or DRAMATIC HALL in five-foot letters, and inside kerosene footlights and drop curtains with pictures of elephants or of a miner recumbent, his pick by his side, dreaming of home. But often traveling actors played in a calico-draped saloon on a stage of boards help up by sawhorses, or in somebody’s barn or warehouse where the all-male audience planted stools on the dirt floor and belligerently staked off places like claims.

         Waller’s troupe stopped first in Nevada City, a clump of shacks in a clearing among the tall pines, and Edwin acted his first Iago.  They played next in Grass Valley, then in Rough and Ready, then in distant Downieville on the North Yuba at the deep bottom of a valley high in the mountains. The more remote the camp, the more electric the tension in the audience of tough-looking miners who sat with their guns handy in their laps. If you could capture them they showered you with gold pieces; if you disappointed them they tossed you in a blanket. Many of them knew the classical texts by heart and yowled with irritation when the smallest cut was made.

         The actors were in Downieville when a tremendous blizzard struck. Waller herded them back along the trail as far as Grass Valley. Here the snow lay twelve feet deep in places, and food was so short and fantastically expensive that Edwin’s precious slug, fetched out of his trunk to meet the emergency, bought the company no more than one dinner. They forced themsleves out and on again to Nevada City, hoping to earn enough there to pay for the steamer trip home. But when they reached town on an icy December night they found the dramatic hall dark.

         For many days neither food not letters had got through to the camps. The stranded miners had no money for theaters.  The stranded actors huddled around the stove in the dismal hotel and began to swap stories out of their accumulated experience of their catastrophes.

         Edwin flung away and wandered off alone down the main street, which led out of the camp into a no man’s land pitted like a moon landscape with gulches left by the gold diggers.  The snow made the night look almost bright and the raw holes sculptured. He was on his way back when he saw a lantern bobbing, heard shouts and running footsteps.

         “Holla!” rang George Spear’s (a member of the company) voice, sounding half-frozen, “Ted, is that you?”

         “Yes, what’s up?”

         “There’s mail just in and a message for you.”

         “What news?”

         “Not good news for you, my boy.”

         Edwin, like his father, occasionally had premonitions, true guesses at dark events. “Spear,” he asked instantly, “is my father dead?” Spear nodded slowly.

LEST WE FORGET DOROTHY STICKNEY
"A Lady of the Theatre"
(June 21, 1896 - June 2, 1998)

Widow of playwright Howard Lindsay after 41 years of marriage, they co-starred as Clarence and Vinnie Day during the long run of Life With Father, the longest-running non-musical Broadway play in history (1939 - 1947).

The play was turned down by the Lunts and many other stars. It was tried out in summer stock at the Lakewood Theater in Skowhegan, Maine with Mr. Lindsay and Miss Stickney thrust into the leading roles.  She said: "We weren't at all sure we were good enough for the parts. We had never originally intended to play them ourselves." Success in summer stock eventually led to Broadway, and opening night was filled with minor disasters. In the first scene the actress playing the maid accidentally dropped a tray of dishes, and, later, several actors forgot their lines.  The Lindsays went home and cried.      "Little did we realize that the play would last through World War II."

A WISE AND PATIENT MOTHER
   Her portrayal of the mother was at the heart of the play. She was understanding without being overly sentimental.  Brooks Atkinson said her portrait was "brilliant acting, both sweet and witty, with a supple response to the storminess of her domestic economy."

Howard Lindsay and Dorothy Stickney in Life With Father

OVERCOMING STAGE FRIGHT

In her 1979 memoir Openings and Closings, she wrote about her lifelong battle with stage fright. She said she had learned one lesson: "When panic overtook me and I felt absolutely unable to go on, I would tell myself, 'You don't have to do the whole play--you don't even have to play the next scene--all you have to do is say the next line."  Although she never fully conquered that fear, she was always able to say the next line and the next line, and in so doing found a lifetime of accomplishment in the theater.

EARLY CAREER CHALLENGES

After a one-line performance as a Folies Bergere girl in Toto which starred the great European star Leo Dictrichstein, she returned to New York.    She lived in a "rickety West Side rooming house" with another aspiring actress who was so tiny she could play child parts.
     "We wore out our shoes making the rounds of the offices every day. On summer nights when our bedroom was too stiflingly hot for sleeping, we would get seats in the open air on the top of a beautiful double-decker Fifth Avenue bus, and for ten cents each, we would ride all night and get a small breeze.
     About three in the morning, when it got a little cooler, we would go back to our room and stretch out in the lumpy bed until it was time to get up and start looking for jobs again. We were hopelessly stagestruck.  We pounded the pavements, and haunted managers' and agents' offices only to be turned away with a shake of the head, when we had barely gotten inside the door, or with 'Nothing today,' or worst of all, with a "You're not the type." Life was a combination of hope and despair.
     For three years I tried to see the producer Edgar Selwyn and never got further than his office boy. One day while waiting endlessly, hoping for a few words from the great man, I whiled away the time and vented my anger by writing some verses."

YOU'RE NOT THE TYPE by Dorothy Stickney  (reprinted in her Memoir)
                 
                   I looked for work in early fall
                  And could not find a part at all.
                  I looked and looked and looked and then
                  I looked and looked and looked again,
                  And looked and looked and now it's spring,
                  And still I haven't anything.
                  Too fat, too thin, too short, too tall,
                  Too blond, too dark, too large, too small.

                  An office boy my dream would thwart,
                 "You're not the type," I'd hear him snort,
                  So then I asked a big producer
                  "Oh, let me play a part for you, sir!"
                  And as my eye he saw me wipe,
                  He yawned and said, "You're not the type."
                  A playwright next I interviewed,
                  My heart with brightest hopes imbued.

                 He turned away and lit his pipe,
                 And shortly said, "You're not the type."
                 To see an agent then I went,
                  My shoes worn out, my money spent.
                 The agent smiled and said, "My dear,
                 You're not the type. Come in next year,
                 For doubtless then we'll be engaging."
                 And I departed madly raging.

                So here within my furnished room,
                At least I face my awful doom.
               I'll starve and go (I hope) above,
               And this is what I'm thinking of--
               Perhaps if I am very good
               And play my harp as angels should,
               Saint Peter will be kind to me
               And lend me once his Golden Key.

              I hope to see upon the stair
              Imploring for admittance there,
              Producers, playwrights, agents, too,
              And all the deadly office crew.
              When my familiar face they see
              They'll say, "Don't you remember me?"
              Then from the Pearly Gates I'll pipe,
              "Oh, go to Hell! You're not the type!"


REFERENCES
Openings and Closings. Dorothy Stickney. Doubleday and Company NY 1979
Wikipedia
NY Times Obituary
Bismarck Tribune Obiturary
IBDB and IMDB


           

 

LEST WE FORGET MARY ANDERSON
(July 28, 1859-May, 29, 1940)

In the early 1860s  her family moved to Louisville, Kentucky, where her father enlisted in the Confederate States Army in the Civil War. He was killed in action at Mobile when she was three. She was educated by the nuns at the Ursuline convent and the all-girl Presentation Academy.

When she was twelve, her stepfather introduced her to the works of Shakespeare, an event which helped to shape her later career. Lessons in English literature and elocution were begun with Professor Noble Butler of Louisville, and progress was rewarded with tickets to the Saturday matinees at the Louisville Theatre.  Her early theatre-going adventures are chronicled in her autobiography A Few Memories published in 1896.  In her own words she discusses her love affair with the theatre and when she decided to pursue a stage career.

THE FIRST PLAY I ever saw was Richard the Third with Edwin Adams as the crook-backed tyrant.
     Young, graceful, handsome, an ideal actor in romantic characters, he was hardly fitted for so sombre and tragic a part. Yet the force of his personal magnetism stamped his every word, look, and gesture indelibly upon my memory.  The music and lights; the actors and actresses, whose painted faces seemed far more perfect to me then (I was 12 years old) than anything in nature; luckless Anne; Henry the Sixth, who, though he is an interloper in the play, makes, through Cibber's daring, a splendidly effective acting scene; the royal army, consisting of six "scrawny" knock-kneed supers, with a very unmilitary look about them----all are as clear before me now as though I had seen them yesterday.

HOW WE ALWAYS REMEMBER the first dip into a new sensation after impressions of things a hundredfold greater are blotted from our minds!  My mother, seeing my delight in the play, promised that, if we deserved it, my brother and I should occasionally attend the weekly matinees. With such a reward as two theatre tickets in view, my amount of good conduct was cheap in payment.  I became less mischievous and forgetful.

WHEN THE LONGED-FOR SATURDAY CAME, little Joe and I would start for the old
Louisville Theatre, then on the corner of Fourth and Green Streets, quite two hours before the doors were opened.  The man in the lobby, observing my singular keenness, soon allowed us, early as it was, to enter; though he was compelled to lock the door after us.
     We would then sit alone in the large, dimly lighted theatre, feeling the most privileged of mortals, silently watching the great green curtain, and imagining all the enchantments it concealed.  After an hour of such amusement, mysterious feet, generally in shabby boots and shoes, were seen under the curtain.  Then the doors opened, people began to drop in. There was a rustle of programmes and banging of seats.  Suddenly the footlights flared against the green curtain, under which mysterious feet were seen again, this time in dainty satin slippers or shoes--so many feet, so differently shod, yet all meeting on one common ground before the peep-hole in the curtain.
     Then the orchestra, full of noise, especially at the furioso finale, after which the tinkling bell, and, to the traditional pizzicato (if the villain commenced the play) or the sweet tremolo of violins (if the angelic maiden began), the curtain slowly rose.
     From that moment we became oblivious of everything but the scene before us, and only after the curtain fell upon the last act was our dream broken, when, with a shock, we found ourselves once more in the cold and dusky streets.  To leave the Temple of Enchantment and come back to commonplace realities was our daily sadness.  Fairy plays, melodramas and minstrel shows formed our regular menu.

AN ANNOUNCEMENT that Edwin Booth was to visit Louisville filled its playgoers with delightful anticipations. Times were hard, we were poor, and many sacrifices had to be made to enable us to witness a few of his performances.
   RICHLIEU was the first of the series. What a revelation it was! I had never seen any great acting before, and it proved a turning point in my life.  The subtle cunning with which the artist invested the earlier parts of the play was as irresistible as the power, fire and pathos of the later scenes were terrible and electrifying. It was impossible to think of him as an actor.  He was Richlieu. I felt for the first time that acting was not merely a delightful amusement, but a serious art that might be used for high ends.
    AFTER that brilliant performance sleep was impossible. On returning home I sat at the window of my little room until morning. The night passed like an hour. Before the dawn I had mapped out a stage career for myself.

I was fourteen years of age, inexperienced and uneducated, but I had not a moment of doubt or fear.

RESOURCE:   Anderson, Mary. A Few Memories. 1896