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“………ain’t never what a girl supposes….”, chirps the soubrette Ellie in Jerome Kerns hit operetta SHOW BOAT, backed by a similarly chirping chorus of towns women who think being an actress is filled with glamor and stage door Johnnies who will shower them with diamonds and furs.

This charming little First Act number sets out to correct that notion and only ends up making all of them ( and us in the audience) want to be in Show Biz even more! For you see, nothing can shake a girl loose from her dreams, if her dreams are what make her life worth living! A profound lesson to finally understand and accept in my 78th year…..now that I have the wisdom ( hah!) and perspective of my almost eight decades of experience.

I am a retired actress.

I made a good living in my profession, and brought joy to many audiences, I’m pretty sure, while filling my days with plenty of creativity, heartbreak, drama, and horrible ecstasy…..those years in New York, and around the country on various stages, were my “salad days”, as the old turn of phrase goes:

…….”My salad days,
When I was green in judgement,cold in blood….”
Says Cleopatra in Shakespeares play ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA…..
Referring to that time in her younger life when she dallied with Julius Caesar, when she was inexperienced, fresh to life, green of experience and chilly in her ability to truly love……cold, fresh, like salad!

I wonder how much of Life we would genuinely enjoy, thrive in and achieve if we knew then what we eventually end up knowing….if I had truly known the pain my devotion to theater and show business would cause me, would I have made it my chosen profession anyway?

Well, pain has a way of making its presence known deeply and rapidly, so I knew “show biz” had the acidic ability to murder my soul very early on, but my need to express myself thoroughly, fully, beautifully, made it positively impossible for me to choose any other way of life.

Only theater, center stage spotlight turned full force on me, show business with all its successes and failures…well….so,I knew deep within that that was the true life for me….go figure, huh? Masochistic? Maybe…but joyous and deeply throughly fulfilling nonetheless!

And so my true life was not at all the family outings and celebrations I missed…my genuine life was not at each of the graduations, dinners ( I had to get to rehearsal or rush to half – hour to sign in at my Broadway job in some hit show or other) or funerals I disrespected by choosing my stage life over real life….my true life was elsewhere…. It was at the theater, on the set, in a chilly rehearsal hall, in the company of other devotees who were disrespecting their families in the same ways I was disrespecting mine…my family changed with each show I was in….very few of those “ familial” connections lasted too long, but while they existed, they sufficed, they felt warm and real….they made me feel loved.