The Audience Loves a Dragon

A million years ago, or, more precisely, twenty-five, I was a student in Geraldine Page's acting class in New York.

I was glued to the seat behind her most weeks, because I was awe-struck and terrified and because Geraldine Page could read my mind. Or, like our best teachers, our mothers, she had convinced me that she could, and I was taking no chances.

I first encountered Geraldine Page onscreen at a military moviehouse on Okinawa. My father, a Sergeant in the Air Force, managed the base theatre, so I saw almost every American film released the two and a half years we lived overseas. I had seen Summer and Smoke, Sweet Bird of Youth, and Toys in the Attic by the time I was ten. Two Tennessee Williams and one Lillian Hellman, our Southern masters. I didn't know they were playwrights. The only plays I had seen were in movies.

Watching those films for the first time was thrilling: characters and language I recognized from my own family background, and this woman who was familiar--she even looked like she could be in my family--except she was on the big screen, sometimes plain, sometimes pretty, only real, acting with movie stars, but not one, transcending reality, doing and saying things I knew I could do. Maybe not as well, not yet, but someday.

I told my mother that I knew what I wanted to do when I grew up. "I want to be like that lady in Summer in Smoke", I said. We were sitting in our beat-up old black Ford, in front of our Quonset hut home. "I think I can do that."

My mother tossed her cigarette out the window and spoke in her can-do voice. "You are every BIT as cute as Pamela Tiffin!", she said.

Hunh. I thought it best to keep my bigger ambitions to myself from then on.

Back to 1984. I had just finished some scene, and was waiting for Geraldine's critique, hoping she wouldn't tell me I reminded her of Pamela Tiffin. She leaned in. I took a breath.

"You're so-- Niiiiice. You want Everyone to-- Liiiiike you." (The smarmiest reading of that you can imagine.) And then in her lower register: "I was a nice girl from the Midwest, too. I loved being a heroine onstage. I didn't want to alienate the audience in Sweet Bird. I didn't want them to hate me. But the moment I realized that the meaner I was the more they loved me, I was Free. Don't apologize. The audience loves a dragon. Be a Dragon."

I'm still finding my Bitch-y shoes. They are not comfortable anyplace but at home. I wasn't wearing them at the reading of my play the other day, and I don't know when I'll break them out in public. Soon, I hope. Maybe if I wear them while I do the re-writes, they'll be broken in just in time for performance. Right now I'm still barefoot.