'Cliffe Girl Returns to screaming Business

Ex-professional screamer Dorothy Dean '54, who hasn't screamed for an audience since she was 13, is being pressed into service next week to save the voice of leading lady Nora Sayre '54 in the coming Lowell House Opera production of "King Arthur."

On Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights of next week the slight, darkhaired Radcliffe senior will deliver from off stage "three short ones with lots of body." But she will not be paid as she used to be.

Depending on the type she produced, Miss Dean used to get better than $25 for each scream from a New York radio station. The studio wanted to protect the voices of its higher paid actresses.

In the Lowell opera, Miss Dean, who usually handles properties, has been called out of professional retirement to deliver each night a short, painful yell proceeded by a groan. It comes after Arthur mistakenly stabs his lover--the opera's heroine--who is tied to a tree.

"I used to do a whole variety of screams," she explains. "One was the strangler, full of horror. Another was the terror scream, as if someone came up behind you in the dark. There were the stabbing screams--sort of gurgling sounds, and several others."

Miss Dean admits that she is a bit embarrassed to be asked to scream although she occasionally lets loose in Gilman Hall by herself.

"My friends still ask me to do it all the time," she said, "but I haven't done a strangling scream in ages."

But Miss Dean, who has even been used for several people being murdered at the same time, fells the days of pay are gone forever. "Except for chances like the Lowell opera," she says, "there just doesn't seem to be any need for a screamer any more."