Life Comes Without a Script

There is no single memory that comes to mind when I think of myself at Harvard 25 years ago—rather a stream of images, fitful, fleeting, snapshots that capture what historian Erving Goffman would call The Theatricality of Everyday Life.

I knew so little about Harvard when I applied that I counted on being a Drama major. Since that concentration has never existed I chose Fine Arts, but spent most of my time in extracurricular activities, off and on stage, either as director or actor.

The defining moments of my life at Harvard were spent waiting in the wings: I remember counting the bodies of sailors dangling on ropes to open the Gilbert & Sullivan production of H.M.S. Pinafore at the Agassiz.

Or my proud (and fearless) entrance in pajamas as the ingénue in Noel Coward’s Present Laughter. My vampy goth get-up as a witch in the Leverett House production of Dark of the Moon.

We were decidedly ’70s in our use of drama for therapeutic ends. I explored my Shadow self in Peter Frisch’s famous mask workshop and held encounter sessions with my best girlfriends while directing Megan Terry’s Calm Down Mother at the Loeb Ex.

I so inhabited the lead in Tennessee Williams’ one-act This Property Is Condemned, that I condemned myself to a bout of mono and spent the evening of the show in the infirmary.

There were movie moments, too—set pieces in real life that were overblown, theatrical gestures.

I remember throwing my drink at a flirtatious student bartender at a Hasty Pudding party and then waking up next to him the next day.

Or being caught kissing the wrong fellow in the Ibis room at the top of the Lampoon castle and watching him tumble headfirst down the stone stairs after my boyfriend slugged him.

The image that keeps resurfacing, however, is a sweet one, not sexy, sickly, or violent.

I was in a play called The Kitchen, by Arnold Wesker, again at the Loeb and directed by Peter Frisch. My part was that of a gum-cracking waitress and I chewed wads of Bazooka that I parked on my dressing table mirror when I wasn’t onstage.

One night, it was April I believe, we were surprised by a late snowstorm, and when I couldn’t find my gum to go back on after Intermission, a fellow cast member (the Chef in the play) beckoned me outside, and there he’d built me a snow bunny, with a wad of pink bubble gum for a nose.

It was a lovely courtship gesture, and perhaps my fondest memory of Harvard.