Nancy's Notes

   For Charlotte, it was a reunion straight out of the movies, which was appropriate since it was with the woman who had been her drama teacher and mentor in college; a woman, it would be accurate to say, Charlotte had openly adored from the first moment she saw her on the first day of classes of freshman year. Nancy – Mrs. I, as we called our professors in those days,  glided into the classroom, graceful, feminine, and important even on those impossibly high heels, wearing a tight skirt and tucked in sweater. As soon as she spoke, her honeyed tones captivated every one of us in that classroom. We all came to recognize the modulations in her voice during our four years under her wing.

 Charlotte was just barely 17 and coming out of a big high school in which she had felt largely invisible and mostly miserable – 1700 in her graduating class – into a small college campus with a total school population of 2500. She hated high school. Four gothic buildings around a quad. It was more like a college campus than a city high school and the academics were renowned; however, there was no drama department. She not only felt as if she had no place there she felt unknown because the small group of twelve that had gone through school together since kindergarten was split up by logistics in that huge place. Charlotte was unseen, unknown in her misery. 

  The small university, she hoped, would make it hard for her to be invisible. 

Mrs. I assigned the text book, gave everyone a general idea of what the semester held in store, the kinds of assignments everyone would be performing, what she hoped for this group of theatre seekers. 

  After several weeks, everyone began to feel as if they knew each other. Mrs. I gave a couple of partner assignments to induce interaction.  She always sat in the corner, in the back of the room. She slid into the chair-desk and although there were usually 20 or more people in the room, she was the beacon; the one everyone performed for, her eyes directed only on the performer, her whole attention on one person at a time. It could be disturbing, especially if she laughed because the sound wasn’t so much a recognizable laugh as it was a swallowed gurgle. 

  She gave notes after each performance. In Charlotte’s early days, Nancy spent a lot of time getting her to drop the polished pronunciation, the artificial voice, in favor of more natural reading while still keeping the dramatic interpretation. Charlotte agonized over this. She was the product of a well-spoken family and, especially of a grandmother who threatened her and her sister with elocution school if they misbehaved. Not knowing what elocution school was but that it sounded enough like electrocution that the sisters were terrified, they gladly did the little speech exercises their grandmother gave them as substitute punishment. What a trick to make sure they wouldn’t have the Brooklyn accent that sounds like marbles are in your mouth. It did make Charlotte a little stilted and Nancy was determined for a breakthrough that would free her from concentrating on how she sounded to what the words were meant to say. 

  Other breakthroughs needed to happen before that, though. It was the era of Method Acting and teachers were intent on students being in touch with their feelings to produce honesty in the work. Charlotte loved how the intensity and trust of working together grew and found freedom in talking about where motivation was coming from, loved hearing everyone relate moments made them glad or mad or cry or scream. It was self-indulgence rewarded as they talked endlessly about themselves, baring their souls to each other. 

  As many hours as they spent onstage, they also spent in one-on-one sessions with their professors, rehearsing a monologue or poem for performance, exploring the motivations and how to get to the emotion the part demanded. Everyone learned a lot about themselves; or, at least, they exposed a lot about themselves. One acting professor had them sit on stage on a toilet, re-enacting their personal, solitary act of voiding. Charlotte hated that assignment but saw the value in expanding her confidence to take risks on stage. Nancy had a knack of demanding all out of her students but, at the same time, inspiring trust to tell her anything. Charlotte would – and did – over the years, tell her everything. It would be impossible for that kind of intimacy to inspire anything less than adoration.

  Charlotte’s breakthrough came in her Sophomore year when Nancy assigned a poetry reading to music, due after the winter break. Charlotte spent that break in her bedroom listening to records and reading the poetry in the class text, Maxwell Parish’s Reading Aloud. She was comfortable and happy doing this, having danced and sung her way through her childhood in that bedroom, knowing every lyric to musicals popular on Broadway then.  She ended up choosing Tennyson’s Morte d’Artur set to the Largo movement of Dvoràk’s New World Symphony. Odd….the old world of Camelot with the New World. Somehow, it worked and when she read it in class, she felt connected not just to the moment but to the entire story of King Arthur, Sir Bedivere, Sir Lancelot and all of Camelot. She knew she was making that myth a living moment and everyone in that room was living it with her. When she was done, there was a long moment of silence, and then an eruption of applause. Nancy had no notes for her that day and, slowly, began arranging for Charlotte to do the reading for other classes she taught and then for local high schools, part of a student recruiting program. Charlotte still has a book Nancy gave her with a little note tucked inside the front cover in which she thanked Charlotte for bringing her time and talent to her classes. It was as much Nancy’s achievement as Charlotte’s. Nancy had helped Charlotte find herself. 

  Nancy was Charlotte’s touchstone for so much more than classwork in her major. Their relationship went beyond teacher and student but still had a proper boundary. Charlotte never stopped addressing Nancy as Mrs. I until she was graduated and, in fact, finished with her Master’s, for which she was a teaching fellow at the school from which she had just been graduated. She was by then, however, talking to her about other matters than just her course work.  She told her of her ambivalence about her boyfriend of several years, the one Charlotte’s parents fully expected her to marry. She was at once guilty to have those thoughts and relieved to share them. 

  It was an extraordinary time. All the passion of the sixties simmered beneath an exterior of 1950s traditions and manners. All of a sudden, Charlotte found herself thinking thoughts that didn’t quite mirror her well put-together exterior. The tumultuousness that characterized her generation meant challenging the existing dogma. Nancy had always chosen to direct plays by Tennessee Williams or Arthur Schnitzler for many reasons but, Charlotte realized years later, when Nancy directed her class it was because the plays expressed upheaval, emotion, reflection. She was helping to make sense of warrior thoughts by refracting them through the words of genius.

When Charlotte looks back now at the assignments and the instruction, sixty years later, she can still remember the gentle way in which Nancy coaxed performances out of each student whether it was a short, terse poem, or a Williams monologue. She knows she has so much more for which to be grateful than just the right and proper management of voice and speech. 

  Nancy was teaching the world. When she gave those notes at the end of a performed assignment, it was as if the performer was the only one in the room and what was gleaned just might be the most important lesson they would ever learn. The way in which she studied the world, reached conclusions and imparted them was, in itself, a lesson. She got to the core of an issue, explored it and was clear and eloquent in expressing what she knew to be truths. She was fair and honest, intolerant of injustice, deeply moved by the power of theatre art. 

   In 1963, she brought a recording of Martin Luther King Jrs. I Have A Dream speech to class. Charlotte’s desk was on the left side of the room, next to a window, third row up from the front. It was a beautiful day and Charlotte was looking out the window, as the recording of the speech spooled out in the room. Charlotte looked out of the window but didn’t see anything of the green lawns of the campus, ringed by the three original brick buildings and also dotted with the Quonset Huts. She was inside of the sound of Martin Luther King Jr’s. voice. Nancy wanted them to lose themselves in the rhythm and cadence of the speech in order to let the words find a dwelling place in their souls. She knew the place that speech would have in history and she knew the value of placing them in the same moment. She had much to do with the quickening of their political responsiveness. It was a time of civil upheaval largely un-reflected on that campus of middle-class white people, few people of color, then, and even fewer people of the Jewish faith. Nancy knew they needed to be awakened to prejudice, was aware of those of in the class beginning to participate in civil rights marches, and encouraged them to open their minds to all that was outside of the boundary of that protective university enclave.     

   Still, she could give assignments that Charlotte challenged as ridiculous. For years after she was graduated, whenever the opportunity arose, Nancy would tell the story of how Charlotte had argued with her in class over having to take a perfectly good three-act play- The Glass Menagerie  – and reduce it to a twenty-minute presentation. She would tell people how annoyed she was for the challenge, and then would laugh with Charlotte who admitted that, later in her life she realized it was one of the most important assignments she ever had to master and how much it had taught her about getting to the heart of a matter. 

 Charlotte would never have known Nancy was annoyed or angry about anything, however. Once, when Nancy was talking about something that had happened in the Drama Department and how angry she was, she said she had told her husband about it and that she was furious. They laughed over his response: “Did anybody know?” 

  Nancy knew Charlotte’s excitement at landing an internship, in her Senior year, that extended into the next year when she was a Teaching Fellow at the school. She landed at a major NYC radio station that putting her right in the midst of celebrities everyone in NY knew. There was temptation in that atmosphere at every office door, around every corner. The intern role started in the late afternoons and most of those late afternoon and evening radio hosts were men; powerful, smooth, seductive men who were used to doing whatever they wanted. They delivered exciting broadcasts and were assisted mostly by staffs of young, attractive females of which Charlotte was now one. The invitations were often overt but more usually in a much more flirtatious style. She loved it, loved being around the power and the energy and the creativity, and she loved the vapor of sexuality in the air. It was a large part of what fed her ambivalence about marrying the soon-to-be-doctor from Brooklyn and heading into that predictable life before, Charlotte thought, her actual life had started. While Nancy may have gently guided her to be careful as she made moves and decisions, she didn’t turn her away from that enticing life either. Nancy and her husband were at the wedding that took place after the Fellowship year. Charlotte could not stop crying, which most of the 150 guests and her family thought was just because she was so dramatic and emotional. After the ceremony, Nancy whispered to her that she knew why she was crying. A scant few years later, after Charlotte had left the marriage and was living on her own in the city, a little scared and lonely, Nancy came to spend a few days with her. It was because she had left her marriage and was in the city with a new friend. She wasn’t in much better shape than Charlotte was now understanding that back in the days when Nancy was listening to her and telling her that she needed to look at what she wanted, not what was expected of her, she was also talking to herself. 

 Charlotte knew Nancy for 43 years, although there was a gap after that visit. Nancy may or may not have been attempting suicide. She did take an overdose and started crying out in fear to Charlotte, asleep in the next room. Charlotte rushed her into a cab and to an emergency room where they pumped her stomach.  The hospital called Nancy’s husband who took her home. Nancy did not take Charlotte’s calls, or answer her letters. Charlotte thought often of her and missed her but had no real reason to think she would re-enter her life. Years passed; years in which Charlotte remarried, was widowed, and sank into a sadness that lasted for over a decade.

  And then she saw Nancy again in 1991 when her college-bound son announced that he thought he would apply to that very school Charlotte had attended.  When he was accepted into the theatre program – vastly different than when Charlotte had been there, housed now in a beautiful and professionally equipped theatre and light years away from the wooden Quonset Huts – Charlotte’s first thought was that she would soon see Nancy again. The first opportunity was when he was invited to audition for the school’s full-tuition acting scholarship. Parents were invited to the audition. Nancy approached Charlotte and her son, waiting in the theatre lobby and introduced herself….”I’m Nancy I,” she said. “And I’m Charlotte Stevens,” Charlotte whispered, barely able to breathe. For the rest of that day Nancy introduced Charlotte to people as “One of our best….”  Her son was ultimately awarded the scholarship, which his mother had not been 25 years earlier, but now she had something better – Nancy’s public pronouncement that she had been one of the best.

  The silent years erased, they met for lunch a few weeks later at The Ginger Man on West 64h Street in New York City and spent four hours tucked into a window table talking about everything that happened to them in the time since they’d last seen each other. Nancy gave Charlotte all the time she needed to tell her about her marriage, the son, losing her husband, the love of her life who had been 22 years her senior.  Although Nancy had been divorced, she and her now ex-husband were living together again, but not planning to remarry. They spent a lot of time recounting incidents from their years together on campus . She reminded Charlotte how people had thought of her as that odd combination of theatre/English major, student protestor and sorority girl. 

  When they had to part that day, and as Charlotte walked away from her, she realized that she was suddenly lighter, that her mourning had ended. Nancy was the first person Charlotte had spoken to, in all those years, besides her family, who had known her before she was married to anyone. Once again, Nancy had helped her find herself.

  They talked and saw each other often after that. The teacher-student relationship was always there but it deepened and they talked about their families in different ways. When Charlotte left New York and moved to the Pacific Northwest, they made sure they talked even more and would see each other as often as they could whenever Charlotte came back to visit. From time to time, they would send each other little presents. Charlotte still carries in her wallet another little note Nancy wrote that came with one of her gifts. She talked about puffs of fur from Snowball, her kitty, that might have found their way onto the gift. She left out a word in that little note and it just seemed so sweet and silly because Charlotte could hear her laughing, so busy describing the kitty as she was writing that she didn’t realize she had left out a word.

***

   And, finally, there they were, two grown women having a luxurious tea in the lobby of the Garden City Hotel. Charlotte was filled with faithful awe at being with Nancy. This was another turning point. At 60 years old, Charlotte was about to get married, after 26 years of being widowed, and Nancy was nearing the end of her struggle with diabetes and lung cancer; although, at tea that day, they didn’t realize how close the end was. Seeing her, when she could no longer wear high heels so chose colorful tennis shoes instead, and then talking to her by phone a scant few weeks before her death that May, carried the trace memory of the first day Charlotte had seen her.  

  In their last phone conversation. Nancy asked Charlotte to write her eulogy.  She died just before Charlotte’s wedding and Charlotte couldn’t go back to read – perform – the eulogy for her teacher, her friend, her mentor who had traveled through the world on a plane few of us will ever reach.    

  On the day and hour of the funeral, Charlotte read the eulogy aloud, alone, in her home 3000 miles away. She lamented that there would not be any notes at the end but knew that Nancy had already given her the most important notes of her life.