All my life, I’ve had a long list of wants. I wanted to be a recognizable TV actress. I wanted to feel important. I wanted people I admire to admire me back. Most of all, I wanted an audience: a large, large audience of adoring fans.
None of that ever happened – until it did — when I was in my 80s.
I began by doing all manner of crap jobs. Children’s theater, where one kid asked, “Are you a puppet?” Free shows in nursing homes, where a resident yelled out, “Hey, is this gonna be over soon? It’s almost time for cake.” One line on a soap opera: “The doctor will see you now.” And — worst of all — tedious, brain-sucking days on the sweltering sidewalks of New York as a movie extra. Then my husband and I moved to Los Angeles, where I started to get semi-regular work as a TV actress, including a returning role as Doris Klompus on Seinfeld.
But I still had too much time on my hands. So, I decided to try writing and performing my own words — as a storyteller. Once again, this meant a steady diet of struggle and humiliation. One event was at a grungy barbecue joint deep in the bowels of the San Fernando Valley. When I got there, I discovered that most of the audience spoke English as a second language — the first language being Mongolian. Needless to say, my piece about my son’s Jewish wedding did not rock the house.
Another show was on the freezing front patio of a coffee shop in East Hollywood with noisy traffic going by. Six storytellers, with four people in the audience. Everyone was under 25, so once again, my piece about my son’s Jewish wedding did not rock the house. A much warmer reception greeted some guy’s detailed description of his battle with genital herpes.
One ray of light during those dark days was my husband. Benni came to every show, every gig, every performance. And his response was always the same: He would say, “You were terrific.”
I would say, “How can you say that? I got zero laughs!”
He would say, “That’s because they were really listening. Trust me, they loved you.”