An Improvised Life Read Free Page A

sense to us, and in any form that we could identify with. In his classroom I wrote my first play. It was on the topic of slavery in the United States. I think I got an A . Probably the only grade above a C I received in my four years there.
    High school consistently made me feel as if I were in prison, but being in plays sustained me. I lived for the rehearsals and performances. It was the only arena in which I felt that I had any identity and any purpose. As I write this it seems strange to think that for so many years my sense of comfort and identity was secured only when I was being someone else, but I think this is true of many actors.
My own unformed personality found grounding and shape in the words and actions of the characters in the scripts, and I would turn into the characters during rehearsals and stay within them until long after the plays had finished their runs.
    It was around this time that I began to study guitar. Like most of my hobbies, playing the guitar began as an attempt to keep my mind off acting, and gave me something to occupy my mind when I didn’t have a part in a play. I worked hard at the guitar, and soon got good enough to perform at functions around L.A. I masqueraded as a folk singer, but I was a maverick within the folk scene because folk music wasn’t a particular passion of mine. I was more interested in jazz, but wasn’t disciplined enough to learn jazz guitar.
    At that time there was a singer who’d become very popular in folk circles, a big, impressive black woman with a huge voice and commanding presence who wowed audiences throughout Los Angeles. We’d often be on the same bill together and I was never comfortable listening to her. I could never understand her success. She sang the music of her people, spirituals and blues, and some gospel, but what she was doing never worked for me. There was something about her that I found annoying, and I couldn’t figure out what it was until a couple of years later when I heard Mahalia Jackson and it all clicked. This woman on the folk circuit was singing the pain of her people, the pain of being black, the pain of her life, and I suppose she struck the same false note in me that was struck by my mother’s friend in
the living room, when I was eight. Mahalia Jackson on the other hand made me cry. “What was the difference between this woman on the circuit and Mahalia Jackson?” I asked myself, and I struggled with this question for weeks until I finally realized that Mahalia Jackson’s singing was a joyful release from the pain of her life. Her pain and suffering were present in her singing, there was no way for her to escape; in every note she sang it was clear that she’d had a huge burden to carry, but she was singing to rise above it. Singing to liberate herself from her pain and to share the joy of the music with anyone who cared to listen. The woman on the folk circuit was simply singing her pain. In doing so she was inflicting it on me, making me feel as if I owed her something, and that it was somehow my job to alleviate her suffering. I wanted to be like Mahalia Jackson.
    In those days I thought that my feelings about other people’s performances were objective. I felt there was a component to an actor’s work that went beyond taste and personal preference. I still feel that way in part, although I also recognize that there is a time when people are ready for certain emotional experiences and not for others. There have been times in my life when I’ve dismissed certain works of art as being stupid or boring, only to find a couple of decades later that I was not mature enough at the time to appreciate them. It’s hard to admit we don’t understand something. I am still amazed, for example, at someone’s being afraid of Beethoven. I’ve known people who can’t listen to his music because it’s too emotionally arousing or overwhelming
for them. But for me, Beethoven’s music was for decades almost as crucial as eating or