If you think about it, aging is a form of quarantine. Or as my mother-in-law Dorothy Sterling would say, “Aging is not for the weak of heart.” I would say that aging is not only for the old. It is one measure of the spiritual health of the entire community. Before the Trump administration shoves everyone in my generation onto the ice flow heading out to sea, a few thoughts:
Age and the University
I will always remember my first playwriting course that I taught at Cornell. In my second year of graduate school I was assigned my own workshop of freshmen (back then only men were given graduate fellowships; women could teach, which would easily add twenty to forty hours of time on top of our own coursework. But then, the reasoning went, fellowships were wasted on women who would marry and have children).
But back to the matter at hand. I was extremely nervous, at age 24, and excited. I sat at the large seminar table and chatted with students who filed in to take their first playwriting course. And then they waited for the professor to come. The looks on their faces as I stood and announced that we would begin: not possible that this kid was their instructor!
Over the years the elation and terror of starting workshops never faded; what did fade was their disbelief. I aged. First I was the age of an older sister. Although I keenly remember in my literature course (over 100 students enrolled!) that when I mentioned Janis Joplin, a student said in awe: “You Saw Janis Joplin live?” it made me feel ancient. And then there came the decade where students didn’t really know who Janis Joplin was. I went from ancient to antique.
One of the torments of teaching is our bodies age as faculty, assaulted by an endless Torrent of the Young each September. Forever 18, it would seem. Forever 21. Thank God I also ran a graduate program, because my graduate playwrights were aging too, and their dissipation after a weekend was a welcome sight. I was determined to keep up and outrun my undergraduates, stay up as late, rise much earlier, and just exhaust them as much as I could in productions; but my older writers were given slack so they could write all night, cut corners, and write brilliant plays.
One of the things I have always found funny was how age was represented in the plays of my younger students; I had to concentrate on not laughing at stage directions like: “the old woman, nearing fifty, manages to cross the room and with care, sits in her chair.”
And then there came a time when I was no longer an older sister, or a mother, but a grandmother.
Age in the Theater
What a sharp relief being in theater was, where I could go to theaters and see brilliant 60-70-something-year-old women bound across the stage with vitality and yes, youth: performers like Colleen Dewhurst, Jessica Tandy, Geraldine Page. I could write plays like The Oldest Profession and be in a room with that brilliance and vitality. And although I experienced a similar aging in my body—from writing The Oldest Profession in my twenties (the shock on Alice Drummond’s face when she saw how young I was as a writer: “Oh!” she said, “a playwrightess!”)—to writing Indecent, where I could craft the entire spectrum of age, the phenomenon of age in theater has been very different. I am now often the oldest member of the troupe. But there is an empathy and projection that younger actors give on stage, where they offer up their bodies to those of us in the audience who must cross the room carefully to sit in the chair. When we watch theater, those of us with gray or white hair experience youth again.
Age is treasured in theater. Not so in Hollywood. But through empathy and the life force of acting, we see the reversal of age in older actors (the coup de theater that Andrea Martin performed in Pippin—My God!).
I have to say that all my life I have been smitten with older women. When I was 20, before I got kicked out of Bryn Mawr, I was asked to play a song I had written for the class musical I wrote: In Her Own Image. In one song I had written lyrics about Katherine Hepburn, one of my greatest crushes in my life. It was an out of body experience to sit at the piano in a school forum and watch Katherine Hepburn enter the room. Without makeup, in her customary black turtleneck, the 70-year-old Hepburn bounded across the room and sat beside me. I couldn’t breathe.
Of course, the other satisfaction of writing this particular class musical is that I played the role of the legendary M. Carey Thomas, founder of Bryn Mawr in her 80s and I dyed my hair white (the other satisfaction was pillaging through her love letters to women and putting it all on stage). I went around campus with that white paint in my hair for weeks. I was born to be an old woman, and I knew it then.
Reinforcing that positive image of age for women artists was an encounter with the remarkable Megan Terry, whose play In the Gloaming I particularly adored. On a campus visit in 1975 to critique my play Meg, she took me out to lunch. There, my 24-year-old self broke down at the table, weeping. “It’s just so hard for women! I don’t know if I can do this!” Megan smiled. “You just have to wait until you reach the muumuu stage.”
“Huh?”
“All the idiot men who treat you like crap now: you will reach an age when younger men run the companies. And you will sweep into the room as an older woman wearing your muumuu (Megan was wearing one and she looked great) and you will grandly sweep your arms up in the air and proclaim ‘Darlings!’ and they will love you.”
Well, not quite. The testosterone-fueled men who are my age are still running many companies. There is one great man of the theater who used to pat me on my head in Providence, and he’s a few years younger. Another director my age whom I adore told me I reminded him of his mother. Alas, we never worked together again. So that brings me to:
Small Towns and Mothers
My city kid DNA changed as I worked in Juneau, Alaska, and Ithaca, New York, in my twenties. I fell in love with landscapes where I could see wildlife, breathe fresh air, and leave my doors unlocked. Such landscapes welcome theatergoers only for brief periods of the summer when city dwellers trek to the Berkshires, or Sundance, or any of the festivals in tents and barns that dot Cape Cod. But as I worked in these landscapes, I became healthier, and my sensation of time slowed down. After a stint of self-destructive relationships, I decided to find a woman who was healthy, sane, and who would be the rock of a long-term relationship. And so I wrote a wish list. On the top of the list, I wanted to find a woman who loved her mother.
I found her. She fulfilled all the items on my wish list (life-long friends, love and respect for her ex-lovers, a sense of humor, smarter than I am, a love of nature, and a scientist/social scientist). And more. Three months into our courtship Anne Sterling took me home to meet her parents.
And that night I fell in love with my partner’s mother: a writer, a social activist embued with a staunch belief in racial, economic and social justice, and a force of nature. The night I met her, I also fell in love with my future: for in memorizing her face I had a vision of Anne twenty years from that night. And I fell in love again with our past: this woman had been an ardent theatergoer in New York, and with her husband had been a participant in the WPA projects. I sat at this 86-year-old woman’s feet and pestered her with questions: what was it like to see Lunt and Fontaine? Was she really at the opening night of The Cradle Will Rock?
And so this writer, this historian, this activist became a lode star in my life. Before it was legal for me to marry her daughter, Dorothy Sterling called herself my mother-out-law, or better yet, my mother-in-love. I watched as she faced the death of her husband, sister, life-long friends, as she lost her hearing, her eyesight, and her breath. We rigged up the oxygen, and boosted the volume on her computer. She continued to write with all the limitations and listened to the New York Times each day.
But what most won me over in this small town was to see the community rally around Dorothy: a wonderful actor came over once a week to read Shakespeare to her, speaking into a mike so she could hear him. The police would tiptoe into her bedroom when she had rolled onto her medical alert button in her sleep, check on her breathing, and leave a note for her caretaker to find.
Without our elders, how do we hold onto our history? Our culture? The perspective that Dorothy and her friends provided me as we entered the war with Iraq and eroded our own freedom under GW Bush was crucial. Dorothy told me, “I lived through McCarthy. We’re not there yet.” Dorothy lived just long enough to vote for Obama. Fortunately she did not experience Donald Trump, or the defeat of the first woman presidential candidate.
So now that I am one of the endangered species (and all of us in this country are endangered—people of color, immigrants, children, those of us who live in blue and red states) I would like to give you my wish list for the next President. It is a wish list that highlights, of course, the characteristic of empathy.
1. Someone who loves the arts. Who invites artists into her/his/their living room in the White House more often than dictators. Someone who had music education, loves history, and feels, as John F. Kennedy once said, “We are only as great as we are graceful.” Someone who loves to dance, to sing. Someone who played instruments in a band in her/his/their basement in high school
2. Someone who remembers her/his/their grandparents. Someone who has an ongoing relationship with older mentors, and soaked up the life stories of her/his/their elders. Someone curious enough to pester the grandparents for stories about their grandparents.
3. Someone who grew up with a family dog, cat, animals. Often our first experience of death is the pet funeral in the backyard. How to feel, acknowledge, express grief is an important skill learned in childhood. Someone who brings pets to the White House.
4. Someone who loves their spouse. Who still croons “their” song in stolen moments to embarrass said spouse. Someone who loves their children, because they can see their wife’s or husband’s face, and glimpse their grandparents in the reflection of their children’s faces.
Someone who loves people on the entire life span: from cradle to grave. (Of course, Hitler loved his mother, and loved the arts. She died while Adolf was young, so she never had the recognition that Mary Trump had, wondering what kind of son did she create.)
Let’s elect a President that gives credit for their success in life to the power of love, that gives service in life to pay back that power, rather than the power of revenge.
We have to decide, in this time of quarantine, to get healthy as a nation. Let’s vote for a candidate who loves their mother.
