Black and White Drama Masks

These may be some of my oldest earrings, dead to me now not because one is missing or they are broken, but because I can’t imagine putting them on. They are so over-sized and so set in that time in my life that began when I was nine years old and took my first acting class, and when I tried out for Children’s Theater productions and didn’t get cast as Dorothy and had to sing a solo in the chorus. They were what I might have worn when I stopped eating and wore black turtle necks and a girdle even when I weighed 74 pounds and hung out with the other drama kids and was the president of the Thespian Society.

I started off as a drama major at Berkeley, but soon dropped back and changed from wanting to act to wanting to be a critic, which I did for more than 20 years no matter what else was happening. There was the life I lived nursing babies or working on abortion rights, and then the life at night when I sat in the fourth row center and got up at 3 a.m. to write what I had seen.

I can’t imagine wearing these now, because no one here in Georgia would have a clue.


Digital Photgraph by Doug Greenberg