Allan Appel Photo
Gladys Pine (right) demonstrates steps of the “shag” 1940s swing dance with Corey Morrison.
Gladys Pine’s friends gave her a penny to put in her shoe for good luck when she married in the World War Two Bronx. Around the same time, Bernice Friedman was sitting on her stoop praying to God to let the handsome man who had just moved into her building say hello to her. He did, and became her husband of 25 years.
These were some of the revelations that emerged in a rehearsal of The Ups and Downs of Life: Rising to the Occasion, a staged performance of memories written by Friedman, Pine, and a half-dozen other residents of the Tower One/Tower East retirement complex off Church Street South.
Some of the women, like Ruth Landau Levey Cohen (pictured), played Queen Esther or Vashti in the Purim plays of their girlhood. Some have done a little community theater. Basically, all the performers are non-professional thespians. They are participating in the second year of a program that brought the women to see all the plays in the Long Wharf’s recent season. After they saw the plays, Long Wharf Education Program Manager Corey Morrison — Gladys Pine’s partner in the 1940s swing “shag” dance pictured at the top of the story — helped them write responses to the plays that derived from their own emotional lives.
The woven-together texts of memories and words of wisdom will be presented at the Long Wharf Mainstage this Sunday at 5 p.m. The performance is free and open to the public.
Click on the play arrow for a snippet of the play that begins with Pine’s story and ends with Bernice Friedman’s story. Of the man Friedman describes, her husband Aaron, she added, “I loved him from my toes. Oh, how I loved him, it would make your hair stand up. We used to sign cards, ‘All my love, my life.’”
That didn’t keep her from marrying two more times after Aaron died. The second marriage lasted seven a half years. The third also lasted 25 years. “I was very nervous when it came to 25 [again],” said Friedman, a woman still full of zest for life.
These latter Friedman husbands did not get into the collaborative script, which was organized by Morrison around the frame of the women waiting for an elevator. The theme was chosen because during the year Tower One indeed debuted its new elevator. Its long anticipated arrival helped to remedy more than one instance of old elevators stalled and riders passing the time telling stories. (Read that elevator story here.)
The sections of texts in the show will be punctuated by the “ding” of the imaginary elevator moving to the next floor, as well as by quotations from notable authors who have also had ups and downs, including Albert Einstein, Judy Garland, and Robert Frost.
It’s not likely Pine and the other actors will be doing the shag on Sunday, although their star turns will be preceded by numbers performed by the dance and choral groups from the talented crews at Tower One/Tower East.
When the curtain rises on Sunday, all the women will be standing in an imagined waiting area for an elevator. That elevator will be constructed of light on the Long Wharf stage, a long rectangular vertical, said Morrison.
In addition to those mentioned, other members of the Tower One/Tower East Company are Bertha Kahn, Terry Berger, Marjorie Garrison, Sylvia Rifkin, and Sylvia Rosenthal.
