Chance = Change

Darling Marcia Lewis - one of my first friends in the profession, a truly gentle heart connected to a deeply gifted soul - passed away yesterday at the age if 72.  She'd had cancer about 20 years ago, was nursed back to health by her Mom, and she went on to have her best Broadway triumphs, and a loving marriage...  but the damned thing finally came back for a final visit, spread, as it will, and finally laid this wonderful woman low.....i am sad about Marcia's passing. She was good to me.

Way back before I had my Equity card, i was cast as "Maude Dunlop" in THE MUSIC MAN - starring some quiz show host ...Peter Marshall, that was it!- with "Marion" being played by a former Miss America,etc..one of those great big summer stock tours, before air conditioning, so that our false eyelashes fell off from the perspiration...but that was part of the fun - and Marcia played "Eulalie McKecknie Shinn"...i was one of her "One Grecian urn" ladies...the Pick-a-Little gang, y'know.  That summer earned me my card, and a good new friend in Marcia.

We did that small summer stock tour, shared a house somewhere up in Massachusetts - Cohassett, I think - and boiled lots of lobsters for dinner (they were sold across the street from our guest house)...now that I think of it, she taught me how to boil my first lobster, and it may be that I have never boiled another since then...but Marcia was a good old Massachusetts girl and lobsters didn't scare her the way they did me...she was my lobster coach!  Then , we'd go do performances in- the- round at the local theatre and share a bottle of cold summer wine after the show, back at our house. She was married at the time to agent Dick Woody.

So, of course, she introduced me to my first NYC agent: her husband.

We stayed friends forever after that. And my then husband Paul loved her as much as I did. We went to see her cabaret shows, followed her work, had many city dinners with her...she was warm, loving, kind...even when going through hard times, like her divorce from Dick, her later first cancer scare,etc. tough times in LA....somehow, we always kept in touch and found each other.

THEN: our next show together - we've really only done two, I think - was RAGS on Broadway (though mostly in Boston at the Shubert there), and i understudied Marcia...the only Broadway understudy gig I ever accepted, since I had a small part in the show anyway...but it was an honor to understudy Marcia. Only then did I learn how easy she made it all look: the one time I had to stand in for her at a rehearsal, I felt 1/3 as talented as she, even though I was twice her height...she was the one with the astonishing trumpet voice, and I could only dream of singing as well....and there was that ineluctable, indefinable sweetness she projected at the same time that she was being terrifically acerbic and funny...Marcia was a swell combination of so many gentle/strong qualities at the same time....she was a small surprise package with talent of a giant. And the gentleness of one too.

When she finally settled into her one and only long Broadway run in CHICAGO, i expressed admiration of the way she decorated her dressing room, and she told me she was so grateful to be in a long run, she was going to milk it to the hilt: her dressing room became her 2nd home, and she made it lacy and pretty and deeply Victorian-comfortable...a real old fashioned leading lady dressing room, in which she could graciously entertain pals after the show, pour wine,etc..it was fun to go visit her there...she was so happy. AND THEN: she met this man, who became of fan of hers, and saw her in that show 15 times! or more! and Marcia began showing up at commercial auditions all dressed up and fashionable and extremely womanly and all made-up,etc...i think this mature and lasting love had begun to transform her, and when she married, she expressed such relief and a desire to sleep for a year!  Marcia worked hard all her life, and if anyone deserved a long winter's nap, it was that dear woman. In the arms of man who adored her.

And now she's gone, and I cannot tell her how much i have missed her.

But, as I don't believe a spirit like Marcia Lewis' ever truly dies, i know she's watching us all from somewhere up there, sitting next to Alice White and sharing a bottle or two, as they talk about the next auditions for some heavenly show or other...well, whoever is directing? Lucky them: because two extraordinary character women are "at liberty" and are no doubt ready to audition!  Cast them both, and they will blow your heavenly roof off!

Marcia - love to you, and my sincere applause of appreciation, wherever you may be!

Labels: Adventures with Friends