I Never Wanted to be a Stage Manager

by Christina Flint Grossman, Class of 1987

Coming to Vassar from New York City, I felt I knew exactly what I wanted out of the college. I wanted to act in plays and I wanted to study Art History. I had had a high school internship at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in European Paintings, had been in high school plays, and had been exposed to some remarkable stage productions and museum exhibitions in New York. At Vassar, I chose to double major in Art History and Drama.

I thought I had my academic plan all figured out, and felt confident that I would be able to do the work and do well. Theoretically, I knew that as a Drama major I would be required to do back stage work, yet I never knew how great an impact this part of my major would have on me. In my junior year, when several of my drama classmates had gone for a semester abroad, I found those of us on campus had a fair bit of weight to pull. I took costume history and costume design, and for the first time designed costumes for a play, and enjoyed it all thoroughly.

Second semester junior year, [Senior Lecturer in Drama] Bill Miller selected me to stage manage an Avery Theater production, “The Dark at the Top of the Stairs.” At first I was overwhelmed. I was in charge of props, sounds cues, light cues, taking notes for who crossed the stage and when, etc. But by the time the show was in production, I was having the time of my life. Sitting up in the stage manager’s booth, outside [Professor Emeritus of Drama] Evert Sprinchorn’s office, I felt a sense of pride in my work like nothing I had experienced before. Who knew how fun it was to sit there in the dark with huge headphones on and call cues? Certainly I didn’t, until now.

I went on to stage manage “The Skin of our Teeth” my senior year, and also to received a senior scholarship as the stage manager of visiting play readings from New York. I saved most of the money for living expenses, but treated myself to two hard cover volumes of the plays of Eugene O’Neill.

Although I did not become a stage manager professionally, that experience was one of the most enriching I had at Vassar, and it helped shape me as an adult. I had to step outside of my comfort zone to do the job, and was happily surprised that I could not only pull it off but also enjoy it.

I have had several careers: as an actor, as an admissions and financial aid officer at Harvard, running events and fundraising for the Harvard University Art Museums, as an elementary school teacher, and most recently as a mom and step-mom. In all these roles, I have had a lot to juggle. Vassar helped prepare me to call the cues and keep the show going.

My grandmother’s 50th Reunion at Vassar in 1968

by Christiane Hyde Citron, Class of 1971

I remember being honored to address my grandmother’s 50th Reunion class at Vassar in 1968. My grandmother was Frances Hyde Zabriskie ‘18. I was apprehensive about how they would react to my talk. I was a fervent activist and talked about urban problems and the need for social change. I was immersed in the Eugene McCarthy campaign for President. I was the President of the Vassar Democratic Club. To my surprise, they didn’t seem put off by what I said. They greeted my talk with great enthusiasm and support. It was very exciting that they were so supportive. I was so proud to have my grandmother there!

Learning to Be a Feminist in the World

by Lydia Murdoch, Class of 1992

My mother left Toledo, Ohio, to attend Vassar in the early 1960s.  She remembers hearing Pete Seeger sing “We Shall Overcome” and Ravi Shankar perform on campus, being told in Chapel by President Blanding that Vassar students were becoming too promiscuous (a word that she then had to look up), and receiving meaningful support from Linda Nochlin, the art historian who would go on to publish the groundbreaking essay, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” in 1971.  I remember as a child finding letters that my mother had written home to my Granny, a brilliant and bitter high school history teacher who painstakingly corrected my mother’s grammar with red pen.  For as long as I can remember, Granny told me to go to Cornell, her Alma mater, because that is where I would find a good man.  I also remember my mother telling me about the family crisis that caused her not to return to Vassar in the fall and the riding boots she left in a trunk stored in the basement of Lathrop.  Now, as a professor, I sometimes wonder where those boots are and whether they will ever be unearthed, my own personal Vassar mastodon.  My mother had a good sense of the benefits of a Vassar education, as well as the challenges involved, which is perhaps why, looking back, she pressed me before graduation to go and personally thank the Vassar Bursar who rearranged my financial aid package to make it possible for me to return to Poughkeepsie when my plans to study abroad in Greece were cancelled in the midst of the Gulf War.  I was glad I did and surprised to learn he knew who I was and where I was from.

I first visited Vassar with my mother my senior year of high school, taking the train up from Virginia, still wearing my beloved cowboy boots.  I finished Philip Roth’s When She Was Good in Alumnae House, a novel that ends with the heroine dead and buried under the snow—perhaps not the best beginning.  I also saw La Bamba at the Juliet and distinctly remember feeling at ease walking in solitude across the quad.  Along with its elitism and wealth, Vassar struck me as a space for alternative visions, an impression no doubt quietly and steadfastly reinforced by my mother.

As for academics, I received a C- on my first British history midterm and quickly learned that I needed to work harder.  Much harder.  The professor for that class, one of my best, Donald Olsen, would routinely keep us for over an hour after the scheduled ending time with an unquestioning sense that the discussions in that classroom about mercantilism or Chartism or the way in which eighteenth-century aristocrats would let their infants play in pots of cream on the table (could I have imagined this last one?) took precedence over missed dinner dates and all else.  Inspired to do better in his class, I arranged my campus job to work in the Library, first in acquisitions where I filed typed cards in the catalog, and then in the Reserve Room, where I worked through my senior year handing out file folders to hurried students and searching the 24-hour room for stolen books.  The Library is still my favorite space on campus, and the people I came to know there were among the very first to make me feel welcome at Vassar when I returned to teach.

As a women’s college that has gone co-ed, Vassar surrounded me with models of excellence that were mine to draw on.  Sitting with Beth Darlington outside Sanders as she read “The Wasteland” on one of the first spring days, hearing Rachel Kitzinger speak Greek in melodic tones, dissecting an argument with Uma Narayan, and being introduced to the joys and challenges of women’s social history by Miriam Cohen are among my strongest memories.  Although I never took a Chemistry class, Miriam Rossi gave me a tour of her lab when my step-father, also a crystallographer, visited.  Now when in the “Introduction to Women’s Studies” I teach the section from Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929)—“Chloe liked Oliva.  They shared a laboratory together.”—this is the vision I hold.  More than anyone else, Tony Wohl, my senior thesis adviser, taught me the discipline of History as he encouraged me to develop my work on childhood and prostitution in Victorian London focused on a series of articles by the journalist W. T. Stead.  Tony never had to be told first how Stead had died on the Titanic or taken a controversial stance on the Boer War in order to see the relevance of my topic—a response that proved unusual for the time, but was certainly true to the longer traditions of Vassar’s History Department.

Unlike my mother, I never became a great or even good rider, but in Vassar she gave me the thrill that comes with an unrestrained gallop, knowing full well that you may end up on the ground or splayed across the horse’s neck, hands full of mane.  Vassar at its best taught me how to be a feminist in the world, and for this I am eternally grateful.

Remembering Noyes on her 50th Birthday

by Margaret McCurry Tigerman, Class of 1964

(Written in 2008)

In September of 1960, when I moved into my assigned double – #226 – on the second floor of Noyes, the dorm was a mere two years old…all bright and shiny, with no sprinkler pipes to mar its pristine precast concrete ceilings. As a would-be Art History major and daughter of an architect, I knew the work of Eero Saarinen and could appreciate its modernist aesthetic. Looking back as an architect myself now, I realize that compared to Saarinen’s Stiles and Morse dorms at Yale, which took their cues from the towers of the Italian hill town San Gimignano, Noyes had no traditional antecedents and there was a certain cache attached to residing in Vassar’s newest dormitory. As freshmen, we were all placed in the double rooms that faced onto the circle. The triangulated window bays transmitted vertical sound quite effectively so we were often privy to dorm gossip from above and parlor talk from below.

The rules of dormitory life have certainly changed over a half-century, but in our “simpler, gentler” time, there were no encoded locks on our doors. However, a “white angel” guarded the entry enforcing a midnight curfew. No televisions broadcast the daily soaps or blared out late night entertainment. We watched Kennedy’s inauguration, the news of the Bay of Pigs invasion, and the confrontation with Khrushchev on the family television that our Professor in Residence plugged into a parlor outlet. Bereft of male company the majority of the time, we still optimistically named the circular sunken seating in the parlor “the passion pit.” The upside of our celibate life was breakfasting in our respective robes in the in-house dining room, an especially welcome ritual on frosty winter mornings. What none of us welcomed was the institution called “scrape.” A left over from WWII when male workers were at a premium, female students were assigned KP duties in the kitchen; namely, scraping detritus off an endless number of dirty dishes as a parade of trays passed by on the conveyor belt. It was steamy work made especially onerous by the mandatory attire – hairnets, aprons and cotton socks – ensembles no one wanted to be seen in, especially when the weekends brought the opposite sex to campus.

By mid-fall of our freshman year, friendships had begun to solidify, some that have lasted fifty-plus years. But by the end of our first year, attrition had affected the comradely costumed group posed for this Halloween photograph. Barbara Reynolds Wiener ‘64 (in the beret) lost her roommate Carol Marchand Hope ‘64 (in the lamp shade), [who went west to the University of Rochester to be closer] to Cornell, the home of Rickey Hope, her high school sweetheart. I, with the bat on my forehead and arm draped over my suitemate’s shoulder, lost the brilliant Susan Strome ‘64 (or St. Rome, as she preferred to be called). Susy returned to campus for our Vassar graduation picnic with her first husband in tow and much later matriculated at Harvard. Jane Baum Rodbell ’64 (holding the pumpkin) joined our rooming group sophomore year citing freshman roommate incompatibility. Our guitar playing pre-hippy friend, Naomi Ware ‘64 brought musician Joan Baez to campus for one of her first concerts outside the Boston coffee houses where her mercurial singing career began. Some years later, standing under our maturing class tree at a distant reunion, we were saddened to hear Naomi’s name read off the necrology list.

Maine camp mates, turned roommates, Ellen May Galinksy ‘64 (left) and Karen Stein Diamond ‘64 (photographed sprawled on the lawn of the Noyes circle at the start of our sophomore year) rounded out the rooming group that remained together for the rest of our college years. Three of us reassembled in Chattanooga coincidentally on Noyes’ 50^th birthday. Ellen and I, joined by fellow dorm mate, Virginia Caspari Gerst ‘64, traveled to Tennessee for a mini-reunion with Karen.

These last photographs record us celebrating the rites of spring at the close of our junior year. For spring weekend, we staged a mock escape of knotted sheets for the benefit of arriving dates. My single room overlooking the parking lot was a perfect venue for this escapade and of a size suitable for a quick toilet papering prank instigated by my so-called friends.

On that lazy Saturday afternoon of spring weekend, while sitting in the grassy circle that encompassed the fledging tree (which today would be shading the majority of the onlookers), we watched an impromptu coed soccer game which ended abruptly with a contact lens search. That Sunday morning, we woke to find that some of our bicycles had found their way on to the top of the “mushrooms.” Blame for this “desecration of the canopies” appeared to be attributed to students from Wesleyan and their alleged ring leader, roommate Barbara’s future husband, Alan.

Shortly after that spring weekend, our time in Noyes came to an end. Sometimes at class reunions, I stroll through our dorm on a summer’s day and remember a time when it and we were young.

On Noyes’ special April Saturday in 2008, some of us toasted a dorm that, for three of its fifty years, was our home.

Vassar in the 1940s

by Anne MacKay, Class of 1948-1949

Vassar 1945-1949. All women. What a wonderful four years! We were in love with the beautiful campus, and the professors were excellent and exciting – particularly Art and Anthropology for me. I remember great speakers and performers: John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Maya Deren, Joseph Campbell, George Gamow, Wanda Landowska. I was interested in writing but had the bad luck to have a teacher who didn’t seem to like women very much, and said openly there were no great women poets.

I was part of a very special joined class, ’48-’49. We entered together [for the 1945-46 school year], then ’48 went out in three years – the last class to accelerate. We sang all the time, after dinner, in the halls and at events, and still create wonderful reunion shows. Our 50th Reunion show, “The Hallelujah Chorus Line,” was set at the Pearly Gates for our 100th reunion. It was a very funny, full musical, performed in the Chapel for all reunion classes that day. A DVD is in the Library’s Special Collections. We were great friends and we’re still learning from each other at age 82.

We wore sweaters, cut-off jeans and men’s shirts – but skirts were obligatory for dinner.

I lived in Raymond, which was a lovely, diverse house. We laughed at the Gold Bobby Pin set (socialites) who lived in Josselyn. We had to deal with many rules about curfew, boys and alcohol (no one even knew about drugs.) It was the end of World War II, so we all worked, swept corridors, cleaned bathrooms, waited on tables and sat on [at the] message center – no phones in those days! It was important to do and also a way to meet people. We had no TV, no computers (just typewriters), no soda machines, no refrigerators or stoves – but we survived happily. We bicycled to the “Cider Mill” and hiked up to the apple orchard – where you could see the whole campus laid out below.

We loved to go up to the Pub for food and beer, and listen to the Weavers , Pete Seeger’s group that had just made the national charts. The serious drinkers went to the Dutch a few streets away. We ate in our dorms but Vassar food in wartime was quite poor, except on Sundays. I had a good laugh when I learned later about the Great Food Rebellion – just before they took Student’s Building away from us to create ACDC – when Cushing put all the evening’s “mystery meat,” in envelopes and mailed them off to the Director of Halls.

There was an unspoken expectation from the Vassar faculty that Vassar women would make a difference in our world, and we learned wonderful stories of Vassar women who had made important contributions in many areas. As we got older we also learned about our own classmates who had gone forth and helped transform their communities, or the world.

At home, it was clearly understood that young women were to marry as soon as possible, have children, and keep their husbands happy. If you worked it would be just a temporary job until you found the right man. So a lot of time was spent visiting men’s colleges, looking for this ideal man to please you and your parents. By the 1950s, more than a few of our class were miserable, isolated in the suburbs with children – and husbands who, paying for everything, felt they ‘owned’ them. This would set the stage for the Women’s Movement and the ‘60s revolutions: Sexual, Black and Gay. The only escape in the 1940s was graduate school, or being a ‘career woman’ (starting, of course, as a secretary).

Since transportation was limited, we tended to stay on campus on weekends. Student’s Building was ours and had a great stage so we did many plays. I learned more there and had much more fun than in the Drama Department, my major. These years became the era of the Great Musicals – full shows with terrific original scripts and songs – now archived in the Music Department and Special Collections of the Vassar College Library. I directed our Soph Party, a musical that was a feminist’s dream: the heroine loved the men presented to her, then said, ‘Thanks, but I want to wait and be a scientist first!’

The student government (I was president ’48-‘49) was a farce. Students had no power at all, but I think in those days we really didn’t care. The college was run by the President (Sarah Gibson Blanding), the Warden (now called Dean of Students), and the Financial Officer. There were many extracurricular activities, including religion, and politics (we had conservatives and some wonderful ‘Lefties’ on campus (pre-McCarthy)). We had two newspapers, the Miscellany News and the Chronicle – but the Misc was the smartest and most liberal. We had some excellent athletes who, sadly, were not valued either by us or by the college – later I learned they even had to pay their own way to events.

If you realized you loved women you lived in deep silence. ‘Gay’ hadn’t been invented then, I knew no one else like me, and there was no one to talk to. See my book, Wolf Girls at Vassar: Lesbian and Gay Experiences 1930-1990.

We had octet singing groups. The Night Owls were the best and always in demand to sing at men’s colleges. I remember one evening, as a freshman, I opened the door of the theater in Student’s Building. It was a cavernous room, and dark. There was one light on stage and the Night Owls were rehearsing. A magical moment with such beautiful women’s voices and harmonies!

I remember the night after graduation, sitting out under the great English Plane tree between the Library and Main, sad that it was all over. I’ve had a great life since and done most of the things I wanted to do, but Vassar will always be a special place and time.