Life Is Not a Stage Florence Henderson (13 ebook reader .txt) 📖

crashing down too. Seeing the emotional devastation on his mother, there was a part of him that shut down that spilled over into our relationship just as my reactive programming from my early years did.

Ira and I shared an unspoken compassion for each other because of what we had separately gone through. On the other side of the coin, it bred dysfunction because neither of us wanted to risk going into the scary unknown frontiers beyond our upbringing and conditioning. We were both heavily invested in a carefully constructed façade, one that proved to be more fragile than I could have imagined.

So the pill may not have changed Ira’s attitude. But it did mine. I was thirty-four years old. With this single development, I realized how trapped and subservient I had been to a set of hypocritical rules that I could no longer accept. How hard I had struggled for so many years to try to make everything okay.

You come to a point when the talking stops, when you realize that still nothing changes. You realize that the status quo is abhorrent. It exacts a price on your spirit that will attack you at your weakest link—addiction, depression, or mental breakdown, or gradually wearing out your physical body with debilitating and deadly disease.

With the pill, my life went haywire for a while. Little Miss Perfect checked out.

CHAPTER 13The “No Door Act”

As a sense of liberation began to take hold in my personal life, some boundaries with my work also began to crumble. Some doors that were locked or that I had dared not even attempt to enter, such as working more in Hollywood or doing my own nightclub act, were suddenly flung open. What lay on the other side was certainly beyond my imagination at the time. Before the 1960s would come to an end, both my career and my head would be in a much different place.

Once you’ve cracked whatever you have been repressing, you suddenly begin to understand the stranglehold guilt, fear, sadness, and anger can exercise over every minute aspect of your existence. It wasn’t as easy as simply opening the gate and putting my galloping horse out to permanent pasture. There were still many miles to go before that horse and I would more peacefully coexist. But that incessant drive and control over my life began to slowly loosen, as I gently let go of the reins.

Once the process started, it was almost impossible to stop its forward progress. For the first time, I was much more relaxed, more prone to go with the flow. Other shifts began to take place in that state. Even during my worst periods, I had always loved performing onstage before an audience, but now the enjoyment stepped up to a new level, becoming more aligned with the internal shifts that were starting to happen.

Another message came forward that it was time to stand more powerfully on my own two feet. With that realization, the field began to open up. Opportunities to do variety television shows abounded, while theater work became more sporadic. Someone recently sent me a copy of one of the old Bell Telephone Hour summer shows I did regularly during this time period as a singer and host. Talk about a trial by fire. It reminded me just how demanding those programs were. In the course of an hour, you might be doing four or five songs and changing costumes each time. You didn’t get much rehearsal time, so you had to step your artistry up a notch if you wanted to be better than just good. Nowhere else but these variety programs did you have the chance to work with and interact with so many varied artists who were at the absolute top of their craft.

One of my lasting memories from The Bell Telephone Hour was seeing the incredibly lovely Lena Horne resting backstage with her shoes off and her feet up on a chair.

“Oh, Miss Horne, do your feet hurt?” I asked her.

She looked up at me and smiled. “Oh, you’ll find out later.” She was about twenty years older, and she was right. Doing two shows a night in high heels catches up with you in the long run.

At their highest form, The Bell Telephone Hour and The U.S. Steel Hour might feature symphony orchestras, great opera divas, and ballet companies, extravaganzas that I trust few television entities would attempt to mount as an ongoing regular series today. In fact, I feel sorry for the younger performers nowadays who missed out on the opportunity to be exposed to this genre in its heyday and grow from the experience. In recent years, the only things that come remotely close are shows like Dancing with the Stars, American Idol, and Glee.

Perhaps my very finest acting job was on one of those shows. I had to do a duet with John Raitt, a period piece for which I was dressed in a period costume. At one point in the song, I had to sit down on a chair. Immediately a long and sharp straight pin pierced through my dress and found its way into the flesh of my derriere. Somehow and some way, I didn’t flinch or use any profanity when it happened. It sure helped with the high notes.

You could also get an education just being present and watching the best of the best perform up close, such as the great dancer Rudolf Nureyev in his prime. I recall how very upset he was about having to perform on the studio’s concrete floor, and rightfully so. That’s one major contributor to why so many dancers from that era developed chronic knee and hip problems.

One summer, I hosted the Bell programs out of Studio 8H at Rockefeller Plaza in New York, the future home of Saturday Night Live. It was the first time that an American television show was shot in the round with an audience completely surrounding the stage. They had to get very