Neighborhood Playhouse

So, I spent my teenage years going to the Neighborhood Playhouse junior program for theater. Neighborhood Playhouse is legendary for being a top notch school for acting. We also studied dance and singing.

I went every Saturday, with a couple of friends Lynn and Elyse. Elyse turned on Lynn and ditched her in a really horrific way. I wrote about this in a previous blog called Ditched by A Golden Girl.  But during this time we were all friends. 

It was great instruction however there was one teacher that stood out – Irma Jurist.  She was ostensibly our singing teacher.  We didn’t really learn about the technique of singing but I learned more about performance and acting from her then from all of my many many acting teachers there after.  We would sing a song and improv it into a scene with another person.  We learned about creating a moment and being present.

Irma was brilliant and very out there.  She would smoke during the sessions, strike a match and let the match burn down to her fingertips before lighting her cigarette.  It was attention grabbing.  

Some of the other girls in the program were very talented and some were to the manor born, there to get poise and grace.  One girl Loraine had a golden voice.  She sang “Soon It’s Going to Rain” so frequently that I called her “Soon It’s Going to Loraine, " Years later after university, I ran into her as I worked at a Broadway theater and she was in the chorus of the show. She complimented me, saying I was one person who had talent in the program.  

We got out of theater school just in time to second act Broadway shows. We snuck into as many as we could. Afterward we’d make our way to the stage door and charm the doorman into letting us backstage. We were cute young girls and times were simpler. They let us in. We’d knock on the door of the stars of the shows and gush how much we loved them.  We became friendly with them, and the whole cast.  In retrospect it seems rather “All About Eve” but I certainly wasn’t that conniving though Elyse had the tendency.

I once brought my very conservative, basketball playing brother with me on the Saturday excursion.  Irma Jurist walked around my brother several times and said, “Ah yes, I see the resemblance in the nostrils.”  I took him to the dressing room of the biggest star of the biggest Broadway show that year.  He stood in the corner awkwardly not knowing what to do, as I joked and laughed away.  

I remember Irma Jurist saying that crazy people were constantly receiving a massive amount of information, they just didn’t know how to filter it. I believe she was right. She knew how to impart information, though I am not so sure her filter always worked. I saw Irma Jurist on the Upper West Side when I was in my early twenties.  She was feeding the pigeons.  I didn’t go up to talk to her, I don’t know why.  I wish I had.