BEGINNING

"I want to tell you about Sophie Tucker. I want to tell you because she asked me to and she isn't the kind of person you say no to.

Sophie came to me, maybe in a dream, maybe a fantasy or maybe she just came to me, you decide, and she offered me a bargain. 'Hey kid, you tell people about me, remind them of who I was and in return I'll remind you of who you are.'

Discovering that Sophie died of lung cancer in 1966 and wondering what she could possibly mean, I thought back to the little I knew about her. I remembered her from old Ed Sullivan shows in the early nineteen-fifties. She was an old fat woman, kind of like my grandmother with huge breasts, and a huger voice. Or at least the remains of a huge voice. She sang old fashioned songs, in twinkling dresses with high feathered head gear, and whenever she was on, there was an excitement in the house. "Hey, Sophie Tucker's on TV tonight, lets make sure we're home so we can see her!"

There was nothing particularly Jewish about her that I could see except that every now and then a Yiddish word that I didn't understand found it's way into a song, but to my parents, she represented all the good that America had done for the Jews and all the good that the Jews had done for America.

When Sophie 'came to me' my instructions were to get to know her and in the process to learn why she had come. 'I don't mean imitate me, kid' she said, 'just get to know me. Learn through me. Pick up where I left off.' "

As it says in Torah, "Do not delay to offer the fullness of your harvest and the outflow of your presses.  Well if that's what Torah says, I have a lot of catching up to do."

And so begins Some of These Days: My Journey thru Chutzpuh, Passion and Pastries, my tribute to the woman, a the entertainer, the role model and a the star of burlesque, vaudeville, night clubs, theater, film and a television for more than fifty years.

BACK STORY

So what did she mean, remind me of who I am? Well she got me out here didn't she? I've listened to her songs, read her books, imagined her life over and over and over. An I'm remembering the girl in me who used to sing at milk time in the fourth grade. Every day, skipping down the aisle to sing, "I'm as corny as Kansas in August....I'm as normal as blueberry pie."

And I had my time on the stage, I played some delicious roles, I worked with some spectacular people and learned about how to live my life through the roles I played, and how to open my heart to the songs I sang, and how to love the process, the artistic process, so much that I walked away from the stage to enter what I've always thought of as a human laboratory otherwise known as an acting class. In this laboratory we can experiment with life in as many scenarios as we have time for. I learn to be free of inhibitions by teaching others to be free of inhibitions. I learn to base my work on joy as I teach others to do the same. And as I am given more and more opportunities to see what life is like when "the play is the thing", when we're all in service to the play or the process of creating the play, and there is no hiding, no separations, we are all in it together, I am given tiny bursts of insight as to what God might be.

So, since the mid seventies with only a few short detours, I have stayed in the classroom, learning the process, trusting myself and grateful for the opportunity to do do. But always there is this nagging voice "I thought you were an actress!" And my student's saying, “You have to do it too" And I think back to a time when my marriage had broken up, there was a fire in my apartment, I was mugged on the street and I gained quite a bit of weight. And one day as my unemployment was about to run out from my last acting job a good long six months ago, I opened the New York Yellow Pages to find something or other and the pages fell open to a listing for acting schools. As I had always sworn that I would never wait table, I decided to make up a resume and apply for a job at one of the acting schools truly believing that the chances were miniscule that anyone would even respond.

So here I am picking up the mail on one hot day in early July, 1976, the day in which my unemployment runs out. I'm standing in my apartment, the smell of smoke so full in my nose that I hardly notice it, I look down at the envelopes I see one from The American Academy of Dramatic Arts. They want to talk, I go the next day and start work the following Monday. It is a six week summer term but at the end of it I am working full time, year round for eleven years.

I have no teaching courses to my credit, only my own experiences in acting classes but God, I love it. And now I begin to learn. Every student with every issue is my teacher. Every challenge is my challenge. I am becoming a good teacher, I can tell because my students works grows before my eyes. But it is true, we do teach what we need to learn. So I keep teaching and I keep learning and after the Academy I work in another school and then open one myself and never look back.

And in the mean time, by the force of another so called accident, in 1992 I find myself walking back into a Judaism I had kept out of my life for many many years. Now, somehow, my creative work is feeding my explorations of Judaism and my studies of Judaism are bringing both grounding and flight to my teaching,

The two passions merge. I understand the teachings of the Rabbis by the human behavior I observe and partake in in my classes and I see that the essence of Judaism as I understand it, the ability to connect to others from the inside of our hearts through the performance of actions or mitzvahs is the very thing that will bring a scene to life. To do is what an actor learns. The feelings come as a result of the doing. To light the candles every Friday night is to await the experience that emerges anew each time.

Then in April 2005, I lose the space where I had been teaching my classes for the last ten years. It was my ideal space. I had built my business there I am tricked out of it and it feels like the end of everything. But one cannot spend as much time in spiritual dialogue as I do and pretend that closings are not also openings as well. So, OK God, what've you got for me? I wait to see what the opening will be. And I wait. Meanwhile, I take the actions I have to take in order to earn a living.

In August 2005 I go to a local theater to see a one woman show about Bessie Smith, the great classic blues singer of the 1920's. I am enjoying the show but only become fully engaged when the woman playing Bessie lets out a note that is so strong, so full, so complete in intention that I feel as if the rest of the audience and I had been sitting, as separate beads, big wooden beads in our separate chairs, until we hear that note, that voice. It embodies all of who Bessie was and all of who the actress is and all of who we are. In that moment the separate beads form a necklace, no longer wooden but bright glowing jewels, a rainbow of color. When I can think again, my thought is "Wow, who in my traditions could I do that would allow me to sing like that?" Immediately the answer comes. Sophie Tucker.

That's the night she spoke to me.

Now I am learning who I am all over again and the mirror that I look into in order to see the progress is Sophie. Sophie Tucker.
 

In memory of my parents Eleisa and Max Fox