I left Little Rock, Arkansas, bound for the East Coast with two suitcases, $200 and a one-way ticket to Hartford, Connecticut in hot pursuit of an acting career.
I wanted what Carlos Castaneda called “the company of my own kind.” I wanted to hang out and talk shop with other actors, where the craft of acting was ordinary as a cup of coffee.
When I was 20-something and dreaming of my future, I wrote in a song lyric: “I don’t know where I’ll go from here, and I don’t know what I’ll see, but the road is long, and the road is bright, and the road is calling me… When I was five, I saw the road, and even then I knew I’d follow the charm of that old road, and follow the sorrow, too.”
I spent four years in Arkansas, teaching, studying, performing, directing, finding my music in the Rackensack, the Arkansas Folk Society. And always, I felt the pull of the road, the path to the future. Years later, in New York, the great acting teacher Michael Howard, said to me, “Darling, actors love danger.”
In September of 1973, I made the leap. Not to New York but to Boston, because I listened to a good friend who had lived in both cities.
“In Boston,” he said, “you can explore your talent without feeling like a failure if you decide you don’t want a thing. In New York, if you don’t know what you want, the city will kill you.”
I knew he had my best interest in his heart. So, I made my way to Boston via Hartford, Connecticut, where a friend from my undergraduate days met me and drove me to Boston, after we spent the weekend in rural Massachusetts, catching up.
Patricia introduced me to a friend of hers, a theatrical carpenter whose last show in New York City was “Oh! Calcutta.”
“City’s crazy,” he said. “People full o’ shit,” Yet another alert about life in New York. I was raised in Iowa in a town of 350. Little Rock, Arkansas in the 1970's was the biggest city I’d ever lived in. At this point, I had not even seenBoston, and already, I was wary of New York.
Sunday afternoon, Patricia drove me to Boston and we toured Back Bay. She told me I should call Massachusetts Avenue and Commonwealth Avenue “Mass. Ave.” and “Comm. Ave.” to avoid having my pocket picked. Maybe it wasn’t New York, but it was like New York.
She dropped me off at the YWCA in Central Square, Cambridge, where I would live till spring. I called her the next week and we talked. But I never saw her again. For all practical purposes, I was alone in Boston.
Monday, I went to a temporary employment agency, The Skill Bureau, and registered for work. I found a newsstand on Mass. Ave. in Cambridge, bought a copy of The Boston Phoenix and found auditions.
That very week, I went to work as an office temp, and auditioned for The National Theater for Children. I got the part of the Witch in “The Mirror Man” by British playwright Brian Way. No money. But I was an actor with a part!
I spent the winter temping, rehearsing and playing the Witch in elementary schools, often waiting in line for hours at the gas station because it was the winter of the fuel shortage. Weekends, we performed at the cabaret in The Charles Theatre. Still, no money. Then, I was cast in the summer season for the Cape Ann Playhouse, where I got what my director called “plum roles”: Stella in “A Streetcar Named Desire” and Bunny in “The House of Blue Leaves.” But the salary was not plum. Barely subsistence, in fact.
In August, when I got off the bus in Porter Square, Cambridge where I shared an apartment. I had $15 between me and the end of the world. And no job on the horizon. Once it started, I expected paid acting work to continue. It did not. To pay rent, I resumed office work at an ad agency in Government Center. I was grateful for work and good company.
But I wasn’t about to give up on my acting career. I got cast in a video workshop production at WGBH, eventually joined the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, AFTRA, and found an agent. I narrated an episode of NOVA, the PBS prime time science series produced by WGBH Boston. The episode about B.F. Skinner. To this day, I don’t know if mine was the one they used. But that’s life in the world of voice-overs and film. The cutting room floor. But I got the money. I got the credit.
Eventually, I moved in with two brothers I met through a mutual friend, Michael and Steven Rudy. We lived on Columbia Street in Cambridge, between the slums and MIT, where Steven worked on his doctorate at Yale and assisted Slavic poet and scholar Roman Jacobsen.
The three of us loved to entertain, and one night after I moved in, we threw a party. In the midst of the three of us reciting Yeats poetry, one of their friends asked me the inevitable question, “What are you plans?”
In Boston, everyone is either a student or a rising professional, and everyone has plans. I heard myself say: “I’m going to work with Maxine Klein, get my picture on the front page of the Boston Phoenix, and then move to New York!”
My own words stopped me cold. I had never met Maxine Klein, a popular director in Boston at the time, who had a New York resume. And back then, the Boston Phoenix was the Village Voice of Boston.
Still, just weeks of uttering those words, I was cast in “Fanshen,” a play based on the book by William Hinton about the Communist Revolution in China. It was directed by Maxine Klein. And the week before we opened at the People’s Theater in Inman Square, a photo of four of us cast members, including yours truly, appeared on the front page of the arts pullout of the Boston Phoenix!
I knew then New York was the next stop. Another leap into the unknown. Despite my successes in Boston, I was terrified. Still, three months later, I made the move.
On a Saturday morning in September 1977, my friend Sandy helped me load mattress, dishes, cat carrier with two cats, and suitcases into her station wagon. We drove from Boston to Manhattan, to the 4th floor walkup in a brownstone on the Upper West Side I had rented weeks earlier.
Another friend from the office, Cathy Winters, moved with me. Her boyfriend drove her and her belongings. We met at 310 West 82nd Street and put together a relay to get everything moved up four flights of stairs. Four hours later, it was done.
The next day, I got Bella Abzug’s autograph in front of Zabar’s, went in and bought a garlic press, and pronounced myself a citizen of the Upper West Side.
I lived in that 4th floor walkup for 22 years, fell deeply in love with Manhattan, with its grand and gritty lifestyle, its parks and public spaces, the lions at the public library on 42nd and Fifth Avenue, the Museum of Modern Art and Rousseau’s “Sleeping Gypsy,” the block party the night before the Thanksgiving Day Parade, free buses and subways on New Year’s Day, and with its tough yet tender exterior, with actors everywhere, with Chinese takeout, and restaurants I couldn’t afford, with Broadway and Off Broadway, with the Village, SOHO and Tribeca, and with the fierce and loyal friends I found there and have kept to this day.
I left only after a knee injury ruled out four flights of stairs, and two years after that, came back to Iowa and my parents, my brothers and sister.
It may well be true, as a dear friend of mine once said, “Kay Scott, you have the guts of a burglar!” But it seems to me that great risk, that terrifying leap to the unknown, is its own reward. But only if we take it.
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Ode is a storytelling series where community members tell true stories on stage to promote positive impact through empathy. It’s produced by Siouxland Public Media.
The next show is 7 p.m. Friday, April 6 at The Marquee, 1225 Fourth St. The theme is “Just Keep Going,” inspired by this year’s One Book One Siouxland selection, “Hidden Figures.”
Tickets are $10 in advance; $15 day of show.
