"Shall I get you another book, Mother, so you can read us another story?", I said, trying not to react to my mother's dazed and uncertain look. It was all Mrs. Neeson's fault.

Here we were on the stage in St. Patrick's vast auditorium, my mother, my little sister, Henry Grady, and me. It was a very sad Christmas story. The ladies of the St. Pat's Christ Child Society had written this play about a poor widowed woman and her three children, too poor to have heat in their house and food on their table for Christmas dinner. The idea was that just as the mother finished reading the story of the manger in Bethlehem to her children, there would be a knock on the door, and a lady from the Christ Child Society would be there. That would be Mrs. Neeson, come to save the family from a bleak and forlorn Christmas. Unfortunately, the knock on the door did not come at the appropriate moment, and my poor mother looked panicky. So, at age ten I popped up with my first ad lib, "Shall I get you another book, Mother, so you can read us another story?"

Taking my time getting a book off the shelf, I started to further fill the silence with some prattle about how noisy the wind was outside our house, but luckily, Mary Neeson finally banged on the door, and the show went on. I remember how proud my entire family was of my performance...and how I basked in the praise!

The next time I delivered an ad lib, it was not nearly as successful, although it did get a lot of laughs. Franklin Junior High School in Long Beach offered a class in Speech, which I think may have been optional, but at any rate I signed up for it. Our teacher, Miss Snell, was very fond of improvisation as a technique for developing poise in speaking. "Now, class, pay attention, please! Today I want you to work on how to do introductions and how to use small talk when you are with other people. So we will divide up into small groups and take turns on stage."

I got to take the part of the hostess when it was our group's turn, and things went along pretty well for a while. I was a lady seated in her living room when the knock on the door came and a friend dropped in for a visit. Soon another knock came announcing two more visitors. (Strange how knocks on doors seem to be a repeating phenomenon in my life!) After I had introduced the newcomers to my first caller, my mind was casting about desperately for things to say to get the conversational ball rolling, and so I blurted out, in my best west Texas drawl, "Would y'all lak some tea?".

The class exploded in laughter, including Miss Snell, bless her, and you can be sure that I never forgot how embarrassed I was. Of course, that didn't stop me from pursuing my acting ambitions, and I can remember a graduation play and several radio plays that I wrote, acted in and directed in high school.

My generation was in love with the movies. Mother and I used to walk downtown on Saturday morning, visit the public library to exchange one armload of books for another, then go to lunch at Woolworth's while we decided which double feature to see that day. We would emerge late in the afternoon, bleary-eyed and happy after spending three or four hours in a world where reality was just beginning to creep in as wartime themes pulled at our emotions. I can remember rising with tears streaming down my cheeks for the singing of the national anthem, while the curtains closed on a picture of the stars and stripes. This was just after watching a very sad film. I think it was "Foreign Correspondent" with Joel McCrea and, I think, Laraine Day. Of course, the house management, as was the habit in those wartime days, turned the houselights up while everyone blew into their shredded kleenexes before standing up to sing,

A few years later, after high school, I took acting lessons at the Long Beach Community Playhouse, from a Mrs. Day. I learned that Laraine Day had been born Laraine something-else, and had adopted the name Day as a tribute to her teacher, the same one that I now studied under. The Playhouse, at that time, was housed in an old yellow railroad station building that had been abandoned by the railroad.

In later years I joined amateur theater groups in Placervile and Auburn, and even participated in a couple of productions in Roseville and Sacramento. Do I ever miss the rehearsals and the lights and the costumes? Only rarely. And then, mostly what I miss is the friendship and spirit.