Conversation – 36

They had to wrap her in blankets backstage every single night to stop her body from shaking. Gloria Foster was twenty-nine years old in 1963, performing in an Off-Broadway play called In White America, and her final scene as a thirteen-year-old Black girl walking into a Little Rock school left her trembling so hard the cast had to cover her like a child until she came back.
She won her first Obie for that role. Sit with what acting cost that woman.
They had to wrap her in blankets backstage every single night to bring her body back to itself. After the Little Rock scene, the trembling would start somewhere deep in her shoulders, and the only thing that quieted it was being covered, head to foot, in heavy fabric until the shaking stopped.
The year was 1963. Her name was Gloria Foster.
She was twenty-nine years old and had just moved to New York from the Midwest. The play was called In White America, and across two and a half hours she stepped into twenty-seven different characters, drawn from court records and slave narratives and newspaper clippings stretching across three centuries.
She was a woman whose husband had been killed by a mob. She was Sojourner Truth, and she was a mother burying a child.
And every night, in the final scene, she became a thirteen-year-old Black girl walking up the steps of a Little Rock school after the Supreme Court had said she could. The mob of white onlookers met her at the door, calling for her life, faces twisted with hate.
The script took the words from documented testimony, real children who had really walked those steps in 1957, and Gloria gave them her body. She let the fear of a thirteen-year-old enter her shoulders and her chest and her hands.
By the end of the scene, she was thirteen. By the time the curtain fell, she could not stop shaking.
Gloria did not act the part. The playwright Martin Duberman would say later that she embodied it, that her body would not let go of what it had just held.
The tears down her face were real. The trembling was real.
The blankets were real.
The audience could not bear another scene after that one. Duberman and the director tried adding something else after Little Rock during rehearsals, but nothing worked.
The room was already broken open. So Little Rock became the closing scene, and Gloria became the actress who could carry that weight on her shoulders.
She won her first Obie Award. Life Magazine wrote her up across two pages.
The New York Times’ chief drama critic, Howard Taubman, said someone should write a play for her. People did.
Joseph Papp built productions around her. In 1965, she became the first Black woman ever to play Medea in New York City, a role that white women had owned for centuries.
She played Mother Courage. She played Mary Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey Into Night.
She played Madame Ranevskaya in Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard, and Clytemnestra in Agamemnon, parts that Black actresses, in 1965, in 1970, in 1975, were not supposed to be able to play.
She was, as critics put it then, majestic, full-voiced, statuesque, stunning.
She did not chase Hollywood. She did not chase fame.
She told an interviewer once that young performers were always thinking in terms of stepping stones, but she had never thought that way. The only thing she ever thought about, she said, was the next more difficult role.
Behind the work was a life very few people in those theaters knew about. She had been born in Chicago in 1933 and never knew her father.
Her mother had been hospitalized for mental illness when Gloria was small. After that, she was raised by her maternal grandparents on a farm.
Her grandmother was Elinor Sudds. Her grandfather was Clyde.
They gave her quiet, and a roof, and a place to grow into herself. That was what she carried into every classroom and every audition for the rest of her life.
At the Goodman School of Drama in Chicago, she was one of the few Black students in her class. Her teacher, Bella Itkin, refused to limit what she could play.
Itkin cast her in classical roles, the kind reserved for white actresses, and watched what happened. What happened was that a working-class girl from the South Side could speak Shakespeare like she had been born to it.
By the time she walked onto a New York stage, she was already the most prepared person in the room.
She married the actor Clarence Williams III in 1967, and they divorced in 1984. She did not remarry.
Her closest friend was Cicely Tyson, her sorority sister from Delta Sigma Theta. The two of them did not see each other often.
But they would get on the telephone, and three hours would pass like nothing. Cicely would describe those calls as the most honest conversations she had with anyone.
In 1995, Gloria came back to Broadway to play Sadie Delany, the one-hundred-and-three-year-old Black woman in Having Our Say. Her co-star was an actress named Mary Alice.
The two of them shared a stage every night at the Booth Theatre, neither of them knowing that one day Mary Alice would have to step into Gloria’s body of work, into a role written for Gloria and lit for Gloria, because Gloria would be gone.
There is a cruel detail from those years that very few people know. The actor Ruben Santiago-Hudson had begun trying to bring a revival of A Raisin in the Sun back to Broadway with Gloria as the lead, alongside himself and a young actress named Viola Davis.
He had raised $1.2 million in backing. He walked into the offices of the men who owned New York’s theaters, the same offices where decisions about which Black plays got made and which did not, and he was told no.
They said the play was not really that good. They said Gloria Foster was “too articulate.”
Three Obies. Thirty years of Shakespeare and Chekhov.
The first Black Medea in New York. Too articulate.
Santiago-Hudson would tell that story years later at her memorial, with his voice steady and his face not. He had not been able to get her on a Broadway stage in a play that was written for women like her, in a country that was still finding language for what she was.
In 1999, a film called The Matrix opened, and an entire generation of Black children met Gloria Foster for the first time in a kitchen, holding a wooden spoon, baking cookies, smoking a cigarette, telling a young man named Neo what he needed to hear and not what he wanted to hear. She played The Oracle.
The role landed the way her stage work had always landed. Whatever she touched, she filled.
By the time she came back to film The Matrix Reloaded in early 2001, her body was already failing her. She had lived with diabetes for years, and in the way diabetes works in a body that has been carrying weight for decades, it was beginning to take pieces of her quietly.
She finished most of her scenes for the second film. She did not film any for the third.
On September 29, 2001, alone in her Manhattan apartment, Gloria Foster died. The world had been reeling for eighteen days from the towers coming down, and the news of her death moved through the theater community more slowly than it should have.
Her ex-husband Clarence Williams III, the one she had divorced in 1984 and stayed friends with, was the one who told the world. He made the calls.
He gave the statement to the papers.
Cicely Tyson would say afterward that she had been planning to call Gloria a couple of days before she died. The thought had come to her clearly, the way thoughts about a friend come, and she had set it aside for later.
Something pulled her attention away. She forgot.
The phone call did not happen. Two days later, Gloria was gone.
That is the kind of grief that does not have a name. The call you meant to make.
The voice you assumed would still be there.
A memorial was held on October 15, 2001, at LuEsther Hall at the Public Theater. A small photograph of Gloria, tied to a yellow rose, sat on every seat in the auditorium.
Ruby Dee spoke. Cicely Tyson spoke.
Mary Alice spoke. Geoffrey Holder rose to his feet and called the entire room up with him for a standing ovation.
The memorial closed with a recording. It was the audio of her Little Rock scene from In White America, captured in 1963, the same scene that had broken audiences and required blankets to bring her body back to itself.
Her voice rang through that auditorium thirty-eight years after the first time she had performed it. The trembling was still in it.
When the third Matrix film came out in 2003, the directors had a problem to solve. Gloria was gone.
They wrote her out by saying that her “shell” had changed. Mary Alice would step into the role.
Shell. The word the industry chose for her body.
The same body that had needed blankets at twenty-nine, the same body the diabetes had taken at sixty-seven, the same body that had carried Sojourner Truth and Medea and Mother Courage and Sadie Delany and a thirteen-year-old girl walking up the steps of an Arkansas school.
They called it a shell. We know what it was.
The Oracle still speaks in those films, on a screen in some Black grandmother’s living room somewhere right now. The voice still works.
The wisdom still lands. The body that carried it is buried at Kensico Cemetery in Valhalla, New York, the trembling finally over, the blankets folded away, the work, every bit of it, done.

Good Morning Peeps and enjoy the HSN Community. 😎

believe in YOU….believe in POSSIBILITY….Believe in your ability to SUCCEED! – xx Happy Wednesday everyone!

@oodiebom,

Good Evening very interesting day good food too. Hubby would have loved your meal. 💕😎🎈
Oz is a bit chilly tonight with some rain i don’t mind. I did have to turn on the heat just to
take the chill off the house. This is the last time until Winter arrives again. 😎

The heat is off and I am going to jump in the shower and then get under the covers. 💕
The animals are all fed and I made sure to dash across the street so my favorite cat also
eats. I am training Miss Kitty to leave other animals alone I share with them too.

Oodie glad you enjoy the Met Gala Show always something interesting and these Costumes
are not for everyone. I did like quite a few. Anna Wintour always do a good job. 😎

Good luck with your doctor’s visit may it go smooth and all is one and done.
Glad your hubby had some good food I would have eaten every morsel too. 💕😎

Here some ice cold tea enjoy and rest your back. Get some rest as tomorrow is another
busy day. 😎 Get some good sleep so you are up and ready. 🎈

@shoelady60,

Good Evening thanks for the Colorado Shout Out. 🎈😎 Game is still on and I am
sure my phone will light up with calls. 😎🎈So far so good.

Enjoy this tonight it’s a little chilly with rain on the way in OZ. I can’t believe I turned
on the heat just to take the chill off. I think it will not be back on until Winter returns.

Enjoy the rain with me tomorrow it cleans the earth and make things nice and fresh. 💕😎🎈

Going to be an interesting night with the Game I hope they win. 🎈😎

Sweet Dreams. 💕

All Night Long (All Night)
Song by Lionel Richie

Da Da, ooooh
Well, my friends, the time has come
To raise the roof and have some fun
Throw away the work to be done
Let the music play on (play on, play on, play on…)
Everybody sing, everybody dance
Lose yourself in wild romance
We’re going to Party, Karamu, Fiesta, forever
Come on and sing along!
We’re going to Party, Karamu, Fiesta, forever
Come on and sing along!
All night long (all night), All night (all night)
All night long (all night), All night (all night)
All night long (all night), All night (all night)
All night long! (all night), Ooh, yeah (all night)
People dancing all in the street
See the rhythm all in their feet
Life is good, wild and sweet
Let the music play on…(Play on, play on, play on…)
Feel it in your heart and feel it in your soul
Let the music take control
We’re going to Party, Liming, Fiesta, forever
Come on and sing along
We’re going to Party, Liming, Fiesta, forever
Come on and sing my song!
All night long (all night), oooh, (all night)
All night long (all night), yeaz, (all night)
All night long (all night), yeah, (all night)
All night long (all night)…(all night)
Yeah, once you get started you can’t sit down
Come join the fun, it’s a merry-go-round
Everyone’s dancing their troubles away
Come join our party, See how we play!
Come on! Come on!
Everybody dance like Jimmy
Come on!
Tam bo li de say de moi ya
Hey Jambo Jumbo
Way to parti o we goin’
Oh, jambali
Tam bo li de say de moi ya
Yeah, Jambo, jumbo
Oh, O, O, O, yes
We’re going to have a party! (Yeah… ugh)
All night long (all night), All night, (all night)
All night long (all night), All night, (all night)
All night long (all night), All night, (all night)
All night long (all night)…
Everyone you meet (all night)
They’re jamming in the street (all night)
All night long! (All night)
Everyone you meet (all night)
They’re jamming in the street (all night)
All night long! (All night)
Everybody come on!
Feel good! Feel good!
Come on!
Come on!
Sing about here, everybody!
All night long (all night), All night, (all night)
All night long (all night), All night, (all night)
Come on now
All night long (all night), All night, (all night)

All Star
Song by Smash Mouth

Somebody once told me the world is gonna roll me
I ain’t the sharpest tool in the shed
She was looking kind of dumb with her finger and her thumb
In the shape of an “L” on her forehead
Well, the years start comin’ and they don’t stop comin’
Fed to the rules and I hit the ground runnin’
Didn’t make sense not to live for fun
Your brain gets smart, but your head gets dumb
So much to do, so much to see
So, what’s wrong with taking the backstreets?
You’ll never know if you don’t go (go)
You’ll never shine if you don’t glow
Hey now, you’re an all-star
Get your game on, go play
Hey now, you’re a rock star
Get the show on, get paid
(And all that glitters is gold)
Only shootin’ stars break the mold
It’s a cool place, and they say it gets colder
You’re bundled up now, wait ’til you get older
But the meteor men beg to differ
Judging by the hole in the satellite picture
The ice we skate is gettin’ pretty thin
The water’s gettin’ warm, so you might as well swim
My world’s on fire, how ’bout yours?
That’s the way I like it, and I’ll never get bored
Hey now, you’re an all-star
Get your game on, go play
Hey now, you’re a rock star
Get the show on, get paid
(All that glitters is gold)
Only shootin’ stars break the mold
Go for the moon
(Go, go, go) go for the moon
(Go, go, go) go for the moon
Go (go), go for the moon
Hey now, you’re an all-star
Get your game on, go play
Hey now, you’re a rock star
Get the show on, get paid
(And all that glitters is gold)
Only shooting stars
Somebody once asked, “Could I spare some change for gas?
I need to get myself away from this place”
I said, “Yep, what a concept, I could use a little fuel myself
And we could all use a little change”
Well, the years start comin’ and they don’t stop comin’
Fed to the rules and I hit the ground runnin’
Didn’t make sense not to live for fun
Your brain gets smart, but your head gets dumb
So much to do, so much to see
So, what’s wrong with taking the backstreets?
You’ll never know if you don’t go (go!)
You’ll never shine if you don’t glow
Hey now, you’re an all-star
Get your game on, go play
Hey now, you’re a rock star
Get the show on, get paid
(And all that glitters is gold)
Only shootin’ stars break the mold
Only shootin’ stars break the mold
Go for the moon
Go for the moon
Go for the moon
This is how we do it

DeBarge Lyrics
“Rhythm Of The Night”

When it feels like the world is on your shoulders
And all of the madness has got you going crazy
It’s time to get out, step out into the street
Where all of the action is right there at your feet
Well, I know a place where we can dance the whole night away
Underneath electric stars
Just come with me and we can shake your blues right away
You’ll be doing fine when the music starts, oh

To the beat of the rhythm of the night, dance until the morning light
Forget about the worries on your mind, you can leave them all behind
To the beat of the rhythm of the night
Oh, the rhythm of the night, oh yeah

Look out on the street now, the party’s just beginning
The music’s playing, a celebration’s starting
Under the street lights the scene is being set
A night for romance, a night you won’t forget
So, come join the fun, this ain’t no time to be staying home
Ooh, there’s too much going on
Tonight is gonna be a night like you’ve never known
We’re gonna have a good time the whole night long

To the beat of the rhythm of the night, dance until the morning light
Forget about the worries on your mind, you can leave them all behind
To the beat of the rhythm of the night
Oh, the rhythm of the night, oh yeah

Come join the fun, this ain’t no time to be staying home
Ooh, there’s too much going on
Tonight is gonna be a night like you’ve never known
We’re gonna have a good time the whole night long

To the beat of the rhythm of the night, dance until the morning light
Forget about the worries on your mind, you can leave them all behind
To the beat of the rhythm of the night, dance until the morning light
Forget about the worries on your mind
To the beat of the rhythm of the night, (oh baby, I’m crying)
Forget about the worries on your mind
To the beat of the rhythm of the night, (oh baby)
Forget about the worries on your mind

The music’s playing
It’s a celebration
The music’s playing
Everybody dance to the beat of the rhythm of the night
Forget about the worries on your mind, ’cause you can leave them all behind
To the beat of the rhythm of the night, dance until the morning light
Forget about the worries on your mind, you can leave them all behind
To the beat of the rhythm of the night…

Enjoy. 😎🎈