Good Company at the Pasadena Playhouse

“Hark! They do look clean-like.” That was the line, the only line, I spoke in the play in junior high school. I peered off stage into the wings, hand at my bonnet, which hindered me from seeing my fellow players and, thank goodness, the audience. I did not give my all to the line I spoke, for I didn’t understand how hark connected with look. I have often wondered through the years what the heck that line meant.

I was on stage again last week, at the Pasadena Playhouse, eating chicken Diane salad and mingling with the stars there to celebrate its reopening.

There was Jamie Farr, who officially “welcomed back” the Playhouse. There was Tom Hatton, who smiled broadly and said he remembered interviewing me on his television show, but didn’t, I’m sure. There was Buddy Ebsen, who smiled broadly and said he did not remember me in my red 1952 MG pulling up next to him in his red MG and exchanging MG enthusiasms. Not only a lack of memory but impossible, he said, since “I always buy American cars.” As puzzling and unconnected as hark and look , for I still see him, a real movie star, telling a goggled-eyed Michigander that his long legs fit well in the little car.

There was Robert Rockwell, looking just as handsome as when I saw him years ago in a Pacific Palisades market--shopping just like an ordinary person. He gave me pause to consider subscribing to cable TV; there he can be seen in the marvelous old Miss Brooks shows every afternoon, he said.

There was Earl Holliman, his near-belligerent jaw and furrowing eyebrows unchanged; there was Robert Cummings, with the same boyish, face-splitting smile. Dana Andrews, still handsome but tired, sat nearby.

Bill Erwin said of course he knew me; he’d heard me singing my “Songs of Age” and “Songs of Rage” at Jack and Sue Warford’s Fourth of July parties--gosh, I felt like a star myself.

What a rat race this acting business must be. So many of these actors we should be seeing on television and in movies right now; instead, due to luck, chance, intrigue, politics, connections, I don’t know what--we don’t. No, we have to look at younger actors who can’t act, or older actors who never could act, or in-between actors with forgettable personalities. Why? Is there something going on to keep these people out of the public eye?

Anyway, the purple velvet curtains parted, revealing an absolutely glorious Spanish galleon in full sail, riding triumphantly into orange sunshine--the original 1925 asbestos curtain painted by Alson Clark--and the Pasadena Playhouse was officially open again after 60 years.

I walked back to my car, smiling and star-struck. What nice people they all were. And I wondered what “Hark! They do look clean-like” could possibly mean.