Linda Goldman Goes Off Her Rocker: Who Says There Are No Second Acts?

I have started to contribute to Arts Coast Journal, the online journal of Creative Pinellas. Here's my latest, published on the site today, the story of a remarkable Creative Late Bloomer:

After a 25-year-long career in finance, Linda Goldman retired.

Well, that's not entirely accurate.

At 65 she graduated magnum cum laude from St. Pete College with an Associate in Arts Degree. At 70 she wrote and staged her first play. And now three years later, after creating her own theater company and producing five more plays (with a free, upcoming performance October 27 in Clearwater), she is writing her seventh.

Who says there are no second acts in life?

"I never thought I would be a playwright," Goldman told me when we met recently at Panera's in Pinellas Park to talk about her late-blooming theatrical career.

What prompted this unexpected second career? Goldman says she started writing plays because she was fed up with the way seniors were being portrayed on stage. After leaving her full-time work, she began volunteering at Temple B'nai Israel in Clearwater, creating programs for seniors there, including regular outings to community theater. She had gown more and more embarrassed, however,  by how often those plays made fun of older people.

Seniors on stage were either treated in a patronizing or, worse, they were the butt of jokes. They didn't reflect the active lives of the seniors she knew. The portrayals certainly didn't reflect Goldman's own rich life as a senior.

"I knew I could write a better play than that," she said.

So she wrote Grandma Goes Off Her Rocker, featuring a complex older character, a widowed mother who has to move in with her daughter and her family. The play takes an honest look at the generational clash that ensued, examining what happens when the roles of mother and daughter are reversed later in life.

Grandma Gets Off Her Rocker was staged at her synagogue
with some of the same seniors who had joined her to see those community theater productions that had made her cringe. She thought the performance would be a one and done experience.

It was so successful, however, that a friend asked her if she would stage it again, this time as a fundraiser for a struggling temple in Tarpon Springs. To appear "more professional," Goldman created a theater company that she called SAGES: Senior Actors Guild & Educational Services.

Under the SAGES banner, Goldman wrote and produced five more plays, all addressing concerns that seniors face -- dating after the death of a spouse (Get in the Game), deciding when to give up the car keys (The Deal Maker), negotiating different retirement goals within a marriage (Committed), and defining what constitutes "proper" behavior for an older lady (A Corset Line).

Her most frequently staged work is a cautionary tale, a "fall prevention play" called Denying Gravity).

Denying Gravity premiered last year at the Pinellas Park Performing Arts Center before an audience of 500. This month Denying Gravity was restaged at the Heritage Springs in Trinity on October 20 (hosted by the Pasco Fire Rescue) .On October 27, a free performance will be offered at the Bilheimer Capitol Theater in Clearwater (hosted by Clearwater Fire Rescue).


It's a play that Goldman initially didn't want to write.

When Christine Hamacher, director of business development with Home Care Now and a member of the Fall Prevention Coalition of Better Living  for Seniors, first suggested the topic to her, she thought, "Yeah, a play about fall prevention, that will bring people to the theater in droves."

But Hamacher was persistent. Wasn't the goal of SAGES to put on plays with a purpose? What better purpose was there than to warn seniors about the dangers of falling?

"At first I thought I'd rather get a root canal," Goldman admits. But she was blown away when Hamacher told her that Pinellas County alone gets 25,000 calls a year about falls. "When I heard that statistic, I knew I had to do it," says Goldman. "After all, my theater company has the word 'educational' in it." What better way to educate people about the dangers of falling than through storytelling? In Denying Gravity, a woman named Claire falls and breaks her arm, but stubbornly refuses to take precautions against falling again. She ends up falling again and again, eventually falling to her death.

"People were shocked that we actually have Claire die in the play, but we knew that shock was important to get our point across," Goldman says. But in a twist at the end of the play, there is a rewind of the action, so that Claire can be saved if she takes fall prevention to heart.

Saving Claire, in fact, is the name of a documentary produced by Ames Production about Goldman's play and the dramatic impact its lessons have had on audiences. The film was a collaboration among several groups, including Pinellas County 911 & EMS, Fire Departments, the Fall Prevention Coalition of BLS/AAAPP, the Florida Physical Therapy Association and, of course, Goldman's theater company, SAGES.

Goldman tapped Hamacher to direct Denying Gravity and now the fall prevention activist has joined SAGES as its vice president and executive director. Also on the SAGES team is Marvin Hollander, listed on the SAGES website as "Biggest Fan and Playbill Designer." The 90-year-old Hollander, who worked in the composing room at the New York Times for 28 years, is Goldman's fiance.

"We're not getting married," Goldman says, flashing her engagement ring. "There will be only one Mrs. Marvin Hollander." But she says the two enjoy going out to dinner together -- and working on SAGES play projects. Goldman's own spouse died in 2004, a 15-year-old union that Goldman says will be her last marriage. Her first marriage -- they had three children -- ended in divorce.

Does her personal life provide fodder for her plays? Yes, of course, Goldman says, but her observations of others are an even greater inspiration. "I am used to listening to other people's stories," she tells me. Growing up at a time when boys had a lot more freedom than girls, she was always told to sit still in the corner and be quiet. While her brothers got to run around, she would play with her dolls and make up stories with them based on conversations she had eavesdropped in on.

Goldman's next project, a play about telephone cons, is tentatively entitled Scams, populated with such playful characters as Sgt. Moe Money and Lt. Caramba from Cabbage Cove (not to be confused with Jessica Fletcher from Cabot Cove). She's finished with the research and already has a first draft. Like Neil Simon, her favorite playwright whose work often blends humor and tragedy, Scams is a mixture of comedy and drama.

All of her plays are. After all, says Goldman, "Life is never just one or the other, is it?"














 

Older Women: The Year of Kicking Serious Butt

     Need some inspiration? For anyone who's been feeling stuck lately or who's been worrying that it's too late to make a difference, consider these older women who clearly don't understand the meaning of giving up:


      This week 89-year-old Dolores Huerta, who co-founded the National Farmworkers Association with Cesar Chavez, got herself arrested in Fresno along with seven members of the International Services Emplyees Union 2015 .during a protest demanding a raise for the county's home care workers. The workers haven't had a raise in 10 years. They make $12 per hour. They were asking for a dollar more.

      Earlier this year, thanks to the Democrat's sweep during the mid-terms, 78-year old Donna Shalala entered the House of Representatives as that body's oldest freshman and Maxine Waters at 80 became the first woman to head the House's Financial Services Committee.

     At 78 Nancy Pelosi has risen as a formidable opponent of Donald Trump: She is one of the few women he dares not give a nasty nickname. At 70, Elizabeth Warren is the leading woman candidate for president.

     At 71 Glenn Close won a Golden Globe for her role in "The Wife," based on a novel by 60-year-old Meg Wolitzer about a woman who puts her own needs and desires aside to help a narcissistic husband. The movie took 14 years to get made -- perhaps because its title was "The Wife" as Close joked in her acceptance speech?

     But no one has had to wait for success as long as Carmen Herrera. While her male contemporaries, abstract artists Frank Stella and Ellsworth Kelly, were being heralded, Herrera -- Cuban and female -- was ignored. But, thanks to a supportive husband and her love of the straight line, she persisted

     Finally in 2009, Herrera got her first break: her first solo show at the British Gallery Ikon in Birmingham. The was 94.

     They say if you wait long enough your bus will come. "I waited for my bus for 94 years," says Herrera who lives and works in New York City. Yes, she still works. Though she can no longer walk on her own and has to have in-home care, she is still painting and creating.

     And now there are Herreras all over NYC. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art on the Upper West Side, the exhibit that bears her name -- Epic Abstraction: From Herrera to Pollack -- includes her acrylic painting Equilibro, which she completed in 2012 when she was 97.

     And to the south in New York's City Hall Park, five monumental outdoor sculptures by Herrera are on display until November 8. The are Herrera's first major sculpture exhibit although she first designed three-dimensional forms based on her hard-edged minimalist paintings back in the late 1960s. Another bus that took a long time to come. Only a few of her designs were ever turned into sculptures.

     The New York display, called Estructuras Monumentales, includes three sculptures from those earlier designs and two new ones, including Angulo Rojo which she designed in 2017 when she was 102.

Angulo Royo by Carmen Herrera (2017)

Aging: The Promise of One More New Year

     

      As I am writing this, on New Year's Eve, at the end of 2018, I am reminded again how each December 31 we symbolically mark the end of the year as a kind of death as we watch that ever-present trope of Father Time, bearded and bent, shuffle off to make way for the Baby New Year.

     The figure of Father Time traces its roots back to the Greek god Chronos and to the Celtic Holly King. Both are described in ancient tales as an old man, usually bearded, wearing long robes and a dour expression, often carrying a scythe (like the Grim Reaper, the very personification of death) and a timepiece.

     We get it. Time is passing him by.

     The Baby, on the other hand, stands for life, resurrection, a new beginning. He echoes the Greek God Dionysus, the god of fun, wine-making and drinking and ritual madness.

     He looks rarin' to go.

     I'm rarin' to go, too, but I know realistically that my life is closer to the man with the hourglass than the Baby in the top hat. But how do I navigate well this time "somewhere near the end," as Diana Athill calls it, as I count down another year of my life?

     On my bedside table is a book called Aging Thoughtfully by philosopher Marsha Nussbaum and legal scholar Saul Levmore that attempts to answer my question. It is a lively debate between two academics about how to approach the subject of aging. It begins with a firm denial that their book has anything to do with that sullen man with the scythe:

     "This book is about living thoughtfully, and certainly not about dying, gracefully or otherwise. To age is to experience, to gain wisdom, to love and to lose, and to grow more comfortable in one's own skin, however much it might be loosening."

     Yet despite their denials, the subject of death permeates Aging Thoughtfully, from the authors' examination of the choices made by a dying King Lear (a fictional character, of course) to their discussions about how the fear of death affects real-life people's end-of-life choices.

     I ordered Aging Thoughtfully, published in 2017 by Oxford University Press, after hearing that Nussbaum was this year's recipient of the Berggruen Prize. I was curious to read something by a 71-year-old who had just been awarded a million dollars for thinking.

     The prize, launched in 2016, is given out by the Los Angeles-based Berggruen Institute to encourage research in cross-cultural understanding. The results of the American presidential election in 2016 certainly drove home how desperately such research is needed.

Marsha Nussbaum & Saul Levmore (Book photo by Lloyd Degrane)

     Aging Thoughtfully is a conversation between Nussbaum and Levmore who are colleagues at the University of Chicago. The book's subtitle -- Conversations about Retirement, Romance, Wrinkles & Regret -- give you an idea of the range of subjects they cover. The conversational format -- Nussbaum and Levmore take turns weighing in on all those subjects -- was inspired by Cicero's De Senectute (On Aging) written in 45 B.C.E.

    De Senectute is a fictional conversation inspired by letters exchanged between the Roman philosopher and his friend Atticus, both of whom were in their sixties at the time. The two men didn't consider themselves old at all ("Romans were a healthy lot," Nussbaum and Levmore point out) so in De Senectute Cicero invents a dialogue between a truly aged man -- in his eighties -- whom he calls Cato and two men in their thirties.

     Cato, the imaginary 80-something, is healthy, politically active and obsessed with gardening. He seeks to dispel the myths that his two young men friends have about aging -- that as we age we lose creativity and that death is a "constant fearful presence," for examples.

     "Each part of life has its own pleasures," Cato tells his young interlocutors. "Each has its own abundant harvest, to be garnered in season. We may grow old in body, but we need never grow old in mind and spirit."

     At the same time Cicero was writing about aging, he also wrote a book about friendship -- De Amicitia -- which Nussbaum discusses in Chapter Three (entitled Aging With Friends). That book, too, was based on Cicero's correspondence with Atticus, but as Nussbaum points out, Cicero's official writings don't tell the whole story of what the two men discussed in those letters. At the time Cicero was experiencing a deep depression. His daughter Tullia had died in childbirth. The unbearable pain of his grief and even thoughts of suicide are present in the letters exchanged with Atticus, but they don't make it into the books.

     "These two books have been justifiably popular over the centuries. Both have some very good ideas and arguments. But still, there is something missing," Nussbaum writes. "Although in form they are dialogues, they are very abstract, and they lack, therefore, a key aspect of both friendship and aging: the nuanced sensitivity to the particular that Cicero often praises under the rubric of humanitas." 

    In other words, when philosophers generalize too much about aging, they risk missing the point.  King Lear is not a commentary on dementia -- "or any other universal, individuality-effacing feature of aging," says Nussbaum, "but about the aging of a very particular type of person, one accustomed to dominating and enjoying control."  We all experience loss as we age, but Cicero's grief over the loss of his daughter was specific to him. While his official treatise on aging offers an upbeat, forward looking way to view aging, his letters reveal a more realistic look at age as the struggling, more human Cicero relies on his friend Atticus to see him through a difficult time.

     In other words, we all age, we all grieve, we all love in our own peculiar way. We'll get a more accurate picture of what we need to do as we age if we see ourselves as individuals aging and not just part of a faceless group of "senior citizens." 

    "Cato says that aging is in many ways superior to what precedes it because of the quality of the talk it contains. But he doesn't make good on that promise; your letters do," Nussbaum writes, addressing Cicero directly. "Aging is bound to contain tragedy. It is not bound to contain comedy, or understanding, or love. What supples both of these is friendship."

     Friendship -- by bringing us that understanding and love -- also can edge us away from a fear of death as we age. 

     For as Marcus Tulles Cicero put it:  "No one is as old as to think he or she cannot live one more year."

    One More Happy New Year to us all!