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Show 167 and clearly they were all better than I. So come summer I went back east to Northwestern to the theatre department. Northwestern is mostly a rich kids' school too, and if the students in the acting classes were not all rich, they were all blessed with talent and told me so. Clearly they were better than I. Northwestern is a big place too, so I went north to Lawrence College in Appleton, Wisconsin, which sounded healthy, wholesome and vitamin packed. I'd been a bent arrow whipping this way and that; now I wanted a straight course. I would major in philosophy and all the great thinkers would tell me how best to live and solve my problems, except philosophers seemed interested in life at such mysterious removes that I couldn't follow them. To get a practical and realistic hold on life I switched to economics, except it was more mysteriously removed than philosophy. English? History? Languages? I would major in French and enter the Foreign Service; I would live in Paris and be very suave. But what I really got into was acting in a new play by a new playwright: Arthur Miller, All My Sons. I played Chris Keller and in the kissing scene with Ann Deever, when Chris is afraid of her, I did especially well. My posture, my mouth and especially my look of extreme anxiety were all perfect. I was certain that the message of the play would reform the world. Appleton was the hometown of Joe McCarthy and by winter I was fed up with fraternity boys talking about sorority girls, and with fascists in bars bragging how they had run a Negro family out of town a few years back and how no black person had stayed overnight in the town since. Those college kids were rich too, which usually does something unnice to people, and it was only a small college anyhow, so I decided to go south to the University of Chicago. It was liberal and very intellectual and J_ wanted to be superior for a change. Looking for a room in Hyde Park I found one advertised in the window of the Communist bookstore on 55th Street. I was pretty radical myself, not |