[00:00.00]text This Life
[00:05.88]It is the first time I have ever been on a stage
[00:10.45]--I don't even know what a stage looks like
[00:14.39]--but I'm up there now and I open this "script,"
[00:19.44]but I don't know what it is.
[00:22.60]The director tells me to read the part of "John."
[00:26.85]"Everywhere I see"John"I must read everything under that.
[00:32.50]Then I see him sitting in a front seat staring at me with the strangest look.
[00:38.56]He says,"Get off that stage."
[00:42.92]I say,"What do you mean?"
[00:46.79]He says,"Just come on down off that stage and stop wasting my time.
[00:53.24]You're no actor.You don't even know how to read."
[00:58.31]I leave and walk off down 135th Street saying to myself,"
[01:04.16]You can hardly read.You can't be an actor and you're not able to read."
[01:10.64]I begin to think about what he's said to me.
[01:14.58]Now I know I can't read too well.
[01:18.21]Here I am,eighteen years of age,and if I live to be eighty,
[01:24.45]for the next sixty-two years I'm going to be a dishwasher.
[01:29.91]I'm not going to be able to make people notice me.
[01:34.28]During the next six months,I spent as much time as possible reading.
[01:40.23]One of the restaurants I worked in during that period was in Astoria,Long Island.
[01:46.29]The work was hard and heavy,
[01:49.64]but we would have most of the dishes cleared away be 11:00 or 11:15 p.m.
[01:56.27]It was my custom to sit out near the kitchen door and read the newspaper.
[02:01.52]At the waiters'table there was an old Jewish man
[02:06.56]who used to watch me trying to read that paper.
[02:10.51]I asked him one night what a word meant,and he told me.
[02:15.68]I thanked him and went back to my paper.
[02:19.44]He went on watching me for a few seconds and then said,
[02:24.30]"Do you run across a lot of words you don't understand?" I said,
[02:29.76]"A lot--because I'm just beginning to learn to read well,"
[02:35.01]and he said,"I'll sit with you here and work with you for a while."
[02:40.94]So at about eleven every night when he sat down for his meal,
[02:46.61]I would come out of the kitchen and sit down next to him
[02:51.05]and read articles from the front page of the paper.
[02:55.20]When I ran into a word I didn't know
[02:58.96](and I didn't know half of the article,
[03:02.73]because any word longer than a couple of syllables gave me trouble)
[03:07.90]he explained the meaning of the word and gave me the pronunciation.
[03:13.46]Then he'd send me back to the sentence
[03:17.41]so I could understand the word in context.
[03:21.64]Then I would take the paper away with me,armed now with the meaning of those words,
[03:27.67]and reread and reread the article
[03:31.51]so that the meaning of those words would get locked into my memory.
[03:37.08]I stayed there at that job for about five or six weeks
[03:43.32]and I learned from him a way to study,and then I went off to other jobs.
[03:49.28]I have never been able to thank him properly
[03:53.43]because I never knew then
[03:56.67]what an enormous contribution he was making to my life.
[04:01.63]He was wonderful,and a little bit of him is in everything I do.After that,
[04:07.80]I always looked for the meaning of words,
[04:11.74]I would keep going over and over the sentence they were in,
[04:16.71]and after a while I would begin to get an idea of what the word meant
[04:21.85]just by repeating the sentence.
[04:25.40]That became a habit,as did all the other things he left me with.
|