Shiksa Goddess I cannot tell a lie. Now that Madeleine Albright, Tom Stoppard, and even Hillary Rodham Clinton have embraced their Jewish roots, I feel compelled to bite the bullet and publicly reveal that I''ve just discovered my own denominational truth. I am Episcopalian. I should have guessed a long time ago, because my parents never mentioned it. In fact, they hid it. They sent me to primary school at the Yeshiva Flatbush. It never crossed my mind that I was deliberately being isolated. On our classroom walls were portraits of Chaim Weizmann and Golda Meir in place of Dwight and Mamie Eisenhower.
Our horror stories were not of being buried by Communists, but of being suffocated by nomad ham sandwiches. We lived in a Jewish neighborhood in Flatbush. Our shopping strip included kosher butchers and Hymie''s Highway Appetizers. For Sunday brunch, my mother produced bagels, belly lox, and cream cheese with scallions. Nobody told me that lox lived a double life as smoked salmon, or that herring could ever be kippered. Even the Christmas holidays were a setup. Every year on Christmas Eve, we were on a jet to Miami Beach. There wasn''t even a chance for us to watch the WPIX Channel 11 Yule log burning as the Mormon Tabernacle Choir sang "Silent Night.
" We celebrated the holidays front-row center at the Versailles Room, with Myron Cohen warming up our crowd for Sammy Davis, Jr. Even our African-Americans were Jewish! Until now, I''ve had a happy life thinking of myself as a Jewish writer. I came to accept that when my work was described as being "too New York" it was really a euphemism for something else. I belonged to a temple, and on my opening nights, my mother invariably told friends that she''d be much happier if it was my wedding. In other words, I had a solid sense of self. I knew exactly who I was. Then the bottom fell out. I was speaking at the Lion of Judah luncheon in Palm Beach recently when I noticed a woman in a Lilly Pulitzer dress, one strand of pearls, and forty-year-old pink Pappagallo shoes leaning against the door.
She stood out from the crowd because, instead of the omnipresent Barry Kieselstein-Cord purse with lizard clasp, she was carrying a battered lacrosse stick. At the conclusion of my talk, she approached the podium. "I hope you don''t mind my speaking to you, but I believe we are related," she said. I looked at her dead-straight blond hair and smiled politely. "I doubt it." "Your name translates to Waterston," she continued. "Harry Waterston, your great-uncle twice removed, was my mother''s fourth husband. They were married for one month.
" She looked at me as if only a simpleton wouldn''t make the immediate connection. I did have a distant relative, Dr. Harry Wasserstein, but I never heard of him marrying anyone but Aunt Rivkah. According to my mother, even though Harry was an educated man, he never worked a day in his life, and Rivkah''s life was miserable. "I think you must be mistaken," I said, and tried to excuse myself. "After he left my mother, Harry Waterston changed his name to Wasserstein because he wanted his son to go to an Ivy League college, and to Mount Sinai Medical School. Harry Jr. became an educated man, but he never worked a day in his life.
" I was shvitzing . I mean sweating. "Our name actually translates to Waterstone," I said. "That''s irrelevant!" She was almost haughty. "Look at that actor on Law & Order --what''s his name, Sam? He''s a Hasid if I ever saw one." She handed me the lacrosse stick while I made a mental note to find out what Sam Waterston was doing for the High Holy Days. "This was Harry''s lacrosse stick, which he used the year he was expelled from Hotchkiss," she said. "He made me promise to give it to the first Wasserstein relative I met in Palm Beach.
He said it was inevitable that one of you people would show up here!" She winked and left the room. Good or bad news had always made me hungry. But for the first time in my life I needed a drink. Maybe she was onto something. That week, I began eating chicken sandwiches with mayo on white bread, no crust, and getting full after two bites. For the first time in my life, I wrote in to the Mount Holyoke Quarterly: "Am looking to buy thirty-year-old Saab car and to apologize to all the Holyoke girls named Timothy and Kikky, whom I never spoke to. I now know you were very interesting people." I began wearing faded cardigan sweaters and canceled all appointments for massages, pedicures, and exploratory liposuction.
I gave up on my complicated relationship with a married Jewish Malaysian vibes player and learned to enjoy the company of a divorced asexual friend from Amherst who studies pharmaceutical stocks for J. P. Morgan. I began running ten miles every morning and sculling down the Hudson nightly. My approval ratings with my friends have gone up fifteen points. But I was still, as I used to say in Yiddish, " nit ahin nit aher ," or, as I now say in the Queen''s English, "neither here nor there." That was when I decided to go on a listening tour of Fishers Island. I wanted to really hear the stories of my new Wasp ancestors, learn to make their cocktails, and wear their headbands.
I want to live up to my true destiny and announce to the world how great it is to be goyisheh like me. A Place They''d Never Seen: The Theater As far as I''m concerned, every New Yorker is born with the inalienable right to ride the D train, shout "Hey, lady!" with indignation, and grow up going regularly to the theater. After all, if a city is fortunate enough to house an entire theater district, shouldn''t access to the stage life within it be what makes coming of age in New York different from that in any other American city? I am certain that I became a playwright because every Saturday my parents picked me up from the June Taylor School of Dance and brought me to a Broadway matinee. Of course, at the time I had no idea that I would even remotely have a life in the theater. No adult said to me, "Oh, Wendy, darling, don''t become a doctor, a lawyer, or a certified public accountant. Please do us a favor and consider the not-for-profit theater." But watching those plays while I was still in high school first put into my mind the idea that the work you grew up to do didn''t have to be entirely separate from your real interests. As the 1998-99 theater season officially ended with the recent Tony Awards, and as the attendant hoopla is replaced by the weary question of where will the new audiences come from, I have some good news from the front.
Perhaps there is even a glimmer of hope for the new season from eight New York City high school students who have decided to make theatergoing a habit. Sadly, a New York adolescent''s life as a regular theatergoer is becoming the exception to the rule. Ticket prices have made a family habit like mine almost an impossibility. Moreover, those against government subsidy for the arts have marginalized theater as elitist and solely for the upper middle class. Well-paid movie-marketing experts have endless figures and charts to demonstrate that teenagers would far rather sit through 10 Things I Hate About You , the movie remake of The Taming of the Shrew set at a high school, than the Shakespeare play itself. While I was on a recent trip to Congress to lobby for the arts, a senator asked if I was serious that theater was as important as health and education. I was tempted to say, "Yes, let them eat plays!" But instead I hatched an idea to personally bring New York high school students into the theater. I mentioned my plan to Roy Harris, who was the stage manager for my last three plays.
Roy was quick to jump on board: "Best thing you can do is get those kids in here. This is audience development at the grassroots level!" Stage managers are wonderfully organized people. One day I''m daydreaming, and the next thing I know we''re at a meeting at The Theatre Development Fund. Among its many functions, the nonprofit TDF runs the half-price TKTS booth on Broadway and works to develop new audiences. "You get me eight smart high school students from the New York City public school system and Roy and I will take them to plays for a year," I proposed to Marianna Houston Weber, the fund''s director of education. "Just make sure it''s no one who is looking to get an agent or meet Drew Barrymore. I want students who have never been to the New York theater, and let''s see if it''s at all still relevant to them." Being a Brooklyn girl, I was hoping to include students from every borough.
But Marianna said that the development fund already had a playwriting program set up with DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx. She offered to get in touch with Patricia Bruno, a popular English teacher there, who would pick eight candidates from the accelerated math and science program. DeWitt Clinton High School, named for the nineteenth-century New York mayor and governor, is the alma mater of the comedian Robert Klein, the designer Ralph Lauren, and the writers James Baldwin and Avery Corman. Over the years, the mix of the school''s immigrant population has changed, but the commitment of teachers like Mrs. Bruno to opening worlds for their students has remained constant. In September 1998, with the help of our educational advisers, Roy and I mapped out a more precise academic plan. We would see seven matinees: a potpourri of Broadway, off-Broadway, musicals, and straight drama. After each, we would go out for pizza and talk about the show.
The st.