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Her acting style had developed already. If one didn’t know better, one would think production photos showed a present-day college student imitating the famous movie star Madeline Kahn. At Freda’s insistence, Madeline also joined a professional opera workshop, which required further study and afforded her greater freedom than the theater faculty had, enabling her to play “parts I wanted to do—mature women. I got to do scenes from Mozart and Puccini, and roles like Manon Lescaut, womanly and dramatic.” 13 All of this activity fueled Freda’s ambitions for Madeline’s career in opera.
    Madeline continued to perform in student theatricals, as well, and in 1962, she was cast as the frustrated girlfriend of Nathan Detroit in
Guys and Dolls
. “A person can develop a cold,” Miss Adelaide laments in her signature number—but in Madeline’s case, it was measles. Her friends remained hopeful that she might recover in time to do the show, and though they cast another student as a backup, Madeline lay in bed and rehearsed by herself, mentally preparing every entrance, costume change, gesture, and note. (The experience proved useful later in life, she said, when she arrived on movie sets and started to shoot a scene with no more preparation than what she’d done on her own, at home.) At last she felt well enough to take part in a few rehearsals with the rest of the cast.
    She was still unsure of herself until opening night, when “the audience response was so enormous that I thought I was on a roller coaster,” she remembered. “It was such a surprise to me that what I had prepared so earnestly and diligently by myself, not to please anyone, but just to do what I felt was the right thing—I mean, the laughter, and so on. I had to stop.” For the first time, she began to think of pursuing a career in theater.
    Guys and Dolls
was reviewed in the student newspaper, and the faculty weighed in with its judgments, too. When one professor told her “that I stood out and that I didn’t blend into the production, that I seemed to be doing some show of my own,” she took the criticism to heart. “I spent the next several years trying to blend into every possible place I could.” However, colleagues insist she
didn’t
blend in, and some years later, she wrote, “I don’t ‘hide’[;] I choose to stand out and
up
for myself at thesame time [and] so set an example for others to do so.” 14 Only later in life did she realize that the professor who criticized her was simply wrong. Speaking at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, Madeline tried to share the lessons of her own experience. “If you look at [reviews] to find out who you are, you’re in big trouble,” she told her young audience, adding that “authority figures” aren’t always right.
    Much of her experience at Hofstra confirmed this last insight. The theater faculty made her feel “like an outcast,” she said. Another classmate, Charlotte Forbes, described the faculty as “very narrow-minded . . . whenever any real talent showed up, they shot it down.” Forbes told Ludlam’s biographer, David Kaufman, “[T]he theater department felt so threatened by Madeline Kahn that they literally threw her out. . . .” 15 The abrupt change from theater to music “was very painful, very difficult, and very interesting—I mean,
looking back
,” Madeline said. “Looking back, I can now say, ‘Well, thank you for that, because this was great training for the outside world.’” 16
    In the evenings and on weekends, Madeline took jobs as a dirndl-decked singing waitress at German restaurants on Long Island. Summers, she lived and worked at the Bavarian Manor, a Catskills resort in Purling, New York. Looking back, she counted that gig among the dues she’d paid in a hard life (her words), though she kept her sense of humor. When dogs wandered into the performing area, they’d howl along with her singing, to the amusement of the customers. “I would