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the charm, especially when it came to Harold Clurman. This was especially hard on me because I had long admired his work with New York’s legendary Group Theater in the 1930s. He directed the first production of Clifford Odets’s
Golden Boy
, whose main character, Joe Bonaparte, was a character I strongly identified with as a teen. He’s a violinist who is seduced by the big-money world of boxing. As a kid who loved acting but who hid it from his football pals, I could clearly identify with the conflict of straddling both worlds. Now, my experience with Clurman had me straddling the two worlds of employment/unemployment.
    (NOTE: While I tried my best to keep my thespianic desires secret from my football chums, I was exposed as an actor by a high school history teacher who knew I had the bug and who tasked me with reciting Marc Anthony’s act 3, scene 1 speech from Shakespeare’s
Julius Caesar
to the entire class. Everyone was staring at me with great suspicion as I walked to the front of the classroom and tore into the speech, but by the time I bellowed, “Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war!” all my teammates were standing up and crying havoc themselves. Seriously, there was almost a mini riot.)
    I didn’t forget my lines again during the rest of the run of
A Shot in the Dark,
but an evening or two after I metaphorically “dried,” I literally “dried” on stage during previews. My throat began to tickle, and soon I had a full-fledged coughing fit on stage. Fortunately, my hacking was drowned out by the familiar sound of Harold Clurman having a coronary and throwing another stompfest in the audience.
    I vowed this was never going to happen to me again, so the evening before our opening night, I took the prop guy aside, pointed to a desk my character sat at during the show, and told him, “Make sure there is a glass of water in that desk every night.” If I felt a coughing fit coming on, I could always stroll over to the desk, open a drawer, and take a sip. A
charming
sip, mind you, so as not to disappoint my director.
    The play was a hit, and ran for nearly four hundred performances at the Booth Theatre on West Forty-fifth Street in New York. And I think it was during performance 399 that the tickle hit me in the throat again.
    I was doing a scene with my beloved costar Julie Harris (who tried her best to get Clurman to like me) when the tickle hit, and remembering my instructions to the prop guy, I sauntered on over to the desk for my throat-saving swig. I kept the coughs at bay as Julie delivered her line, opened the drawer of my desk, and produced the glass of water.
    The glass of water that had been placed in the desk nearly a year before.
RULE: Always Remember to Schedule a Follow-Up Meeting with the Prop Guy
    About half the water had evaporated, leaving a thick, white crust in its wake. At least it looked like a white crust, having been obscured by a year’s worth of theater dust. The water that was left was greenish, covered in a film, and—believe it or not—bubbling slightly. I felt like one of the witches in
Macbeth
with this toxic, green, bubbling brew in my hand.
    My stomach muscles tightened, to keep the coughs—and my lunch—down. Julie had finished her line and turned to me. If I opened my mouth then, I would have gotten two, three words out before everything fell apart in a hacking cough. I could almost hear Clurman warming up for his tirade.
    I put the glass to my lips and I swallowed every last drop of sludge. I placed the glass down, and slapped my hands on the desk—once, twice, three times. Julie saw what I had done and looked at me with horror. I could feel the thick water clinging to the sides of my throat as the sludge made its way down, contaminating my insides in its wake.
    I swallowed hard, opened my mouth, and . . . no tickle. Gone. The toxic brew had done its job. I was able to proceed. With aplomb. With dignity. With bearing. And . . . with . . .