Friends: A Love Story by Angela Bassett

don’t particularly like voice class and don’t see why it’s all that important. I’m tired, I’m going to miss class today. I’ll go next week.” They upset the traditional dominant-subordinate roles of professor and teacher. I think that after our class the program was composed of mostly younger students.
    By and large, acting school is a really exciting time. You’re breaking a script down, you’re chatting about the characters and good and bad performances, you’re doing a play, you’re sitting around at the “gypsy” bar where all the grad students hung out. You’re into something you love and want to dedicate your life to. You aren’t out trying to find yourself; you didn’t say, “Let me try to do something practical instead of what I love to do.” You’ve found it—and it didn’t take thirty years! Everyone is training so they can hopefully survive in this impractical profession where people are always telling you that only five percent or ten percent of Screen Actors Guild (SAG) actors actually make a living, and the other ninety percent are doing other jobs.
    Even though it’s very exciting, drama school is very hardwork. Everyone loses weight the first year because you don’t have time to sit down and eat. I existed on coffee, Snickers and bagels. Academically, we had classes, scene study, the history of theater, voice class, singing class, movement, fencing. When I was not in class I was at my work-study job. After first semester, on top of academics, you have to do things like put on a Shakespeare production in ten days—build the set, sew the costumes, learn your lines, rehearse with your classmates, everything. When I think back on it, what we accomplished was amazing. It was so awesome—I was in love with it. And there were so many talented students, like Sabrina, Roger, Charles, John Turturro, Jane Kaczmarek and Kate Burton, daughter of the famous actor, Richard Burton.
    Unlike out in the real world, race in drama school was, for the most part, a non-issue. You were supposed to grow up and be a teacher, a doctor, a lawyer, those kinds of jobs. We were already different—young, artsy, ain’t none of us gonna make no money right off the bat. Race didn’t make that much difference. We might deal with it in the context of a scene, like if we were performing something of Athol Fugard’s, the great South African playwright. But for the most part we would deal with race later, in the real world, the marketplace. While we were in school any conflict we experienced was mostly interpersonal. We rarely allowed race to restrain our feelings, our intuition, our delving into the psyche and human emotions. I’m the mama, the white girl’s the daughter and you’re the audience. We believe it and we say it is, so you believe it, too. And no one was talking about, “Okay, when you graduate, some of you are not going to work. It’s not because you’re not talented, it’s because you’re black or Latino.” Or whatever the 109 other reasons are why people don’t work, like you’re too tall or too short. For the time we convinced ourselves, “It’s going to come down to talent, right?”
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    In October of my first year, my father’s girlfriend called me with the news he was in the hospital. He hadn’t been taking his blood pressure meds and came home from work with a really bad headache, which wasn’t like him. She took him to the hospital, where they learned he had a brain aneurysm. I didn’t know what a brain aneurysm was—I now understand that he was having a stroke—but it was brain stuff and sounded serious enough that I tried to get there. Kate Burton was one of the few students with a car. When she heard my dad was in the hospital, she offered me a ride to his hospital in the Bronx. She dropped me off and I found my way to his