Shy people often come alive through acting. I was no exception. Though a skirt-hugger as a little girl, I started singing publicly as a 7 year old, and acting at about the same time. Everyone thought I had some talent and I was encouraged to pursue it. I was passionate about it. With the stage lights blinding me, I could become someone else and escape into some fantasy world, explore new places and facets of myself, get away and be someone else.

Though I could move well, I felt awkward and from the time I got glasses at the age of 8, I went through a serious ugly-duckling phase. My beloved second grade teacher discovered I had a knack for voices. I could cackle, so when we read fairy tales aloud in class, I would read the witch or old lady. Mrs Zeve had been a “radio” major in college (I think today we’d call it communications) and she encouraged her shy charge to voice other characters. She proudly came to see me play Gretel in the all school (K-8) production of “Hansel and Gretel” when I was a mere 5th grader. We moved out of Detroit that year, but I didn’t lose touch with Mrs. Zeve. The one photo I have of her was after a high school production of “Arsenic and Old Lace”. I played Elaine, the love interest. My mentor died the next year at the age of 42. She never knew that I went on to be a theatre major in college.

I spent six glorious summers at the National Music Camp (now the Interlochen Arts Camp) in Interlochen, MI during the ’60s, majoring in voice and drama, also taking dance. I sang in the chorus, took Operetta, and had good parts in the High School dramas, culminating in the role of Hermia in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” in 1969. Though not a strong enough singer to ever have a lead in the operettas, the director always gave me extra acting bits to do and rewarded me with the Operetta Chorus Award the three summers I was in the High School division, even going so far as to name me the best female chorus member for the first 25 years of Operetta of all time at the camp!

I was more determined than ever about my craft, got all my general curriculum requirements out of the way during Freshman year at Brandeis and honed in on theatre, which at the time had an excellent theatre program, with a strong graduate program and would hire many professional actors to come in, take leads in the productions and teach part-time in the studio classes.

I began with small parts in large main stage plays and other parts in plays directed by the grad students. For my “tech” requirement, I began stage managing. I was good at it.

By sophomore year, I had a lead in the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta. Junior year, I won the coveted role of Sarah Brown in “Guys and Dolls” against a large field of grad students. The director said he wanted “a little dynamo”. He hired a professional in his mid-40s to play opposite me in the role of Sky Masterson (the role played by Marlon Brando in the movie). Jack had a beautiful singing voice, but needed a hair piece and girdle to go on-stage and look somewhat appropriate. We were an odd couple. He was hardly believable as the dashing gambler who sweeps me off my feet, takes me to Havana on a bet, but actually falls for me. I know…this is ACTING.

The director didn’t help. His directions were mushy. Ultimately, I felt I gave a better first audition than final performance. It is not supposed to be that way. The reviews came in and I never forgot them. The Worcester Telegram said, “Elizabeth Sarason is a superb Sarah”. Boston After Dark wasn’t as kind. “Elizabeth Sarason plays a passing flirtation with the correct key. She acts better than she sings and looks better than she acts. Enough said.” I was devastated. Except for a dancing/acting role in a friend’s senior honor’s project (“An Evening With Garcia Lorca”) and the role of Clea in “Black Comedy”, I have not been in a show since. I am not thick-skinned. I did not have a strong enough drive to overcome the rejection.

I became one of the top stage managers at Brandeis. Senior year, I stage managed the complicated show “Lenny”, for which I was awarded departmental honors.

“Two roads diverge in a yellow wood, and sorry I could not travel both”. Robert Frost wrote “The Road Less Taken” 100 years ago. Randall Thompson turned it into a popular song that I first sang at camp as a 13 year old and as recently as last May in my current chorus. I did not continue with acting, but did with singing, another form of artistic expression which continues to offer gratification. I have thought about roads not taken, both in pursuit of life achievements and love life and what might have been. But one can’t dwell on those thoughts…the “what if’s” or “what might have beens”. One lives life one day at a time; moving forward.

He nodded the beak of his perfectly molded, authoritarian-style trooper’s hat in my direction.
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I confess to hitchhiking once. I don’t think my parents ever knew.
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By Walter Nicklin

Are they hiding, like stars no longer visible in the light-polluted sky? Or are they simply no longer here, gone forever, like the passenger pigeon or Good Lord Bird? What I hope to spot is another elusive species, rare and endangered, maybe even extinct. I feel like a frustrated sky-watcher or avid birder, constantly on the lookout, from back roads to Interstate exit ramps; but I haven’t found a one. Not one. Not a single hitchhiker.

The question, of course, betrays my age. Anyone younger than aging Boomers hardly cares. Like my children and their friends, who greet my puzzlement with polite indifference. Or like my younger colleagues, who look at me as if I’m crazy when I ask if they’ve ever hitchhiked.

But once upon a time, hitchhikers were everywhere — and everybody: Not only students like myself, who hitched for the pure thrill of it and the rite of passage it conferred. But also, of course, migrants looking for work, in the tradition of the Depression-era hobos. And adventurers of all ages and socioeconomic classes, following their hearts in the romance of the open road. Not to mention supposed axe-murderers, sexual predators, and serial killers, stories about whom comprised the currency we hitchhikers traded: something to brag about, raw experience for its own sake, badges of courage, eliciting both shudders and laughter, fear and delight. Of course, we never shared these stories with our parents.

“When you ride alone, you ride with Hitler!” During the gas rationing days of World War II, government propaganda actually encouraged hitchhiking. And such was the free-ride, open-road culture back then that the “Miss Manners” of the time, Emily Post, addressed the proper etiquette of bumming rides in her advice columns. Not until the early 1970’s did the culture start to change.

So what happened? Where did all the hitchhikers go? Where have all the cowboys gone?

Any guy over the age of, say, 55, when asked about hitchhiking, will smile; his eyes might even twinkle; then tales will be told. Take Ralph Nader, for a random, seemingly unlikely, and thus fairly typical example: “You met all kinds of people,” Nader said of this formative experience. “Executives would pick me up, tree surgeons, bricklayers, doctors, truck drivers. Not only did I learn a lot…but you had to adapt to all kinds of personalities. And, remember, you were helping people, too. Some of the drivers would pick you up because they were sleepy and you would keep them awake just by talking to them.”

Hitchhiking, unlike just about any other human activity (with the possible exception of fly-fishing), combined the practical with the poetic. It was easy, cheap transportation — and no less reliable than getting around in today’s world of flight delights and traffic jams. More importantly, it was a metaphor: not simply words on a page or some other kind of dry abstraction, but a trope you could actually live and breathe. And that trope was this: freedom, absolute, total freedom, and a landscape of unlimited horizons — what America was supposedly all about. Go where you wanta go, do what you wanta do.

As with most things long gone, appreciation is most finely honed in retrospect. Without hitchhiking, I would have never known, never connected with the deaf-mute, the long-haul trucker, and countless others. And I at least would have been the poorer. The all-male, mostly white college I would attend that fall wasn’t yet “enriched by diversity,” but hitchhiking was. The people I met hitchhiking were like rare books that I otherwise would never been allowed to take down from the library shelf.

And more: An invisible, unwritten contract was drawn with people you had not yet but were destined to meet. When you were driving a car yourself, it was payback time, so you picked up other hitchhikers. It was a moral obligation, and trust was the currency you traded.

Tocqueville, that 19th-century road-tripper, would have no doubt been pleased. It was community spirit like this, coupled with the coexisting yet contrary impulse toward rugged individualism, which made the American character unique. So if the cocoon-like automobile represented one side of the American character — vanity-plate individualism to the point of isolation — then Americans’ other side was expressed in hitchhiking.

Were Tocqueville to be reincarnated today, he’d likely be a social scientist into quantitative analysis — — seems plausible, right? And so he could hatch a brand new quality of life (QOL) index, which the U.S. Highway Administration might call VMTH — Vehicle Miles Traveled Hitchhiking. That measurement might be just as valid as the so-called Popsicle Index, Broken Window Theory, Gross National Happiness, or Physical Quality of Life Index (PQLI) — all designed to provide more nuanced meaning to the Standard of Living as Per Capital GDP.

With the VMTH now hovering close to a statistical zero, we Americans, each and every one of us, are all “bowling alone.” At the turn of the 21st Century, that popularized conceit made another social scientist, Robert Putnam, famous. Bowling alone, riding alone. They sound the same.

Long before 9/11 and the War on Terror, we became terrified of hitchhikers — that is, terrified of ourselves. Like prohibited items at airport security, hitchhiking can even be against the law in some places now. Not that such laws are needed for drivers who keep their windows rolled up, feet heavy on the accelerator, and eyes straight ahead (except when rubbernecking).

Like the Interstate highways, designed to connect us, the Internet’s instantaneous communication has seemed only to drive us further apart. Fear and mistrust is the climate we’ve grown acclimated to. Political extremists and special interests are fearful of compromise; elected representatives, fearful of their retaliation. Where we live is increasingly self-segregated, ideologically and economically. With our gated-community mentality, fellow Americans become scary strangers; and people standing with thumbs outstretched by the side of the road are the scariest and — given their scarcity — the strangest.
***

A retired journalist and publisher, the author can be reached at walter@rappnews.com