"Upon graduation from Mount Holyoke College in 1955, I expected to..."

 
I'm Elizabeth White Saunders. I graduated from Mount. Holyoke in 1955. I was a speech and drama major. It wasn't, in those days, actually a full department. We had to do a little in the speech department, a little in the English department and we did have a few drama courses in the lab theatre, which was as big as pushing a postage stamp, but it sufficed and we did some really interesting things there. You have since gotten a much better set up for your theatre majors and that department has grown, much to my pleasure. When I graduated from Mount Holyoke I expected to continue in the theatre. I had worked in summer stock all through my four years of college, gotten my equity card during that time and went to Columbia University presumably to get an MFA in theatre arts, but one of the professors there said 'you know you're basically wasting your time, if you want to be in the theatre or do you want to teach?' I thought 'I have had enough of academia for the time being' and decided that I would take his advice and I went downtown to study with Uda Hagen in the Bourgo Studios, which is still in existence, and although Uda died just a short time ago, she continued acting until about a year before she died-amazing woman. At that time, in New York, there were probably four or five off-Broadway houses, so opportunities for actors (actresses as we called them then) were very limited and you did a show, if you were fortunate and then you looked for your next job. So there was generally quite a distance between one job and the next. There was television and I had an opportunity between my junior and senior year to take a job with Arthur Penn at the Philco Playhouse but I made a decision to get my college degree. I came back to Mount Holyoke and got my degree. No one pressured me, I just wanted to finish this and I thought I should have this college degree. My mother had gone to college and graduated from Wellesley and in her era that was relatively unusual and it was something that I aspired to do. I had no intentions of going back into teaching or doing something that I thought I would need a degree for, I just wanted to finish the job I had started. So, when I went back to New York, I didn't have the job with Philco and I had to start looking for something. I did part time work at the Hudston Guild, which is a social services job in New York City, doing part time work and trying to make ends meet with a few acting opportunities in television, primarily because theatre work was hard to get and didn't pay very much, but I was hired for summer stock by my husband-to-be. We went on to get married and work together in theatre but as soon as we started having children, we got into more commercial work and I ended up twenty-five years in the business world in sales for an archives company. My theatre experience was very helpful In that, but now I am volunteering back in the theatre, having retired from business and working with an off-Broadway production house call the Women's Project and Productions. And that's where I am now. Thank you