Almost immediately, I picked up a copy of the Providence Phoenix and saw a photo of a woman I did not know but who had a gloriously open-looking face that radiated warmth. In the accompanying article, she was identified as Pat Hegnauer, an actor, playwright, and director who had recently returned to Rhode Island from New York. Then, although I had no reason at the time to be reading the classified ads and never did so, I glanced at them, and out popped a tiny announcement that I carried in my purse for years afterward: "Free acting workshop," it read, offered by Pat Hegnauer.
My heart skipped a beat. As a child and a teenager, I performed in theatre, but when I had an upsetting experience in a play as an undergraduate at Harvard, where it seemed to me that all the theatre types had already appeared on Broadway (yes, hyperbole, but oh, what talent: Just a few examples -- John Lithgow was there when I was there, as was Stockard Channing, as was Tommy Lee Jones, as was the actor and now radio host and activist Terence McNally, as well as Leland Moss, who soon afterward appeared on Broadway in YENTL), I never auditioned for another play until after the Pat Hegnauer workshop.

Yes, I did attend that workshop, but only after phoning my dear friend, Paul Gladstone, a brilliant, Harvard-Ph.D. biologist who had also become part of a terrific improvisation troupe in Seattle called "None of the Above." I confessed to him that I wanted desperately to attend that workshop but was terrified to go. Without my having to explain the reason for my fear, he said immediately, "Well, you won't really become an actor, because that rarely happens. But you'll enjoy it." "Yes!" I said immediately, because he had radically lowered the stakes for me, "I'll just enjoy it!"

Even so, as I drove to Newport for the workshop that Saturday, I was still fairly nervous. I remember thinking, "Oh, God, what if she makes us do improv?" and instantly eradicated my own fear by deciding firmly, "Then I will just quietly slip out the door."

One of the first things Pat Hegnauer, who turned out to be as radiant and illuminating as she had looked in her picture, said was, "As an actor, if you're not failing most of the time, you're not doing it right. You're not taking enough risks." Brilliant! What a way to make us relax right then, redefining failure as success, as something to be proud of, evidence that we were brave enough to try anything. And what a life lesson that turned out to be, one I have thought of many times in many contexts in the almost 17 years since then.

Pat is such a gifted, natural teacher that she had us on our feet, taking turns doing simple acting exercises of various kinds, none of which made me very uncomfortable. Then she asked for two volunteers. Feeling safe and figuring we would all have to be up there at some point doing whatever was the next exercise, I raised my hand, and so did a young woman. Pat looked at the two of us and said, pointing to the other woman, "You enter from there," and to me, "You come in from the opposite side," and "You see each other, and you used to be her teacher. Go!" As I entered, the young woman caught sight of me, and the expression on her face was, "Oh, no! Not her! I'd rather die than encounter her!" She made it easy for me to start trying every way I knew to engage her, to keep her from trying to get away. It was fun. When Pat said we could stop, I went to my seat, and then it hit me, "That was improv!" I did not slip quietly out the door. I stayed and signed up for acting classes.

On the drive home, I realized that the complete involvement of all of one's being that acting asks of us - our feelings, thoughts, bodies - and the intense commitment every moment to what we are doing was what had been missing when I wrote the opening pages of my book.

After just a few acting classes with Pat, I was so thrilled to be back in the world of theatre that I decided to spend three months in Los Angeles, studying acting at the school called Estelle Harman's Actors Workshop. Estelle was a distant cousin, somewhat older than my mother's generation, and she had trained some of the finest actors for on-camera acting. I found LA a tough place to do theatre, at least as youth-obsessed as one hears, but I had the great fortune to spend some important time with Estelle's youngest daughter, Eden Harman (now Eden Harman Bernardy), who was a theatre prodigy as a teacher, playwright, and director. In keeping with the tradition of the family we shared (last name: Karchmer, which was the maiden name of both Estelle and my mother, Tac Karchmer Caplan), Eden and I somehow managed to have a lengthy dinner during which I swear that both of us talked simultaneously, telling the stories of our lives, each of us hearing everything the other one said. Periodically, Eden would burst out with, "Listen to that line! That's a great line! Did you hear what you just said?" At one point, she told me that I should write plays. At that time, I had written quite a few nonfiction books, certainly never thought of myself as imaginative enough to write a play, and was surprised by her comment. I ignored her comment until I was watching a new play about a woman in a mental hospital and had the thought, "I'd love to write a play based on what I've learned about psychiatric diagnosis and how it can destroy people's lives." My next thought was: "Of course, I don't know anything about writing plays, so it will probably turn out that I can't write a play. But now that my kids are no longer at home, I have the luxury of doing something just because I want to learn something from trying. And Eden said I should do it."

I mentioned this to my daughter, Emily, who for my next birthday bought me a book about how to write a play, and that's how I began writing for theatre.

Pat Hegnauer, by the way, also writes gorgeous poetry, was working on a beautiful, inventive novel when I last saw her, and is one of the great relishers of life. Eden Harman Bernardy, in addition to her work in theatre and as a screenwriter, is also a wonderful visual artist and another of the great relishers of life. How lucky I am to have met them both.

What Pat and Eden spoke to in me had been implanted from as far back as my earliest memories. My father, the late Jerome A. Caplan, who was one of the most gifted actors I have ever seen and whom I miss terribly on this Father's Day, and my mother had made sure that my brother and I saw every play we could get to. My mother played records of all the great Broadway musicals all day long, so I learned the words to every song. And every summer, on our drive from Springfield, Missouri, to visit my father's parents and our other relatives in Connecticut, we experienced the great thrill of arriving in New York City, my father taking us to our hotel room and leaving us to wash up, while he raced over to Broadway and came back somehow every time with four tickets to the best show in town.

[1] My book about the DSM is Paula J. Caplan. (1995). They Say You're Crazy: How the World's Most Powerful Psychiatrists Decide Who's Normal. Addison Wesley.