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Harold Prince
Broadway Producer and Director
I caught on to plays as reading matter. I don't do that much anymore, but I think it must have been a hell of a good idea, because I knew all those plays, all the history of plays from even pre-turn-of-the-20th century, and I read them all and loved reading them, to the exclusion sometimes of great books. And then I got to know very early on -- I'm very lucky -- I got to know a lot of those playwrights, be in the same room with Robert Sherwood and his like. There were a lot of great playwrights around. Sidney Kingsley I knew very well, and Elmer Rice I met, a whole lot of people like that.
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Harold Prince
Broadway Producer and Director
Harold Prince: I am very organized. I don't sit around and do little dots and drawings. When you first start directing -- the very first job I ever got, which was a stock job, directing -- you do little drawings of where you want your actors to go in the scenery. The first play was Angel Street. You know. Gaslight, I think the movie was called. And then you go in and you start to rehearse the actors, and then the actors, one of them says, "I would love to try going in that direction instead," and there is your whole job gone. Somebody who goes somewhere you didn't want them to go, what about all the rest of those people? So preparation is another kind of thing. Preparation is getting everything you need to know of a sensory nature about the characters, where the story is taking place, all those things. I mean what things smell like, taste like, sound like, and so on. That is an exercise you share with your designer as well. Boris Aronson taught me that years ago.
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Harold Prince
Broadway Producer and Director
He was the greatest designer that ever lived, I think. He would never design anything. I never saw him pick up a pen and draw something and say, "What do you think of this?" Instead, he'd say, "Let's talk about the food. Let's talk about what the restaurants were like. Let's talk about the sound on the street. Let's talk about " So Cabaret, for one, was a black box with selective bits of scenery and one huge surprise. I looked at the model for the first time, and there was this waffled, wobbly, funhouse mirror angled at the audience. They came in and sat down, they could see this distorted view of themselves, and it's like saying, "That's your metaphor, folks!" Sort of like the factory in Sweeney.
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Harold Prince
Broadway Producer and Director
I have two left feet, but my direction is characterized, I think, in some of the best work, by movement, and by how I will move a block of people you would call an ensemble or a chorus. And they are moving the way dancers would move. Their feet aren't doing anything, because I wouldn't know how to tell them that, but I can move them. Jerry moved people diagonally across the stage, from upstage down, directly downstage, turn around, move directly upstage. Strange energies come from all of that. The theater that he entered and that I entered moved laterally. They'd drop a drop, and things would move from left to right or right to left. They changed the scenery upstage. You would open there would be doors. I haven't had a door in a show for as long as I can remember. That whole world of inviting the audience to use its imagination and fill in the blank spaces is the difference between what I do and what people who do realistic films and so on do. Films weren't always realistic. I love old black-and-white silent films. They were forced perspective and all kinds of strange wonderful things that I use in the theater.
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Dan Rather
Broadcast Journalist
I worked on my high school newspaper. I hung around newspapers. I sometimes would take the bus downtown and just hang around the old Houston Press. I ran coffee there and sort of struck up friendships with newspaper people. And I wrote a lot and kept a journal. It was only years later when I read a Walker Percy essay on the difference between a journal and a diary that I even knew the difference between a journal and a diary, but it turns out I was actually keeping a journal, as crude as it was. A journal is you tell what happened and what you thought about it.
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Dan Rather
Broadcast Journalist
This was not a college radio station. It was a commercial radio station, 250 watt AM station, lowest wattage allowed by the FCC. KSAN, run by the late Pastor Ted Lott. He was the whole thing, but he needed somebody part-time to help him, and Hugh got me the job at the radio station. I wrote ads. I tried to sell ads. I wasn't any good at selling. And it was great for me. For one: it helped keep me in school. Two: there was so much to do you didn't have time to think about it, and so you just did it. Three: it was such a small environment that I was allowed to make mistakes, and you learn by making mistakes.
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Dan Rather
Broadcast Journalist
I worked for AP, and worked for UP, and worked with the old INS, the International News Service. Later I worked at a radio station. I was the sports information director at the college, which paid, I think, eight dollars a week. I did the statistics for the college teams. But this was a very strong learning curve period for me that I didn't realize at the time, but I was really soaking up a lot of education, skills that I could later use at the radio station. I did everything at the radio station. I was a disk jockey. I did live programs at night for the local funeral home. I sang with them when they sang the gospel choir. I did play-by-play football, basketball, baseball, track. Whoever heard of doing play by play track? I did it. And I did it all. Football? I did junior high school football on Wednesday. I did the black high school football games on Thursday. This was a segregated society in the 1940s. I did the high school football games -- white high school games -- on Friday, and I did the college games on Saturday. That's a lot of air time. A lot of time to be ad libbing. And I didn't realize at the time but I was in the process of making myself a very strong ad libber. I don't mean that in any conceited way but just -- you can't do that much live broadcasting and not develop the ability to ad lib. And under Hugh Cunningham's tutelage I was reading great books because he demanded that we do that, and also putting a newspaper together. So this was a busy time. It was a tremendous learning curve for me.
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Sally Ride
First American Woman in Space
I was a physics major actually from almost the first day that I walked in the door at Swarthmore, and I was certainly a physics major -- declared a physics major -- when I first got to Stanford. But about midway through my junior year at Stanford, I had been taking so many physics and chemistry and math courses, which were all required for a physics major, that I just needed some courses, almost to regain my sanity, get a little more balance into my life, and I started taking English courses pretty much on a whim. I had a friend who was an English major and so I decided to go ahead and try a couple of English classes, and I really enjoyed them. It turned out that I kept taking the English classes, had a focus on Shakespearean literature, and ended up with enough units to also have a major in English.
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Sally Ride
First American Woman in Space
Sally Ride: I had never flown anything, not a thing. I had flown in very large airplanes, but I had never flown anything. But NASA was looking for -- you know, the astronaut corps at that time was still primarily test pilots, but they had some scientists in the corps, and they had made it clear that with the Space Shuttle program, they actually needed an astronaut corps that was more than 50 percent scientists and engineers, less than 50 percent test pilots, so they made it very, very clear that they wanted people with science and engineering backgrounds, and that the test pilot or even a pilot background was not required, they'd teach us everything we needed to know about that.
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Sally Ride
First American Woman in Space
Sally Ride: I was surprised to be chosen. I was fairly certain that I would make it a reasonably long way in the selection process, because I was pretty well qualified to apply. I was going to have a Ph.D. by the time the selection process was over, and I had a good athletic background, which NASA -- they don't necessarily look for an athletic background, but they look for a variety of different backgrounds that show that you have got a variety of interests and particularly showed that you can collaborate well with people, work as part of a team, communicate with people. So I knew that I had a reasonable chance to go a reasonable distance in the selection process, but I didn't think for a minute that I was going to be selected.
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