What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [49]
Alidra’s own response to her brother’s death was complicated by a decade of estrangement from her brother. Its origin was her refusal to accede to their father’s wishes that she not go into theater.
A man of the 1950s, Charles Brown had few expectations that his daughter might achieve any professional success. “In his view, I should go to a good college and become a teacher, nurse, or secretary. He didn’t have any way to relate to my artistic gifts. And I think because of my parents’ marriage, where I felt my mother gave up her soul to be a wife and was subject to my father’s erratic, explosive temper, I didn’t want to be married. I couldn’t conceive of a different marriage, one in which one party wasn’t trying to control the other.”
Alidra excelled in and out of school. She showed talent in tennis, ice skating, dance, and art. After high school, she fulfilled her father’s wishes and went to Smith College, in Northampton, Massachusetts. But having spent her adolescence living in Princeton, and having seen her brother go through the university there, there was little mystique left for her in attending an Ivy League college. By her junior year, she wanted to quit college, apply to the Juilliard School in New York, and launch a career in music and theater. To assuage her father’s heated opposition, she transferred to Barnard College. She would, she reasoned, at least be close to the world of the arts. She majored in musicology and began auditioning for Off-Broadway shows. After graduation, she continued voice lessons, sang in dinner clubs, and appeared in the lead role of an opera workshop performance of Francis Poulenc’s opéra bouffe Les Mamelles de Tirésias (The Breasts of Tirésias), which received rave reviews. Using the stage name of Linda Barrie Brown, she then spent eighteen months in a small part in the musical company of Oliver.
That role, along with her career in theater, ended one day during rehearsals. She was singing and suddenly heard the director yelling that he couldn’t hear her voice. “I had always had a strong voice. But all of a sudden, it wasn’t there. I wasn’t seeing a voice coach at the time and didn’t go to a therapist for help. Now, I think it must have been some kind of stage fright. I had always had side jobs, and so I just went to work at something else.” She never returned to theater. Instead, she pursued a series of jobs in real estate sales, textbook acquisition, and public relations before getting a master’s in expressive art therapy. She worked briefly as an art therapist at Bronx State Hospital, then a hotbed of therapeutic innovations. Inspired and envisioning a more stable income, she took a master of social work degree from Hunter College and started a private psychotherapy practice.
It took twenty years, and recovery from breast cancer, for Alidra to reassert her creativity. She was about to begin interviewing potential subjects for the film on passionate elders when a friend mentioned seeing an article about Doris Haddock. At ninety, the woman known as “Granny D” had recently completed a walk across the continental United States to draw attention to the need for campaign finance reform.
Doris had set out on January 1, 1999, from the Rose Bowl Parade in Pasadena, California. She spent the next fourteen months crossing 3,200 miles, thirteen states, and a couple of deserts on foot. Along the way, she wore out four pairs of shoes and overcame searing heat, a hospitalization for dehydration and pneumonia, emphysema, and arthritic aches of all kinds. By the end, she had transformed herself into a serious-minded, if minor, national folk hero and a media darling.
Alidra