Helena Clare Pittman, one of the Center’s most dedicated teachers, has written, painted, and taught her entire life. In her monthly Helena Writes series, she shares a lifetime of wisdom, one pearl at a time.
In her 73rd post, Helena shares a core memory of play-acting with her sister, Jolene. Enjoy!
Doctor Jo
I wonder if children play Doctor in these odd medical times. I can’t imagine what that game would look like. When we were children, Doctor, along with House, and the many street games and Spaulding bouncing games, potsie, and Cowboys and not Native Americans, not Cowboys and First Peoples, but Cowboys and Indians were the way we spent our long days on the street in spring and summer. Winters meant snow games, or indoor visits, sometimes Doctor, but those were secret, unsupervised games.
I only remember playing Doctor with my sister once, though that one monumental time may be an amalgam of memories.
My sister, Jolene, was born cool. I can see it in the pictures my father took of her. Three and a half years older than me, there is always a mystery about her face. Something contained. Moon in Pisces, I learned years later, as good an explanation as any. There’s a picture of Jo posing with her tennis racket. That racquet was the equivalent of me posing with a paint brush and palette and easel. It was a sacred object. My sister was an athlete. In this time of women’s sports, she probably would have competed.
And my sister Jo had a kind of dignity that fostered respect. There was nothing vulgar about her, and I’d have to add that there was nothing vulgar about anyone in our family. Maybe we came from royalty. I’ve never had the courage to do an ancestor search, because I know where it would lead—to Vilna, the population lined up and shot by the Nazis in WWII, when the letters stopped coming. That was the way my Cousin Nettie once said it. And said it once.
Maybe we were potato farmers; that was the story I heard. But if you look at a photo of my grandfather, he looks like a prince. His cheekbones are high, his nose, fine. An aristocrat. All of his children said that, and they said it in hushed tones.
We lived in the age of antibiotics. A blessing so sacred to my father, the miracle that his children would live, overshadowed his deep knowledge of the world’s trouble. My father was a scientist, a physicist. He understood that vista, understood it to his soul.
The doctors that came to see us, as doctors did when we were children, during that era of medical care, Dr. Brumberger, a stern presence, and later, Dr. Weichsel, a kind man who’s shoulders seemed weighted with compassion, gave a penicillin shot, that wonder drug that saved my father’s children’s lives, and so his own, brought an air of such importance into our house on Crown Street. The house retained the fragrance of the worn and knobbled leather medical bags that snapped open and snapped shut, wetted wooden tongue depressors left on the night table, instructions to take aspirin, prescriptions jotted and signed with fountain pen, the doctors’ voices, their perfect breath, the smell of their overcoats, and the mystique of their knowledge. Doorbell rings, doctor enters, mercury thermometer, cold, green plastic cones poked into the ears. Stomach prodded—palpated. Doctors touched their patients then. The worried parents. The pajamas pulled down, the shot given. The tears. But my father’s children lived.
I have memories of my father, not my mother, waking me in the deep hours of the night to give me a teaspoon of a sweet tasting stuff, and a glass of water to wash it down. This awakening was gravely serious. His children would get well.
Want to play Doctor? asked the children, the boys and girls, of Crown Street, Donna PuKatch, Harvey Salzman, Stevie Berman, Aylene Muntzer, Evie Mehlman, and, maybe, me—one from our repertoire of games. But that game, played in the bushes, or hidden behind the concrete wall of the alley, wasn’t sacred. It crossed the borders children cross in the absence of adults. These were the years when children played their games on the street, stayed out all day, morning to evening, until they were called in for lunch then supper.
But my sister and I weren’t supervised either. Children were children and grownups were grownups. And in our privacy the borders we crossed were conflict driven. We fought, vicious sibling fights that sometimes drew blood. Fighting that brought our parents running in to get between us, fighting that grieved our father.
When my sister and I played Doctor, we never crossed boundaries. My sister was a born actor. I might have been five, she, 8 and a half. She was a fine, knowledgeable medic, one who had spent 10 years in medical school, four of them as a resident. And she never broke character. She was Stanislavski before either of us knew anything about that revered name. She was the Doctor Steinberg, and because she was so thoroughly true, I never broke character, either. I was full of respect, but I wasn’t afraid. There would be no pain inflicted, no injections, and no violation of either of our privacy. I see now that my sister Jolene was a homeopathic doctor, another name we would not know for half a lifetime. She practiced homeopathic medicine; she used natural remedies. She’d wet a tissue with tap water, ordinary water from our bathroom sink. She’d wring the tissue almost dry, then ask me to open my hand. Then she’d press the damp tissue into my palm and close my hand gently around it. “Now, don’t open your hand,” she’d say. And I didn’t until she said I could.
Lee Strassburg’s Actor’s Studio, descendent of Stanislavsky. I’d enter the game with all the belief that comes naturally to a theatrically inclined child—it takes a good audience to see the truth of a good actor. It takes a younger sister—my sister Jolene’s captive audience, me, captive by family, and by the ethereal magic of my sister, my sister, Jolene.
What games did you play as a child? If you have siblings, what is one of your strongest memories of play with them, and have you ever written about it? What did you think of Helena’s latest column? Share with us in the comments.
Related reading: Helena Writes
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