at HB Studio with Robert DeNiro

In 1965, I attended HB Studio and was enrolled in a scene study class. James Patterson was the teacher. Robert DeNiro was my acting partner. We did a scene from The Diary of Anne Frank: I was Anne and Robert DeNiro was Peter van Daan. 

Over they years, I continued off and on at HB Studio... and Bill Hickey became my favorite instructor. Sam Groom told me I could find a lot of work in acting, but I never wanted to leave the stability of my day job.

In about 2010, I was once again at HB Studio, but that time it was to read three of my poems. I received the best reaction from: 

WHAT WAY TO GO TODAY

Almost dusk:

Last summer on one Wednesday, in July,

I sat on a bench, a grey wooden tired

Bench on a boardwalk out at old Long Beach.

In the sky a lonely and lost grey kittiwake tipped

As the hot pink sun set in blazing technicolor over

Hot pinkish sand and the fading blue ocean water.

That morning:

I had thought about seeing great art...

Vermeer, or Courbet, or maybe Monet.

But, I drove to the beach instead to think

To think about everything creative that had been

Created before I got here, and when I was here,

And what will be created when I leave this place.

When one day I leave my place and all places in my

Consciousness that is now in this time and was

At a past time and will be in some next time;

Maybe all time exists at the same time.

The great minds of theoretical physicists search

For the "Theory of Everything" as they sit

In their cluttered rooms, their great thinking rooms.

In universities, they ponder the mathematical equations

And Schrodinger's cat and all those mysteries.

In the evening:

It is during the quiet and still and sad night when

I miss most the people I never met:

Edie Beale, and the Rat Pack, and even Rod Serling

Who made me want to time travel: to go back to simpler places

Like Nedick's, or the Belmore, or Bickford's, and Willoughby.

Then the longing, a longing when distant sounds and faraway

Foghorns drive thoughts to reflect on a life visible through some

Smoky cracked mirror, a haunted and haunting steamy mirror.

As I am sort of old now and getting older

There is a vague and odd feeling that I,

Like the kittiwake, somehow must have lost the way.

© 2009 Marjorie Levine

When I left HB Studio on that day in 2010, I was filled with nostalgia and I remembered back to 1965 when the view west on Bank Street was very different. The Hudson River was blocked by the West Side Elevated Highway: