137- LINDA LAVIN...At WILLIAM And MARY'S PHI BETA KAPPA HALL.....

This is a guy who likes and appreciates many of the arts! It was a pleasure and neat experience to attend "An Evening with Linda Lavin...Songs and Confessions of a One-Time Waitress" this past Sunday evening, November 2nd, on the College of William and Mary campus. It was a Musical Revue to benefit the Virginia Shakespeare Festival.
Miss Lavin, with a backup trio, sang and talked about her very first year as a coed at W&M. She was caring and sincere and gave, often, praise for her early professors in the Drama Dept. and to the musicians on stage with her Sunday evening. She was sooo real, down to earth.
I talked with some friends who had had the opportunity to talk with her before the performance, backstage, and also came away highly impressed with Miss Lavin as a genuine, giving person!
This guy learned, too, about her goal to "make it" in the entertainment business. After graduating from our W&M, she left for the Big Apple, struggling to be a success, but always, she stressed, NOT taking the road to any performance that would lower her personal standards of mores. During her little Q & A on stage, I asked her a question.
It wasn't until she, and others, moved to the West Coast where the action relocated, did she get that BIG break...remember Linda Lavin in TV's "ALICE", that lasted for nine (9) years? She has since acted, with kudos, in many productions. When she went to Wilmington, N.C. once, she fell in life with the town and is now living there. She and her husband found an old rundown gas station there and remodeled it into the Red Barn Studio Theatre for their own productions in a place that seats only about 45 theatregoers. Wilmington, by the way, is where "Dawson's Creek" was filmed!!!!
Oh, forgot...Miss Lavin, as a W&M freshman, was awarded the 'star' part for her very first role....Juliet. I seemed to have forgotten the title of that Shakespearean play!