Today, my book is published. This is the realization of a dream that I had given up on long ago. But my most overwhelming emotion today, and every time I look at the finished book, is sadness.
It would be wrong to say that I wrote Another Day’s Begun for any one person. Presumably like any other author, I wrote it for many people to read. But the person who I most wanted to read it, who I most wanted to have place it on her bookshelf, cannot.
Catherine “Kaki” Marshall was a mentor to me in my days as a student at the University of Pennsylvania, and I am hardly her only protegee. Many kids at Penn, from the late 70s to the early 90s, would find their way to Kaki’s office, on the mezzanine level of the Annenberg Center, when she was the Associate Managing Director there, for knowledge, for caring. There was, quite literally, always an open door, unless you wanted to talk privately; I can’t recall her ever shutting anyone out for her own needs.
Having gone to Penn already in love with theatre, but convinced by many that it was no way to make a living or a life, I took stabs at other fields of interest, but none really resonated. I was most engaged with my time in the Annenberg Center, in my work study job in the box office, 20 hours each week, during my freshman and sophomore years. I joined the Penn Players, the school’s longest established drama troupe, and in two semesters, I directed two shows, staged managed one, and appeared in one. Kaki was the faculty adviser
Having met Kaki and grown friendly with her – mind you, she was a contemporary of my parents, with children of her own around my age – I was able to be assigned to her office for my work-study gig in my junior and senior years. To this day, I don’t remember doing any work beyond answering the phone. What I remember is sitting in Kaki’s office talking about theatre and constantly borrowing books from her wide, multi-tiered shelves – every book about theatre and nothing else. Because Penn had no theatre program, Kaki was my undergraduate theatre curriculum.
I also recall one particular totem on those bygone shelves: a small, square fading color photo of Kaki and Hal Prince, in swim clothes, lounging on chaises at what Kaki told me was Hal’s vacation place in Spain. Hal was one my first theatre idols and, thanks to Kaki, I met him for the first time when I was a junior – and we sat together in Kaki’s office and talked. Kaki had done theatre at Penn with Hal when they were both students, and he remained her friend until he passed away.
In those last two years of college, when I was ostensibly working for her, we grew quite close, bonded by my overwhelming stress about school and career as well as by a personal tragedy in her family. We discussed these subjects openly, and she was for me – and again, I know for others – my theatre mom. She understood my concerns and worries and interests and desires and she supported them with knowledge and perspective. Her office was less my job and more my refuge. Kaki understood my love of theatre in a way my parents, always supportive but not personally invested in theatregoing or theatremaking, could not.
On the last day I saw Kaki on campus before graduating, I vividly remember telling her that I would always keep in touch. “Oh, Howard,” she said, “so many students say that. But with time and distance, it doesn’t often happen, and you need to know that I understand and it’s OK.”
Having introduced this essay talking about my sadness, this is where you might think I’ll now tell you about drifting away from Kaki and regretting the loss of our bond. But that wasn’t the case – I did realize what I had found in her, every minute, and was determined not to lose it.
I was faithful and would call every couple of months to share my news and hear hers. I would look for any pretext to visit Philadelphia, and always include a visit with Kaki, and with her husband Joe too, who I knew to have had a similarly influential effect on his students at Temple Law School.
Most every summer, I would spend a long weekend with Kaki and Joe at their beach home on the southern Jersey shore. We never ran out of things to talk about and, aside from politics and current events, which we discussed with vigor (from the same perspective), our main topic was theatre. Since Joe passed away several years ago, I tried to call Kaki every few weeks.
Our ongoing friendship was such that she always received a call from me on her birthday, year in and year out. She never asked for it, but I know she enjoyed it, proven by a call perhaps 10 years ago. I was in England in late September, as I usually am at that time, when my phone rang as it rarely did when people knew I was traveling. Kaki’s name showed on the screen.
Given to bouts of pessimism, I feared something was wrong. I answered by saying, “Kaki, hi, is everything OK?” With a laugh she replied, “Everything’s fine. But I wanted to know if everything is OK with you?” “I’m fine,” I responded. “I’m in England, remember? Why are you concerned?” “Because it’s my birthday,” she said, “and all of my kids have called now but I haven’t heard from you and I got worried.”
She also spoke to me every year on my birthday, though she didn’t know it. I always made a point of calling on that day because I certainly never expected her to keep track of the date, not with six children and more than a dozen grandchildren, plus siblings and nieces and nephews and cousins. Every year on these calls, I never pointed out my birthday, but we would mark that it was the birthday of Hal Prince. That date is two days from now.
We continued to go to the theatre together when possible, as we had when I was a student. I can’t recall which was when, but I believe our final two shows seated side by side were Tectonic Theatre Project’s two-part The Laramie Project and The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later, which we saw on a single marathon day, and Bill Irwin’s The Happiness Lecture.
For 36 years, I would call, I would send her things I wrote and we’d discuss them, and when face to face, we would laugh together and have the kind of earnest talks about theatre that I always craved. Because of this, because of the bookshelves in her Annenberg office where I learned so much, my greatest desire has been to know that Kaki had read my book and had it on her much-reduced home bookshelf, the bulk of her theatre books having been given away years earlier.
Kaki died in August of 2020, not from the virus, but simply in the course that a life runs, and she was not ill very long. She was one month shy of her 95th birthday. It was only weeks from the time she went to the hospital until she died. We had spoken perhaps two weeks before things had started heading in the direction I had feared for some time. I feared it because my parents had both passed years earlier, leaving Kaki as my only true surrogate parent.
Earlier this past summer, I had thought that perhaps I should let Kaki read the manuscript of Another Day’s Begun, not because there seemed to be any imminent concern, but just in case anything happened. She was 94, after all. I decided against it, putting faith in the fact that all of the women in her family were long-lived, quite remarkably so. I wanted her to see a complete finished book, not simply as something on its way to being a book. It was a miscalculation I will always regret.
Countless people have influenced my life, more than I could ever thank in the book or face to face. But I most wanted Kaki to read Another Day’s Begun because she was the one person I could truly credit for fanning the flame of my theatre love and knowledge at the earliest stage. Also, while she had seen shows at theatres where I worked, this book is something that is truly mine, a testament to her support, her help, her faith in me, her love – and her understanding of me.
I cannot share this with Kaki in recognition of all she gave to me. But in her honor, her memory, and with the deep love I felt and feel for Kaki, I share it today with all of you, because she would have been very happy for us all to have a new theatre book for our shelves. And if a student spots a copy on your shelf and expresses interest, please loan it to them, because in that moment, you will do for that student what Kaki did for me, and that act honors our friendship.
