ABOUT TIME
By Linda Spector
1999

I've always been interested in doing theater. It probably started when I was a little kid going to Yiddish school, and they were doing a Hanukah play and I was really rambunctious. They threw me out. So there was always a repressed desire to be on the stage again.

Audrey Goodfriend was born in New York City in 1920, the daughter of Jewish anarchists. She grew up speaking Yiddish. When she started school, she couldn't speak a word of English. When she was six, her family moved to a cooperative housing project in the Bronx called Shalom Aleichem House, started by American leftists to perpetuate Yiddish culture. She learned to argue politics at the age of 11, and later at Hunter College, became a pacifist, taking the Oxford Pledge not to support the United States in a war of any kind.

When Audrey left home at 18 in the summer of 1939, she and a friend traveled to Canada to visit Emma Goldman, the famous anarchist.

When she first walked down the stairs, she seemed a very frail old woman, but when she began expressing herself, I realized she was a very vital, vibrant person. That was quite a lesson.

Audrey continued her anarchist activities when she moved to the Bay Area in 1946. Twelve years later she became one of the founders of the alternative Walden School in Berkeley, teaching various age groups for 13 years.

In 1980, Audrey joined Stagebridge and has been taking classes and working in productions ever since. What a variety of roles she has played -- a depressed woman in Health: Lost and Found; the "How Lady" in the Enchanted Why; Marietta Stowe, a feisty women's rights activist in Sinners and Suffragists; and Mary Austin, a fascination 19th century nature writer in Jack London and Friends. She's also been in five Grandparent Tales, playing Strega Nona (the good witch) twice. She's played a wicked queen, a mother a few times, and the "old woman in the shoe." She certainly satisfied her repressed desire to do some acting.

It's kept my mind active. I've had to work at memorizing lines, even when I felt I would never learn them. It's also taught me to work with people whose energies and concerns are different from mine. I also love watching the development of the play from the beginning script to production; it's a very exciting process. Learning to adapt is good for older people. We do a lot of that when we're performing, especially when we travel to different schools.

It would be an understatement to say that at 78, Audrey keeps busy. She has been the bookkeeper at Moe's Books in Berkeley for more than 25 years; she swims every morning at the YWCA; still serves on the board of Walden School; and last but indeed not least, has two children, four grandchildren and on great grandchild.

If you're older, your children are older. Then you can have grandchildren and great grandchildren, and that's very nice.

What a role model -- thanks for all the years, Audrey.