By Betty Aberlin

"I got my precious card in l954 in SANDHOG, a folk-opera which played a theater at 12th Street & Second Avenue, NYC,(now a multi-plex). It was 5 blocks away from Manhattan General (now a condominium, The Rutherford) where I was born. A "Red-by-association" ("Commie Show Opens at Phoenix!"), I joined an extraordinary multi-ethnic interracial cast and became a member of Equity. I've been "just an (Off-)Broadway Baby, walkin' off my tired feet" - the Equity Lounge was and is still the place to rest, to check the casting notices, and to see us in all our glory, from the juveniles to the elder lings. It's the catbird seat for perspective. From rehearsals in the old Yiddish Theaters on Houston Street, to straw-hat and National Touring and bus and truck companies of shows like West Side Story, Stop The World - I Want To Get Off & The Mad Show, to Broadway, Cafe Crown, and the original companies of I'm Getting My Act Together and Taking it on the Road, Yours, Anne & Alice in Concert, through the all-night sessions as organizer for Save The Theaters - from the 6am cattle-calls to the "Next!" of the audition rooms - it has been a gift to have my Equity Card as an emblem of the work. (Please let's go back to the line-drawn logo, though: this one is not very human!) A Stephen Sondheim song so funny I had to sing it ("Boy From") led me to Pittsburgh, where I first talked to a striped tiger named Daniel, so beginning a 33 year long skein of Make-Believe as Lady Aberlin, niece of King Friday XIII, on PBS's Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. Despite the waxwork-museum revivals (however enhanced by shining talents), and the Disney extravaganzas, the cast-by-TV gimmickry, the neon ad-biz sight-pollution of the formerly classic Great White Way, despite the gentrification of 42nd street, the constancy of change, and the price of a ticket - Equity survives, and the communion between player and audience, in the cavernous theaters and the jewel-boxes alike - is unbroken. See you at the next open call!"