And Do Remember Me by Marita Golden Page B

as a receptionist in a doctor’s office to pay the rent. Lincoln taughtwriting at the New School and City College and had an informal but not yet lucrative arrangement with a theater company in Brooklyn to write for them.
    She was nearing Lincoln Center. It was five o’clock and the streets were jammed with traffic, teeming with pedestrians. Gradually, unconsciously, she had abandoned the leisurely gait that had carried her across the terrain of her life in the south. Now Pearl walked, like everybody else in Manhattan, as though her life depended on it. She walked as though in flight from unimaginable, yet certainly impending, danger. She walked as though the essence of life itself lay in the speedy, efficient propulsion of her arms and legs. She walked now, she was sure, with more purpose than she had ever possessed before.
    When Pearl opened the door of the Gingerman, she immediately saw Simone at a table near the front window. Simone was wearing a wig so Pearl figured she must have had an audition today, too. Six feet, pecan-colored, possessed of a laugh that could raise the dead, Simone—who only used one name—was pushing forty. She liked to say “pushing it out the way.” A decade earlier, she had come to New York from Kansas City with plans to make it big, and had been only marginally successful, playing small, sporadic roles on a couple of the daytime soap operas, being an understudy for countless roles, doing regional theater. But despite her lack of major success she was determined to “stay in the fight” as she liked to say, because, she often told Pearl, “Honey, I got my pride, and I aim to take a bite out of the apple before it takes a bite outta me.” Simone had started a support group for black actresses, which Pearl had found out about, and they had hit it off. The Shebas met informally once a month and the meetings were part therapy, part crying on shoulders and part sharing of information about what was coming up, developing in the business.
    “Well, if you don’t look like hell,” Simone said, when Pearl slumped into the chair across from her. “Was it that bad?”
    “Worse. I never had them. Not for one moment during the entire audition. I don’t know what happened.” Pearl kicked off her shoes under the table and rubbed one foot against the other.
    “Maybe this wasn’t your part.”
    “It
was
, Simone, I swear it was.”
    “Well, honey, you and every other black actor in this city or in a two-thousand-mile radius is saying the same thing this evening. A revival of
Raisin in the Sun
, you knew the competition would be crazy. And I warned you a callback don’t mean you got the gig. You ain’t got the part till you standing on stage opening night, and even then watch your back.”
    The waiter came to their table and Pearl ordered a glass of wine.
    “Well, where are you coming from?”
    “Told you I had that audition for the Coca-Cola commercial, right?”
    “Yeah, how’d it go?”
    “The director told me I didn’t sound black enough. Can you dig that? I didn’t sound black enough. When the bastard’s back was turned I started rolling my eyes, makin em big and bug-eyed and mouthing ‘Mammy.’ Told
me
I didn’t sound black enough. I was sixty seconds away from slapping him.”
    The waiter brought her wine and Pearl reached for it eagerly.
    “I can see the headlines now,” Pearl said. “Crazed black actress assaults director.”
    “Driven over the edge by stereotyped roles,” Simone said.
    “Were there a lot of people?”
    “Now what do you think? If we’d had some fried chicken and some sangria we could’ve had a party.”
    “I just don’t know what to do, Simone. I’m so starved for a role I’d do almost anything.”
    “I saw an ad for a role in a porn flick.”
    “You know what I mean. I feel like I’m just marking time until my next role. Nothing seems to matter unless it takes place under the lights, on stage.”
    “I was a stripper once, between jobs,”