Still, I wanted her approval, because she was the main one at Howard who refused to give it to me. It doesn’t matter if practically an entire audience of hundreds of people stand on their chairs and jump and holler and scream your name as they cheer you wildly on, you will notice only the one person sitting in the chair with her lips pursed and her hands clasped on her lap, giving you a dead-eyed stare that screams, “They may be impressed, but I’m not.” That was Professor Katz. She was thoroughly uninspired by my hustle and made a point of letting me know that when it came to the craft, I was more con artist than actress. “Go deeper!” she would yell, interrupting my class monologues to chastise me for leaning on tricks to grab the attention of my peers. Always my instinct would be to talk loud, throw my body into it—to make the scene, the lines, grand. But Professor Katz would have none of it; she saw a deeper actress. A thinking actress. She insisted that I consider what happened to my character in the moments before the scene, so that when I opened my mouth, I was responding not to what I’d memorized from the page, but to the emotions the experience conjured. “No, no, no, I don’t believe it!” she would yell, interrupting my lines. “You’re clever and you make good choices, but what’s behind those choices? What does your character want? You have to think like humans think. Don’t stop thinking just because somebody wrote the words on a page. You’re not a robot. You still have to think!”
Understand, getting ripped apart and torn to shreds was frightening in front of a classroom of peers who audition and fight for the same roles as you. But Professor Katz didn’t care about such things. To hell with my ego. She seemed to take great pleasure in drawing blood.
Our conflict came to a head over my portrayal in a play penned by a fellow Howard alum, Guinea Bennett, a good friend of mine who, after graduation, went on to found the Soul Rep Theater Company in Dallas, Texas. Guinea and I were members of a collective of crazy, artsy seventies babies who dressed alike, listened to the same music, and, in the way that kindred spirits do, created together. We even had our own monikers, cherry-picked from names popular in our birth decade: Leroy, Tyrone, Juanita, Suge. I was Cookie Gwendolyn Jones. Yes, “Cookie.” We called our little collective Soul Nation, and Guinea wrote and produced a play for us, Cracking Up, about a group of girls in college dealing with heavy issues such as pregnancy, drug dealing, and several other societal ills surrounding our campus—a play so beautifully penned that the Howard drama department agreed to let us produce it on its stage. That play was a hit; we sold out every night, with students from the fine arts department and beyond lining up to come see us. My character was a standout: I had blond braids and was loud and brash and in-your-face, and I got all the laughs of the night with my one-liners. I was the star. And every night when I stood up on that stage and took a bow, I would say a silent, Yeah, take that, Vera Katz. You’re always giving me all that flack in your class, but look what I did. I’m all they talk about . . .
Ego much?
The next time I had her class, I strutted in as if I owned the place. I couldn’t wait to rub my success in her face. But in typical fashion, Professor Katz quietly broke me down. “Miss Henson, you were loud and over the top. It was too big.” Even with all the accolades and applause, even when everybody else was laughing and falling for my jokes, Professor Katz was making it clear my tricks didn’t work for her. I was missing what was on the page. I was a fraud.
The rest of my time there, I worked to get her approval. The last monologue I did for her was a quiet one. There was no yelling, no grand physical gestures; only pure emotion and restrained intensity, which was so much more difficult to do than any of the other tricks I’d employed up until that moment. I’d finally internalized everything she’d been saying to me over our year together. When I said my last word and the class’s applause died down, Professor Katz stood and gave me an easy smile. “All that time, I thought you were fighting and not listening,” she said quietly.
“I was,” I said. “I just had an odd way of showing it.”
We reconciled, and years later, at an awards ceremony where she was being honored and I was a host, I apologized to her. “I know I gave you hell,” I said. “But you are a huge reason why I’m so successful in the business. You challenged me to be a thinker, to always stay alive and be in the moment. To respect the craft.”
? ? ?
I meant that, too. I’d like to think that the choices I’ve made were informed by the way Professor Katz and my other acting coaches, Jemal McNeil and Tony Greco, who taught legendary methods like the Meisner Technique, trained me to engage the work; through them, I learned that hustling as an actress isn’t just about flicking your hair, batting your eyelashes, wearing the cutest outfit, and plowing through the words; it’s about understanding and working the spaces and angles between what is obvious to everyone else, and using those quiet moments to stand out. To win.
That is the hallmark of a true hustler.
5
My One and Only Love Story
We had that Jody and Yvette Baby Boy kind of love—passionate, raw, and “young, dumb, and out of countrol,” like the tragically immature, stunted main character in John Singleton’s critically acclaimed, urban cult classic. That’s what you get, though, when you mix youth with inexperience, shake in some hood, and boil it with a heap of hot tempers: an intoxicating brew of tragic ghetto love.