AFFIRMATIONS JUDY KRESTON AND THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN
COTTLE, THOMAS J.
AFFIRMATIONS JUDYKRESTON AND THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN THOMAS J. COTTLE "In spite of everything," Anne Frank wrote, "I still believe that people are good." This article is the first in a continuing...
...People get sick, she says, and they recover...
...It scared the hell out of me...
...On the table of Tripps, a Greenwich Village nightclub, one finds a tan card announcing Judy Kreston's program...
...People in the public eye have to reveal these issues...
...she sings, recalling those dreadful hospital club dates...
...What kills me is the people who say now that my singing career is taking off I shouldn't mention the cancer anymore...
...While all this is going on, she ruminates over a woman's recent criticism...
...a plane crash utter paradise...
...In some ways, cabaret singer Judy Kreston is not unlike a host of fellow performers, people, as they say, in the business...
...I don't like green...
...They might well be called the Magnificent Seven...
...Appearing on television to demonstrate new developments in prosthetics, a toy manufacturer has told her, and not without some anger, that if she's going to talk about breasts and prosthetics, she ought to start wearing some tight fitting clothes "so we can see your breasts...
...The author's recent books include Busing, Children in Jail, and Private Lives and Public Accounts...
...Nobody goes through without a struggle...
...Kreston differs from the typical life-style by dint of a series of rather unfortunate exigencies...
...Being a few pounds overweight, now that is serious...
...Someone once suggested," she giggles, "I come on stage on a stretcher attached to an I.V...
...Although we are unable to respond to each proposal, please include your telephone number should we need additional information...
...But the episode required only five weeks in the hospital, so it hardly bears mention...
...Then there is a category called, simply "special thanks to," where one finds the names of seven men...
...A commonly expressed but utterly incorrect assessment of performers is that they are selfish, narcissistic and mindless people...
...Show business backers...
...A cosortium of Broadway angels...
...I love plastic and paying my bills...
...They're not alone in wanting love, attention, recognition, just as they're hardly unique in praying for luck and good health...
...Me and my I.V...
...Proposals should be addressed to our editorial offices at 462 Boylston Street, Boston, Massachusetts, 02116...
...Her background of private schooling, her father's illustrious medical career, her mother's prominence as a world renowned concert pianist make her a little less than typical...
...There's no fun like singing, and the thought of volunteering in a million hospitals and simultaneously signing a contract to do forty weeks a year of concerts is sublime...
...Besides, there would always be time to make a pants suit copied from a Bergdorf Goodman window mannequin, or a cherry Strudel, or a speech on mammography at a local medical convention, or go ice skating daily...
...Ladies and Gentlemen," I would groan, "my sister Judy Cottle...
...You know you live on an edge after cancer surgery...
...Now almost forty years later, and still with envy and dismay and an enormous degree of reverence, I have, in writing these words, made my childhood announcement all over again...
...For twenty-five hours a week she volunteered her services in numerous New York hospitals helping women cope with and transcend the physical and psychological problems associated with cancer and major cancer surgery...
...A fast death sounds gorgeous...
...So, surrounded by her family, her sewing projects, her jewelry tools, bank statements reminding her of the loans she takes out to produce her art, her recipes, her two dogs and four cats, one of whom is missing an eye, another one of whom seems neurologically incapable of coordinating his hind legs, she plans a concert to raise money for the cancer society and a few new gimmicks for Tag Day...
...you're a victim of inadequate treatment...
...And, like so many of her colleagues, she has become an overnight success after about a quarter of a century in the business...
...It's something to consider along with picking out twenty new songs for this year's act and making certain your friend makes good on his promise to deliver a genuine Yankee warm-up jacket to your daughter...
...Two days after Christmas, 1977, a seven hour operation is performed and the prognosis is absolutely positive...
...The name of the game for this uncomplaining courageous woman is not survival...
...In other ways, Judy Kreston isn't at all like a host of stage performers...
...It's a delicious story because it has a happy ongoing present...
...What the hell, I'd do half a center fold, if they asked me...
...Because a year before, a pot loaded with hot coffee had come apart in her hand, permanently scalding her legs...
...This time she is crippled by serum hepatitis...
...She declined, but she does not decline an opportunity to speak publicly about her illness if such revelations take the fright away from cancer and surgery generally...
...But in human terms a succession of illnesses that boggles the mind is hardly hype...
...Ladies and Gentlemen, my sister Judy Kreston...
...A few months after the mastectomy a reporter confronted her with the idea of doing an article on sex after mastectomy...
...You counsel patients during the day, sing at night, and squeeze rehearsals, cooking, sewing, jewelry making, lapidary work, mothering, wifing and family-ing in the other hours...
...Press people, lighting people, sound people, managers, musicians, composers, directors, even her parents...
...you can survive...
...I'm working damn hard at staying alive...
...Depressed about being ill...
...This article is the first in a continuing series about those good people who vindicate Anne Frank's perception, whose lives are an affirmation of humanity, of mentschlich-keit...
...In fact, and now it is beginning to sound like an overdrawn novel, she is involved in a law suit...
...All I want to do with the volunteering and the singing is give people hope...
...More precisely, the Magnificent Seven are medical doctors, all of whom have snatched the cabaret star away from death...
...If she wasn't having a psychotic episode, then God only knew what produced this latest horror...
...Nobody goes through without knowing the lyrics to some down-down love song...
...If it sounds melodramatic, histrionic, show business hype, then so be it...
...Along with the songs she sings is listed a number of people whom she acknowledges as helping her, well, get her act together...
...Then out she would come and sing her songs, while I would sidle back into "the wings" and look at her with envy and dismay...
...Her response is unequivocal: How can I sue the very people who one month ago saved my life...
...In a way they are, if by backers we mean people who make it possible for performers to perform...
...There's time for all of it, except there are those blinding headaches, rage reactions everyone seems to label them, which cut into your efficiency and in time seem to be impairing your vision...
...The culture makes too much of death and dying, and not enough of health and recovery...
...She does model, bathing suits, anything that will pump life and pride back into the bodies and spirits of women who feel themselves maimed...
...But I'm not looking to die...
...In truth, they are like all of us who do our jobs and keep our burdens to ourselves...
...Within months of the removal of the cancer, Kreston was at work in the American Cancer Society's Reach for Recovery Program...
...So, in response, you celebrate life and you carry on an open love affair with your American Express card...
...Furthermore, if her offstage responsibilities of wife and mother yield the same heavy duty schedule facing all working mothers, Ms...
...One month out of the hospital, she will return to the very room where she had recovered from brain surgery...
...She's glamorous, blessed with an extraordinary voice, a superb dramatic sense, a feel for the comedic...
...They may however, be special people, with slightly romantic or dramatic visions of life and living which seem to emerge when they are very young...
...Her love for performing is matched by her love of that myriad noise called people clapping, the sound of an audience loving her back...
...Then, suddenly, as Judy Kreston describes it, came an afternoon when, in the subway, on her way to work, all of New York turned a gaudy green...
...Not at all...
...Sue the hospital, she is advised...
...I remember, for example, being obliged by my sister when I was barely old enough to talk, to stand up in front of my parents and introduce her to that audience of two people...
...You know you have been blessed when a miraculous operation was performed to save your life upon delivery of your daughter...
...Bearing in mind that there are many different ways in which goodness may be expressed, readers are invited to propose suitable candidates, be they obscure or renowned, for inclusion in this series...
...A new life-style was thereby arranged...
...The answer: A growth the size of a grapefruit, blessedly benign, on the outer layer of the brain...
...Kreston's fortieth birthday was celebrated in a hospital following mastectomy surgery...
Vol. 4 • November 1979 • No. 10
