And the memory of a simple Thanksgiving

By Joyce Reehling

Thanksgiving means a gathering of family, at least when I was a kid and even in college. Holidays are always a mixed blessing of food and potential mayhem. But in about 1974 I was living in New York, struggling to begin my theatrical career.

Amid a group of similar women, I lived in the now defunct Rehearsal Club, two brownstones which housed, in shared rooms, girls starting out. Carol Burnett had lived there, Blythe Danner and many others. And me, Kathie and Connie.

When someone really made it they got an apartment. This was likely to be a fourth floor walk-up with a roommate or boyfriend. The apartment would be very small with furniture that was often found on trash removal days around the city. It used to be that if you knew when the high-end neighborhoods were throwing things out, the chances were you could score really nice chairs, tables and other finds. Sometimes a coat of paint, a new seat cushion or no change at all landed you something you could not begin to afford.

And so it was that Connie had an apartment with her boyfriend. She invited her circle of girlfriends to come for Thanksgiving. This flat was up a lot of stairs, no view except the street and two rooms plus bath. I don’t recall much in the way of furniture. In the bedroom they had built the ubiquitous loft bed to provide a desk/dressing area below.

We all were to bring something. We had no way to cook at the Rehearsal Club. Two meals a day were provided, but we did not have access to the kitchen. We all had to save up a little extra so we could buy a baked pie or cans of food to warm up at the flat. Once we paid our room and board we were mostly broke. This took planning.

My absolutely fondest memories of that day are quite humble. The kitchen was a former closet into which the landlord had stuffed the world’s smallest sink, stove and refrigerator. I referred to it as the Easy Bake kitchen. It looked like a real kitchen but barely was.

Connie and her fella committed to having a large chicken — turkey was beyond our budget and well beyond the width of the Easy Bake oven. Someone brought peas or beans, someone a pie. We resembled the motley dinner in It’s A Wonderful Life more than we did the Pilgrims’ feast.

We borrowed cutlery from the Club and because there was no dining table, we had a picnic on a blanket on the floor, sitting around eating our humble meal. We felt like adults on their way, and Connie clearly had gone up a rung in our eyes.

We talked and laughed. I do not remember a cross word or anything approaching an argument. We were not the typical family, so we did not have the drama many families have at Thanksgiving. We were deeply and truly thankful. We were young and pursuing our chosen careers and we had one another.

The Easy Bake oven took a little longer than normal to bake that poor little chicken, but we did not care. We were in an apartment of a friend, on our way to what we would become.

Connie went on to TV shows, including Knots Landing, and later became a certified psychotherapist. Kathie got a Ph.D. and is a psychologist. I spent the better part of 35 years in the theater. A couple of years ago we had a reunion to celebrate 100 years of women starting out at the Rehearsal Club. It is greatly missed.

We have all had many Thanksgivings since, but none shines brighter in my heart than the five of us on a blanket, in a fourth floor walk-up with canned food and a solitary chicken.

“We were very tired, we were very merry,” wrote Edna St. Vincent Millay, and we gave all we had for that day. We gave thanks for our little path toward our future. Time and blessings can dull our sense of gratitude. Rushing from a table to buy something for Christmas weakens the day. Nothing reminds me to be truly grateful like the memory of those girls, of that picnic and the Easy Bake kitchen. We had so little but we had hope, and each other. We were very young and very merry. PS

Joyce Reehling is a frequent contributor and good friend of PineStraw.

Recommended Posts