The Play Goes On by Neil Simon

Author:Neil Simon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

TO PUT THINGS in perspective, I have to back up a little and bring my daughters, Ellen and Nancy, into the picture again. In 1980 Nancy was graduating from the Westlake School. I was asked to give the commencement address for her class. I had long since given up my fear of public speaking, but it returned with a vengeance on that day. The last thing I wanted to do was embarrass Nancy and I worked as hard writing that speech as I would on the first act of a new play. In the fall, she was off to Williams College in Massachusetts and as all parents who put their child on a plane that will carry them away from their childhood, we think to ourselves, “Where did the time go and what will replace those incredible years for me?”

To go back even further with Ellen, she had already given two schools a chance in California, searching for a clue to her future. She moved back to New York on her own, found an apartment, reunited with her former girlfriends from the Dalton School, then attended New York University for a while. She soon found a job in the Holly Solomon Art Gallery in SoHo, but still worked out regularly in dance classes. One of her aspirations was to become a choreographer. Her inspiration was Bob Fosse and eventually she presented an evening of her work at New York’s prestigious Lotus Club on Park Avenue.

But there was something pulling Ellen in a completely different direction. As many young people were doing then, she soon found herself looking to fulfill the spiritual side of her life, possibly influenced by Marsha’s own interest in Eastern religion and philosophy. I was surprised how deeply Ellen’s interest ran when she decided to fly to Bombay, India, to study under the tutelage of a master guru, Swami Muktananda. Neither Ellen nor Nancy had much religious training, and this trip to India must have come from a very deep need to search for something she was missing. When she finally arrived back in California, Ellen seemed more centered than I ever remembered her, and she seemed ready to take the next step in her life. When Muktananda made one of his few pilgrimages to America, he set up an ashram in Santa Monica, just a fifteen-minute drive from our house. She and Marsha went down there quite often and Nancy and I were invited to come to one of Muktananda’s sessions. I was amazed to see how many devotees he had. It seemed to me there were almost two thousand happy people squeezed together on the floor, made possible, I suppose, because they all left their shoes outside the main hall.

Nancy and I were respectfully quiet as we listened to Muktananda speak through his interpreter, and what he said was quite inspiring; I could see why he had so many followers throughout the world. Nancy and I, however, did not become converts. It was not because

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