0.3 Gertrude levy barnstone, b. 1925  (Page 3/3)

Part-time welder

After I lost my job with Channel 2, I was a media consultant for a while—whatever the hell that means, which was practically nothing. Then I decided I was going more and more into getting back into art. Art had always been there in my life since I was a little kid. So I sort of pulled back into art after that. I realized that I had in the past done some big things, but then they weren’t very good. Back before I got married in the 50s, I got a commission to do two very large things for the US Green Stamp building on Holcombe. And there were two separate pieces of aluminum—it was big, you know, five inch by one inch thick, curled. Well, I couldn’t make them—obviously I had them fabricated. You have something fabricated if you work in metal and it’s big. Remember that. And my other thing was working in multimedia, which was everything from paper to this to that. Wood, sometimes metal would come into it.

I didn’t know what the hell to do with metal. I figured well, I’ve got to learn to weld so I can get a chance to do something else large. I can do it. People all over the world learn to weld, so I went to the community college and learned to—and I loved it. So I got a job in welding. I welded the aluminum frames that plexiglass skylights went into. It was repetitive, it was a skill. And the more you weld, the better you get. It’s all habit—I mean practice, practice, practice. So I did this for half the week, and then the rest of the week I did my own work. By the time I learned to weld, I had moved into this house and the garage was already a shop. So it had everything. All I had to do was put in electricity for a welding machine. It was wonderful. It had shelves and a sink and a flat cement floor. It wasn’t the biggest in the world, but it’s worked for 30 years, and I’ve done big things in it.

On making choices

I’ve had several times in my life I’ve felt I really had to make a decision—do I want to go into theater, because I did a lot of theater, too. Should I go into theater, or should I go into art? And two or three times I’ve had that fork in the road, and I’ve had to sit down and figure out what I want to do. Finally I made the decision that once and for all it was going to be art, because with art you could pull more out of yourself; it’s somehow more creative than being an interpretive actor, and the repetition of night after night of performances. I did some things at the Alley. I started that pretty young, when I was about 13. And there was a remarkable woman who was sort of an icon in American theater…Margo Jones. She was brought here by the woman who was head of the Parks Department to head the community playhouse. I was 13, 14, 15, and I kept on until I started college and by that time she’d left. Margo went on to New York and directed Ingmar Bergman, then she ended up with her own theater in Dallas.

She said, “Decentralization of the arts, baby, don’t ever forget, decentralization of the arts.” She said that theater was too important to be centered in New York and Los Angeles…that theater belongs…is a part of…everybody’s life. It’s got to be out there. So it was in this interrelatedness of the arts that I grew up.

My mother wanted to be a writer, but she didn’t. But she hated being a housewife. That’s why she felt that the worst thing that could happen to a woman was to get married, and the second worst thing that could happen to a woman was to have children, because they limited a woman’s opportunity to develop her talent, her intelligence, and to grow as a person. So I mean, I heard this stuff and went, “Okay—well, I’m going to do it. I’ll show you.”

I had a husband that felt the same. The last thing he wanted was a wife who would be a housewife, take care of the babies. Howard didn’t want that. We agreed on that early on, so we were on the same wavelength there. So that was nice.

Gertrude Barnstone was interviewed on June 9, 2006. You can listen to the interview here .