Description
"...From my seven-dollar-a-week room on 118th Street, I would go to wherever my job happened to be, work my customary eight hours, then back to Harlem... One day while browsing through the listings for chauffeurs, maids, dishwashers, porters,
janitors, etc., my attention was drawn to the theatrical page and an article under the heading "Actors Wanted by Little Theatre Group"... Now, I knew I couldn't read too well, I knew that. And I knew I had an accent-a bad, crippling accent... I knew those things, but what I hadn't come to grips with until then was that if I didn't do something about myself, I would be trapped forever as a dishwasher... Here I am, I'm eighteen years of age, and if I live to be eighty, for the next sixty-two years I'm going to be a dishwasher... People will walk by me and I won't register. I will always feel inadequate. That will be my destiny if I do not, by myself, take my life into my own hands and work it into something worthwhile..."
