Spoleto-Colorado-New York-Tel Aviv

Just before I arrived in Israel for the first time (on January 8, 1973), I had been touring in Colorado with Dean William A. Owens of Columbia University. We were doing a show called "The Frontier in Song and Story". He was the story and I was the song. We were performing for the National Humanities Series (of the the National Endowment for the Humanities) in Colorado. Denver was buried under several feet of glorious white snow and Grand Junction, where we spent several days, had snowdrifts so high, they belonged in a winter museum.

I got back home (to a tiny apartment in the East Village) after the tour. New York City was very depressing at the end of December, 1972. The city was going bankrupt, garbage was everywhere (swimming in partially melted black slush), homeless people (including those turned out of mental hospitals that were closing their doors for lack of funding) were sleeping on many of the subway grates for the little bit of warmth that rose up from below. The city felt almost unlivable.

At the time, in addition to touring with the National Humanities Series, I was also a young actress/singer with the La Mama Experimental Theatre Club, one of the great off-off Broadway theatres that began in the 1960s. Ellen Stewart, (then as now), was the iconic head of La Mama. We were good friends (more about Ellen and La Mama soon) and I went to her and begged her to send me back to Europe where I felt I then belonged.

I'd been in La Mama since 1971, performing wonderful modern theatre on East Fourth St in New York City. Every summer we'd go to Europe and perform in many of the great festivals, including the Berlin Festwochen, the Vienna Festival, the Dubrovnik (then Yugoslavia) Festival, and of course, the Spoleto Festival in Spoleto, Italy. During the summer of 1972, while performing in Spoleto, I went to a pre-performance reception on the top floor of composer Gian Carlo Menotti's palazzo and fell down an entire staircase. The steps were like glass. There is a painting of the palazzo in the Spoleto Duomo Square in the Vatican Museum that dates back more than 1000 years. People had been climbing those steps for a long, long time and had worn smooth, deep grooves in the middle of them. I ended up in Spoleto Hospital with a broken nose and bad concussion and had to stay in Italy for several months. So I studied Italian at the Universita Per Stranieri (literally, University for Strangers) in Perugia and fell totally in love with Italy and with all of Europe, as only a young American (experiencing it for the first time) can.

Ellen Stewart's amazing loft was on top of the La Mama building and it was filled with wonderful items from her travels all over the world. She called the Paris branch of La Mama (where I had taught voice the year before...another story...) every night at 2AM but didn't reach the group (turned out they were performing in Avignon). After a few nights of this, Ellen said to me "You're Jewish, you've never been to Israel" and called Rina Yerushalmi in Tel Aviv. Rina, a superb director, was the head of the Tel Aviv branch of La Mama (which performed in a public bomb shelter) and within a week I landed in Tel Aviv with a small backpack, my guitar, Appalachian dulcimer and Irish Minstrel harp.

Oh yes, by way of introduction, my name (now) is Sandra Bendor. I was born Sandra Lee Yasney, in Paterson, NJ, on April 7, 1948. I was called Sandy as a child. I have also been called Sandra Frimerman (my first husband's name) and Sandra Johnson (this is how I was known professionally in Israel...long story).