In Memoriam

In two days, we've lost two important women. Yesterday, playwright Wendy Wasserstein died, and today it was announced that Coretta Scott King died.

I just finished reading her obituary in The New York Times. What an extraordinary woman! They say behind every man is a strong woman, and she was definitely that for Martin Luther King. Reading about their courtship, where he basically decided on their first date, that she was the one he was going to marry, and how she deliberated long and hard about marrying him, insisting that she would continue to be her own woman despite her marriage. And this was in the early fifties? She even asked that the word obey be taken out of the ceremony, and they were married by his father. What chutzpah!

She spearheaded the campaign to have a national holiday named after her husband, when so many people were totally against the idea. Even now there are some states that don't acknowledge Martin Luther King day. She even took the risk of defending the man who was widely accused of murdering her husband. Imagine Jackie O standing up for Lee Harvey Oswald. She carried on his legacy over the years, while raising 4 suddenly fatherless children. While not a civil rights leader in her own right, she carried the torch for both African-Americans and women, demanding they too have equal rights.

Wendy Wasserstein has the distinction of being one of the most successful, if not the most successful, woman playwright. Two of her plays ran for over 500 performances on Broadway, and her plays are constantly done all over the country. I first became aware of her when I saw a PBS presentation of one of her earliest plays, Uncommon Women and Others, about a group of Mount Holyoke students from before graduation and then several years down the road.

I was impressed by her talent, although I decided then and there that I was not going to ever go to an all girls college. She wrote about the choices that women make in their lives, whether it was possible to have it all. If there is such a thing as a chick-lit playwright, Wendy Wasserstein was it.

Long before Bridget Jones, she wrote about women living in the big city, dating, settling or not compromising in their dreams of what they thought there life could be. There would be no Candance Bushnell without Wendy Wasserstein.

I admired her wit, her ability to dig for deeper truths but not forgetting the humor in life. She wrote about women we could all relate to whether or no what our race or color.

She finally achieved one of her fondest dreams, which was to have a child at the age of 48, Lucy who is now 6.

I salute these two very different women of courage and class.