Sally-Jane Heit returns to Community House stage for encore performance
After debuting her latest one-woman show at the Community House last year, Sally-Jane Heit will return to the Sanibel stage for a special, one night only encore performance to present a new and improved version of her one-woman show, “Before I Forget…A Memoir with Music” on Feb. 22.
Her passion for performance began in utero — “My mother must have been very happy when I finally came out” — but when she took the curtain call and made her grand exit from the womb, Heit found herself thrust into a cruel new world.
Not the cut-throat realm of theater and film — not yet, at least — but a world where six other siblings had already staked a claim on her parents’ attention. (Another sibling would follow later.)
“Many of them were already musicians or artists or dancers, and so I realized, when I was three-years-old, that if I performed, I would be noticed. My natural gifts manifested because I needed to perform, and so I did,” Heit said. “Mix that with the desire, the need, the ambition, the aggression — if you have seven siblings, you have competition that’s olympic. You say, look at me, notice me, love me and, most importantly, love me more than my siblings.
“When you get to the place where this need has to meld with whatever your natural gifts are, and we’re all born with them — there isn’t one untalented human being in the whole world — whether that person gets the opportunity to explore that gift, and it is a gift, how it’s nurtured, how it manifested itself, that’s the difference.”
Heit, who was born in New York and raised in Brooklyn, began building her theatrical repertoire with nursery rhymes and by studying the moves of Shirley Temple, but she also had a lot of support from her mother.
“My mother started us all very early and she nurtured all of our talents and found us teachers. Because we were in Brooklyn, from the get-go, I had the best teachers — dance, music, drama, all of it.”
After Heit outgrew her Mother Goose material, she went on to train at several prestigious institutions for the arts, including the High School for the Performing Arts and Yale Drama School. She’s been featured in numerous films, television shows and theater productions — from the big Broadway stage to the tiny cabarets of New York City and Washington, DC.
But along the way, she also had a family.
“When I was doing big musicals, like ‘Hello, Dolly!’ and ‘Gypsy’ and ‘Guys and Dolls’ and ‘Anything Goes,’ I would take my three daughters with me and they were just bowled over by the big orchestras and sets and costumes — and very proud to see their old lady up on the stage,” Heit said.
And while Heit seemed to have it all — a successful acting career, a beautiful family — she said the guilt she felt was overwhelming.
“I’d already had a fairly successful career in Washington, DC, so when the girls finally grew to an age where I could begin the trek, I went to New York. But, as I say in my show, I backed into it –I was tentative, and you can’t be tentative or insecure about anything,” Heit recalled. “I think now I’m more cautious than tentative, but I think if I really looked at it, I was tentative back then because I was guilty, and I was guilty because in my generation, not many women were stepping into their own lives. It was just beginning with Betty Friedan and Bella Abzug — they were just starting to make forays. My kids’ classmates mothers looked askance at me — you should be home with your children. It was the climate of the times, and it was changing, but I was still looked upon as breaking the code of what women should be doing.”
But Heit gave it a shot, and with no professional New York acting credits to her name, she landed a role in the Broadway production of “Ballroom.”
“I thought I had gone to heaven. When I was sitting at the first reading and looking around at all of these incredible people, I thought, how did this happen? I was in Washington doing a PTA talent show last week, and now I’m on Broadway — big time,” she said. “It was a great experience until we got into the actual working of it and then it’s like everything else. I, naturally, started complaining because I held to a certain standard and I was schooled by the best, and the standard wasn’t being met. It was a great experience to have, but it wasn’t what I wanted to do. I didn’t want to do eight shows a week of something I didn’t like. It just wasn’t for me.”
It was one of Heit’s friends in New York who, “sick of hearing me complain about the show said, if you don’t like what you’re doing, then go out and write your own stuff!”
Heit found inspiration for the first incarnation of her own one-woman show in watching Lily Tomlin’s first one-woman show.
Over the years, she tried different kinds of material, incorporated stories from her life, her thoughts and ideas and set it all to original music composed by her dear — an incredibly talented — friends, Shirley Grossman and Bob Bendorff.
Uel Wade, Heit’s accompanist in New York City from her days on the cabaret circuit, is now her musical director and, for old time’s sake, will accompany her during her Feb. 22 show at the Community House.
“The show, ‘Before I Forget…’ is a memoir with music, but is that it’s a living memoir — it’s amorphous. If something comes up, it’s going in the show. This is only the second time I’ve done the show, but because it’s living and breathing as I live and breathe, it’s going to be different than last year,” Heit said. “Because I still have some of that three-year-old in me, I just have to follow the urge to get up on a stage. The show isn’t unique — it’s just mine. I recently read this quote in a book and I loved it. It’s from Sophocles — a very old, dear friend of mine — ‘The unexamined life is not worth living.’ I examine everything and there is no question that what I examine is certainly mine — but when I did my very first one-woman show, a woman came to me and said, ‘Were you in my bedroom?’ It was all my own thoughts and feelings and ideas, and honestly, I thought, wow — somebody thinks and feels the way I do. It was a shocker.”
And whether it’s giving comfort to a random woman in the audience, unsure about her place in the world, or just making someone laugh, Heit said she’s thankful for all the blessings in her life.
“I’m a very fortunate lady and, at this stage of my life, I want to give back. I have been given so much and I’m so grateful for it, so my gift to the Sanibel Community House is this show. I feel so blessed with what I have been given,” Heit said, noting that she must say thank you to all those who made her second one-woman show on Sanibel possible. “I definitely have a gratitude list for this show: Jensen’s Marina, Royal Shell, Jennifer de Lignieres, Jill Kobe and the Sanibel Community Association staff, Marge Meek, Leslie Adams, Maureen Watson, Hollis Jeffcoat, Tom and Barbara Cooley and all the guys in the Dixieland and Island Jazz Bands for being able to play in the key of ‘R’ for me. And the island, which is sanctuary.
“Sanibel is one of the more unique spaces in the universe and I feel gratitude for having found it. I love to travel, but coming back to this place is a gift — the sunsets, the tides — it’s wonderful to be reminded of how insignificant we all are and how important we are, the yin and yang, it’s really great. Being here does that for you.”
Sally-Jane Heit’s “Before I Forget…A Memoir with Music” will show one night only at the Sanibel Community House, 2173 Periwinkle Way, on Tuesday, Feb. 22 at 7:30 p.m. The audience will have a chance to meet with Heit after the performance. Tickets are $35 are now available and can be purchased by calling 472-2155.