Sisters in life, sisters in death, that's what the movie trailer said.

I was one of the seven lead actresses in the 1983 Film Ventures chop-up-the-college-girls-cult-classic House on Soroity Row. Fans of the film may remember me as the clumsy and idiotic blond who grabs a butcher knife, runs down the hallway chased by an invisible killer (who later turns out to be a schizophrenic clown) trips and falls, and—here's the idiotic part—hides in the bathroom where she meets her shocking fate. Slasher Film 101: Never ever hide in the bathroom.

            I knew the cattle call for House on Sorority Row would be tough, but I decided to take my chances. Although I lived in New York City, I paid my rent—and my dues—by playing the piano at the Waterbury Holiday Inn, home of the all-you-can-eat Scampi Buffet, the Blue Hawaiian two-for-one cocktail hour, a spinet piano with a missing leg, and a handful of toothless customers (with names like Dutch and Roy-boy) who made the lounge look like a happy hour scene from Deliverance. Playing the piano in a redneck cocktail bar motivated me to keep searching for other employment. I loved playing, but I had stars in my eyes, a degree in drama, and Big Ideas about limelight and motion pictures and serious acting.

            700 of us showed up to audition for seven roles—a throbbing mass of female talent squashed into a tiny midtown-Manhattan rehearsal-studio lobby, a perfumed blob of blind faith, giddy optimism, and desperation. We were up to our layered bangs in apricot blush. Twenty-five years later, I'm sure some curious but jaded janitorial team is still scraping glitter gel, nail-polish claw marks, and lipstick stains off the walls. Revlon Perfect Plum, with just a hint of shimmer.

There were over 650 rejects that day. A record, even for New York City.

*

Needle-fine April drizzle splattered my forehead as I crossed 55th Street. Pedestrians dodged and leapt over random puddles of spring rain mixed with city grunge, and the air smelled like a noxious broth of exhaust fumes and clean linen. I joined the conga line of actresses snaking past the rehearsal studio door, and worried that the humidity would ruin my makeup.

My hopes plummeted when I reached the front desk and realized I was number 430. The actresses assembled were a lush bunch, with cranked-up hair, high heels with too many straps, and tight synthetic-fiber cashmere sweaters in earthy colors. These ladies had the model-wannabe look: chiseled faces, perfect bodies, but they were two or three inches too short. It was a room jam-packed with Elite Model spitbacks. Gorgeous, but squat.

            In general, when this many actors, or models, or whatever, show up for so few roles, the casting director does something called "typing." Here's how it goes: A nervous group of ten scoots into a fluorescent-lit room. The girls stand there looking like iced cupcakes in a bakery window. The casting director looks each girl over once or twice. Usually several of the original ten are given a "callback," or an invitation to return, with slightly better odds. The casting director, often a woman with a sad smile and a ratty black pantsuit (the polar opposite of, say, Paula Abdul), mutters a hurried thank you for your time and glances at her oversized watch. Then she throws the rejects out of the room by holding open the door and shouting—through clenched teeth—NEXT, PLEASE into the waiting area. The dejected group shuffles out, a hopeful group bounces in. It's like two forces of life, pulling and pushing at the same vague promise.

            I figured it would take several hours before the casting director got to my group. No chairs left, so I sat on the floor and tried not to think about the grubby surface soiling my best coat. A pitted path in the linoleum led from the lobby into the casting area, probably from decades of stiletto heels digging into the spongy surface. I scoped out the cupcake competition and listened to the chatter.

"Do I look fat?"

"No."

My puffy face depressed me; back then, most of my 125 pounds seemed to be located above my neck. But because it was chilly outside and raining sideways, and because I had a stale street-vendor pretzel and a thermos of coffee in my bag, and because I didn't have anywhere else to go until the bus left for Waterbury and the Deliverance Lounge, I decided to stay and devise a strategy. Maybe the Paul Mitchell hairspray fumes would help.

            An idea hit me. Horror films are formula films. There's always an awkward girl, an unfortunate looking sidekick, an ugly duckling. This could be me—the dweeb. I had my Waterbury overnight bag with me, so I had access to a large supply of ugly-girl enhancement tools: makeup remover, hair twisties, pink Keds, fat-girl sweat pants, reading glasses, a baggy old t-shirt—in short, my Ultimate Pajamas™. I shoved my way into the crowded bathroom, where I changed clothes and experimented with some bad-posture poses. An hour later my group was called into the studio. While my beautiful competitors fluffed their hair and beamed at the casting director as if they were auditioning for a Pantene commercial, I stared at my feet.

"Pathetic," said the casting lady.

"I know," said a Jesus-looking man standing in the corner. "She's perfect."

Jesus came over to me and introduced himself. "I'm Mark Rosman, the director. I think you're my Jeanne."

"The rest of you, thank you very much." The casting lady wedged open the door with her boot. "NEXT PLEASE!" she yelled into the crowded lobby.

            I shook hands with Jesus, made an appointment to read for him, and slipped out the door as the next group of calendar girls sashayed in. I hadn't yet been offered the part, but I knew I had nailed it.

            I floated—floated!— to the Port Authority to catch the bus to Waterbury, where I played that evening for two mentally-challenged people named Dennis and Maryanne. They got completely pissed drinking 2 for 1 Blue Hawaiians, argued at top volume, and then threw Pepperidge Farm Goldfish at each other. The dueling banjoes were playing in my head, but I ignored them, because I had a shot at an acting job in a real movie, and soon, very soon, I would be out of there. Who knew where House on Sorority Row might take me?

            "Hey, Robin, where you goin'?"

            To the top.

*

Five days later I returned to Manhattan for my callback, where I read several scenes, most of which included references to blood, guts, and a murdered housemother bobbing in an algae-filled swimming pool.

             "Would you please scream for me, Robin?" asked Jesus.

            "Why, of course," I said. "Uh—you might want to cover your ears."  I let it rip.

            "Thank you. Very passionate, very heartfelt, very loud—just what I'm looking for. Many of your scenes will be without much dialog, either because you'll be in the process of being murdered or you'll already be dead," he said.

"Can't talk when you're dead."

"Exactly, because you're, well, dead! You get it! Let's try another scene, this time with some tears." He shuffled through a stack of pages.

"But you can't cry when—"

"Here!" He handed me a sheet of paper with one word on it: HELP. "You're in a desperate situation. You scream for help, then you cry hysterically. Got it?"

"Got it. Wait! Am I dead?"

"Not yet. Got it?"

"Got it."

            Scream. Cry. Scream. Cry. Eat a tuna sandwich, drink coffee out of the blue and white paper cup, then start all over again. Scream. Scream. Louder.

"One more time, please, this time for the camera." 

We finished the day with me crying for about twenty minutes.  Back then I was good at crying on cue. Salty tears. Big ones, the kind that plop on the floor and almost make a sound. I still have broken capillaries on my cheeks from that session.

*

"Congratulations, Robin, said the production manager, a sturdy guy with a warm smile. The role of Jeanne is yours."

Finally.

"We'd like you to start shooting on July 1st, with several days of costume shopping and makeup tests ahead of time. Oh, you'll have to be fitted for your neck prosthesis next week."

Neck prosthesis?  At this point I hadn't seen the complete script. That prosthesis word made me nervous.

"We'll pay you fifty dollars a day, on days that you work."

That's all? I earned way more than that in Waterbury. How would I cover my rent?

Robert checked his clipboard. "You are fifth to die in the film, and then, let's see here,  you come back as a zombie and as a head in the toilet, so you'll have a lot to do."

"A head in the toilet? My head in the toilet?"

"Chopped off, of course. It's really the highlight of the entire film."

"Oh. How will you—"

"And we'll provide meals and housing, and transportation from New York City to Baltimore. A driver will fetch you at the train station and take you to the hospice."

"The hospice?"

"Whoops, silly me. I mean the hostel. I always get those words mixed up. You'll be staying at a hostel that usually houses Sufi dancers. Community bathroom, but you'll have your own bedroom. You'll have to bring your own sheets and towels."

*

A week later I found myself in the special effects guy's Brooklyn brownstone, with my face and neck submerged in a bucket of high-tech gunk, the plaster-y material used to make wax figures of Nelson Mandela and Elizabeth Taylor for Madame Tussaud's. I breathed through a wide straw and tried not to panic.

"Gorgeous, Robin, gorgeous!" he said to my bucket-covered head. My ears were partially submerged, and his voice sounded muffled, as if he were talking through jello. "This will be beautiful! I'm going to mold some torn tendons and severed arteries for this baby. Lots of gory details. It'll be fabulous!"

I grunted a reply through the straw: "Ffffewwstopssnuthere."

"Just a few minutes longer," he said. "And then we'll get you out of that bucket."

On the bus ride back to Waterbury, somewhere around Danbury, I figured out I wouldn't be able to give up the piano gig—Sorority Row wouldn't pay enough. It was a classic New York predicament. I would have to stay out of town earning money to pay for an empty apartment. I wouldn't be home for weeks at a time.

 I began my Friday night set, every so often stopping to pick little pieces of goo out of my hair. I plinked out a Gershwin medley and thought about the plaster replica of my face and neck floating in a toilet bowl. Dutch and Roy-boy drank their blue drinks and stared at the ceiling all night, occasionally taking a moment to yell out a word spelled backwards, an activity they enjoyed.

"Nibor!"

"Onaip!"

I brushed cigarette ashes off the keyboard, played "Embraceable You," and tried to figure out how I would manage to do both gigs.

Gig spelled backwards is still gig.

There's an old joke: How do you get an actress to complain? Give her a job.

*

Harley, Eileen, Kathy, Jodie, Ellen, Janice, and I—the lucky seven actresses playing the unlucky seven sorority sisters—met each other in Pikesville, Maryland, a few days before shooting was scheduled to begin. Costume shopping turned gloomy when I realized the other actresses would be wearing sexy evening dresses, bikinis, and cut-off shorts (standard slasher film attire), but I, the cast mascot, would be dressed in the college girl equivalent of Garanimals—mix and match polyester outfits with color-coordinated bows for my hair. One scene called for baby blue overalls that made me look slightly pregnant.

Most of the film was shot in a rambling Pikesville mansion that had been art-directed to look like a ritzy sorority house and dormitory. Everything was fake, but familiar in a funky way, and I felt as if I'd been zapped back to college days. There were big plastic containers of half-used cosmetics in the bathroom, Brice Springsteen posters on the doors, and threadbare oriental rugs in the library. Bright, airy, warm, dormy. Fake.

In reverse-Technicolor contrast, House 'o Sufi—the all-too-real hostel where we hung out and slept for the duration of the shoot—was grimy, spooky, and home to most of the Pikesville bat population. And at unannounced times, the main living room was inhabited by dozens of bearded men in white robes. They would spin and spin and spin in silent circles, with their arms held up to the filthy ceiling, praising heaven, praising Pikesville, perfecting the art of spinning in place.

While the Sufis danced, my sisters and I hovered in the community kitchen, gorging ourselves on Archway cookies, Entenmann's fudge cake, and take-out pepperoni pizza, wondering if we'd look fat in the next day's rushes. From the beginning of time, this is how actresses have bonded.

"Do I look fat?"

"No. Do I?"

"No, are you crazy? Have some more cake. It's raspberry-lemon-lite, and besides, you need the energy for that big scene tomorrow—it will be so emotionally draining."

An ancient upright grand piano, surprisingly in tune, stood in one of the back rooms. Sometimes, after a careful check for rogue Sufis and Grandpa Munster-sized bats hanging from the eaves, I would go in there and play. One or two of the sisters would join me, and together we would sing Billy Joel songs about getting high, aiming low, and clinging to past regrets. We were way too young to sing such songs, but we pretended to understand the lyrics.

*

"Here's the plot," says Jesus when he has us assembled on the set. "Here's how it goes: The housemother catches Eileen doing the nasty-nasty in her sorority-girl waterbed. The housemother slashes the waterbed—whoosh!—with her silver-tipped Evil Cane, and the scene concludes with poor Eileen shivering on the flooded bedroom floor. . . "

•

"Well, ladies, I held my ground," said Eileen, after her waterbed scene. "I absolutely refused to show my breasts."

Eileen's bedroom scene had been shot on a closed set—restricted to anyone but the necessary crew—and we had spent much of the morning wondering what was going on in there.

"I stayed 100% fully clothed," she said.

"Did anyone see my striped knee-socks?" asked Harley. "I can't find them anywhere, and my feet are freezing."

*

"For revenge, the sisters play a prank on the old housemother. Eileen, this time with her clothes on, threatens the housemother with a gun, but—BOOM!— the gun goes off, and she accidentally gurks the housemother. The old lady tumbles into the swimming pool, blood pours out of her ample chest, and her corpse soils the water, thereby disappointing many viewers by eliminating the possibility of seeing the sorority girls go for a midnight swim while they are still alive."

*

The prop master handled the gun with care, but still, it was unsettling to be around Eileen with a real Glock 42 in her manicured hands. My character was supposed to be nervous, so I used the feeling by biting my nails and twitching just a tad more.

"Too much makeup on Robin," said Jesus. "She looks too glamorous."

"I look like a squirrel." I was sitting between Ellen, who looked like Audrey Hepburn, and Harley, who was (and still is) a ringer for Lauren Bacall.  Back in the wardrobe area, the makeup artist removed my lip gloss and accentuated the circles under my eyes, while the costume lady adjusted my Garanimals overalls and fussed with my hair ribbons. Turns out it's as much work to make an actress look bad as it is to make her look good. Almost.

"Perfect," yelled Jesus. "Now let's murder the housemother."

So we did. We shot the housemother, pushed her in the pool, and watched her body sink. Jesus wrapped for the day. To celebrate, we ate great piles of bagels and fed scraps of boiled ham to Rocket the dog, a three legged mutt who hung out on the set. After that, we returned to House o' Sufi, rummaged through the refrigerator in search of old cake, and watched the turbaned men spin.

"Do I look fat?"

"No."

Later that night, sex noises drifted from some of my sisters' rooms. Maybe a Sufi or two had whirled up the back stairs, or maybe a lighting technician or production assistant had sneaked in the backdoor. I squeezed my eyes shut and tried not to care. That night I dreamt of knee-socks and Dutch and Roy-boy, and sitting on the edge of a jello-filled swimming pool, while everyone else jumped in and swam.

Nibor!

*

"We put her back in the pool and she was still alive," said Kathy, the big star of the film, also known as The Girl Who Lives. The entire plot depended on the audience believing that the housemother had gotten out of a rock-filled sack at the bottom of the pool, and returned to the sorority house to start knocking us off with her Evil Cane.

Ellen gurked in a basement, with a haunting silhouette of her perfect profile projected onto a stone wall by a lone light bulb that looped back and forth.  The Evil Cane jumped into the frame and, ploomp, stabbed her in the throat.

"Gruesome, but tasteful," we told each other.

"Did I look fat?"

"No."

Jodie, who probably wasn't as dumb as she looked, but still, I had to wonder, bought it at the base of the attic steps. The attic-cam rushed towards her open mouth and frozen platinum hair and left her demise to our imaginations. I like to think she swallowed the camera, and that's how she died. She also did not look fat.

Janice's real name was never revealed to us; she was a Hollywood Screen Actors Guild actress who decided to accept a non-union role rather than spend the summer serving nachos in a Malibu restaurant. The killer snagged Janice while she was snooping around in the basement looking for Ellen. Horror film + basement = Bad News.

Harley Jane Kozak was my favorite of the seven sisters, mainly because off the set she wore Army-surplus Bermuda shorts, always had a good book in her hands, and taught me how to French-braid my hair. I don't remember the details of her film death—just that a gloved hand grabbed her while she was poking around in the bushes, looking for clues. Never ever poke around in the bushes.

Eileen fell into a grave, breasts first. Really, if you're going to gurk, it's convenient to do it right over a hole in the ground. I was impressed with Eileen's death throes; she even took a moment to fix her hair while she was falling. And she absolutely 100% positively did not look fat.

Really, that half-drowned housemother was a true menace. 

The killer caught up with me—Jeanne—at the back gate to the sorority house. After grappling with the mystery killer and the Evil Cane, I escaped, ran into the kitchen, and locked the door behind me. I rummaged through a drawer, pulled out a machete-sized butcher knife, then sat there nervously and waited for something to happen. Stupid really, because everyone knows that if you sit and wait, the killer shows up and you're in deep shit. But I wasn't the writer, I was just the actress hired to play the stupid girl. So I waited.

* 

Jesus: "Here's where things get interesting. The sorority girls are gurking, one at a time, all over the house. Poor little Jeanne is sitting alone in the kitchen, just waitin' to buy the farm. There are 300 teenagers at the party in the next room. She could go in there, get the band to stop playing that God-awful music, and call the police, but no, she waits. The killer rattles the door to the kitchen, and then—smash!—the Evil Cane breaks through the glass window. Jeanne races up the back stairway, the butcher knife clutched in her delicate hands. Down the hallway she runs, bouncin' off the walls, slippin' and slidin' on the slick sorority house floor.

"And then she falls—splat! She cuts herself with the knife, sees the dribbles of blood on her yellow Garanimals dress, and feels sick to her stomach. We can hear the killer coming, faster and faster. Jeanne thinks she might throw up. She runs into the bathroom where she can vomit in private. No, no, no! Not the bathroom! Why the bathroom?

"Jeanne might be stupid, but she's a lady to the end. No way would she toss her cookies right there in the hallway.

*

"Cut!" Jesus yelled. "Someone deal with the knife situation, please!"

The rubber prop knife didn't look convincing, so we opted for a real butcher knife. Blunt, but still. The trick was to release the knife as I fell, thereby avoiding a self-gurk situation that would have seriously jeopardized the plot. But releasing the knife endangered the technicians who were racing backwards on a dolly track in a very narrow hallway. One bad knife toss and I could have taken out half of the crew, including the Best Boy. I practiced running and falling without my weapon, until I felt comfortable enough to add the knife to my choreographed routine of run, fall, and gag. After nineteen takes, the repair of a cluster of open blisters on my sandal-clad feet (those Payless white plastic sandals were not made for stuntwomen), and two leg injuries that would result in my knees looking like slabs of sirloin, I got it just right. I finished the take, crawled into the bathroom, and the entire crew clapped for me.

The next day I returned to the Waterbury Holiday Inn to play a weekend's worth of piano gigs. Compared to House 'o Sufi, the Holiday Inn looked like the Waldorf. I greeted Dennis and Maryanne as if they were my long-lost retarded relatives. I even sat at the bar next to Dutch and Roy-boy and complimented them on their plaid flannel shirts.  I wore long evening dresses to cover my bruises and—in between sets of Janis Ian tunes and the Beatles Greatest Hits—I told my co-workers complete lies about my glamorous life as an actress.

The next bit, my big death scene in the dormitory bathroom, was scheduled for the following week at a Baltimore Public High School.

*

"The killer enters the bathroom and we see poor Jeanne, crouched up on the toilet seat like a little rabbit, nibbling on her fingernails, holding her plastic butcher knife, and saying her prayers, hoping the Good Lord or someone will see fit to spare her poor pathetic life, even if she is wearing such an awful dress. The killer turns on the showers and steam fills the room.

"We hear the hiss of the shower and the steam rushes in. Very scary. Jeanne hears the first toilet stall door open, then the second. She's in stall number three. We wait. We wait. We wait.

"Whack! The Evil Cane breaks the lock on Jeanne's toilet stall. Scream, scream, scream! As the killer pushes her up against that white institutional wall, a gloved hand comes into and forces Jeanne's neck up against the blade of her very own knife. Squirt, squirt, squirt, out comes the blood. Red on white. Very dramatic.

"Gurk, gurk, gurk, down goes Jeanne, with one hand clawing—think chalkboard noise here) at the stall wall, the other hand holding onto to the very knife that's taking off her head. Very desperate.

"If only she'd stayed out of that bathroom. If only she let go of that knife. If only. Gurk. But, you know, for the sake of the plot, she's gotta die."

*

"Cue the steam! Cue the blood!" Jesus shouted.

My death scene was shot without sound, which allowed Jesus to yell verbal cues at me. "Okay Robin, you're really scared. Now you're really really scared. Now you hear that first door open and you're even more scared." He also cued the effects people. "More steam, get it to waft in her face, force the door open. Whack her with the cane. Careful the point doesn't poke her eye out!  Knife to her neck! Blood pump, blood pump, now, now, now!!!!

That blood pump was a big drag. It was attached to a hose that serpentined under my Garanimals dress and ended right at the base of my skull. An annoying special effects man squatted on the floor underneath me, and when he received his cue—blood!—he would push down a plunger that forced the fake blood through the hose and out of the nozzle by my head. The fake blood looked real, it even smelled real, and I wondered if the special effects people were copping it from a pig farm not too far from House 'o Sufi. But I was a professional actress and I soldiered on without asking questions. In between takes I scrubbed off the pig blood, changed into a new version of my dress, ate Fig Newtons and took naps on the lavatory floor.

Never once did it occur to me to quit.

"Once more Robin, then we'll have it. Cue the steam. Cue the blood pump. Action."

Twelve hours of work, three different set-ups, five takes with a knife at my throat, and I was finally dead.

*

"But she's not dead! That's the genius of this script. You think the girls are dead, but they come back. As zombies. And then, and then, and then we see the head. Poor little Jeanne's head, floating in the toilet bowl. What a thing. It will look 100% real."

*

"In there? I have to stick my head in there? Is that a real toilet?"

"Yes, but we cleaned it thoroughly."

I knew they would be shooting footage of my actual head with a fake neck glued to it, but I never thought they would make me put my head inside an actual toilet. It had taken hours to glue the prosthesis to my neck and do my dead person make-up. Now I was to sit underneath the floor of a fake toilet stall and stick my real head and fake neck through a hole cut in the bottom of the porcelain bowl. The cameraman would be on a ladder above me, shooting down.

A production assistant helped guide my head into the hole. I have a huge head, and this was a small hole, so we had to use a wedge and shove technique to get both my head and the prosthesis inside the toilet. Someone shoved a barstool under my butt, so I could sit, but the stool was too low and my neck—the real one, not the fake one—wrenched. I looked up and saw Jesus smiling down at me.

"Shit," I said, losing my cool. "I can't do this."

"Sure you can," he said. "It's the movies. Got it?"

"Got it. But. Hurry. And could someone scratch my nose?"

"Something doesn't look quite right in the toilet bowl," said the special effects man. "Throw some water in there." There were six or seven people standing over me on the platform, staring down at me, one of them holding a bucket.

What would Meryl do?

"And we need to mix some blood with the water."

More pig blood, or whatever it was. "Could you please hurry?"

"Let's start rolling," said Jesus. "Hang in there, Robin."

"Head to the side, head straight. More blood on her neck. More water in her face. Eyes closed. Eyes open. Makeup! Wipe away the tears! Come on, Robin, get it together, dead people don't cry!"

"Yes they do," I shouted.

Three hours later he had his shot.

It took half a bottle of spirit gum remover and twenty-minutes of scrubbing in the shower to remove the prosthesis. It might have been fake blood, but it still left a stain.

"Here, Robin." Jesus handed me the gunky prosthesis like he was presenting an Oscar. "I want you to have this."

"Fuck you," I said. I threw his fake neck at him and left to get the train back to Waterbury. I needed a piano, a blue drink, and a dose of reality.

*

Dutch died (a real death, not a fake one), Roy-boy drifted away, and the Waterbury gig ended a few months later, when I began to get piano work in Manhattan.

House on Sorority Row, when it was released in 1983, was a huge hit with slasher-film fans, a group that's larger than one might hope. The movie also developed a cult following of ethnic minority teenagers. I was recognized on the subway for a good six months after the premier.

"Hey, lady, weren't you the head in the toilet?"

"Yes."

"You were some kind of bad, lady."

"Thank you," I would say, because that's what Meryl would have done.

*

Twenty-six years later, in an act of producer desperation that defies all Hollywood logic, House on Sorority Row has been remade with a new cast of eager young actresses. Not one of the original seven sisters, not even The Girl Who Lived, was asked to appear as a zombie, a ghost, or a head in the toilet in the new big-budget version. Any one of us could have played the evil housemother, but that role went to Carrie Fisher, herself no stranger to horror film scenarios, although I doubt she ever sat next to Roy-boy in the Waterbury Holiday Inn or ducked a flying rodent at the House 'o Sufi.

I haven't seen the remake, but reading about it triggers memories of Pikesville. My recollections are neither misty nor water-colored, but sharp-edged and raw. Almost three decades ago, we—the seven actresses—bonded because we were anxious to escape our jobs as waitresses, office workers, and piano players in seedy bars. After the premier was over and the hoopla had fizzled, we drifted away from each other and toward other opportunities, hoping our careers would someday offer more than an Evil Cane and a dunk in an algae-filled pool.

Jesus, better known as director Mark Rosman, continues to make movies. I imagine him at casting calls, pulling the pathetic girl out of the line-up, and giving her a job because he knows she won't quit, no matter what. I've lost touch with most of my sisters, but I know that Eileen Davidson, Kathy McNeil, and Harley Jane Kozak have had lovely careers doing projects that did not, to my knowledge, involve pig blood or Sufi dancers. Harley, like me, has become a writer.

On that cattle-call day in 1982, our hair was stiff with cherry-scented mousse and our faces were bright with hope. I wonder, if somewhere in that 55th Street rehearsal studio, traces of face powder and stardust still linger—Max Factor Glow Girl, in Frosted Rosé. The company discontinued the color years ago. But it was a lovely shade.

We were, and still are, some kind of bad. And even now, we are not fat.