When We Were Free to Be: Looking Back at a Children’s Classic and the Difference It Made

Thinking about Free to Be

59 Thinking about Free to Be Alan Alda I remember the day Marlo Thomas called, told me about her idea for a children’s record, and asked me to take part. We had worked together on a movie, Jenny, and had become good friends. So I knew that this wasn’t just an idea—it was something that would actually happen, and in a very classy way. Marlo is one of those extraordinary people who decides to do something, gets on the phone, gets people organized , and makes it happen. She’s sort of a benign general. And this was a great idea. It combined show business with a deeper purpose we both cared about. I learned at an early age how powerful theater can be. My father started in burlesque, was later in vaudeville, and then moved on to movies, television, and the Broadway stage. As a child, I was always standing in the wings, watching his performances . Both Marlo and I had fathers who were in show business; in fact, her father and mine had known each other as young actors. We grew up watching funny people be funny, and in the course of that, we learned to use humor to explore serious issues. I think all that came into play when we worked on Free to Be. After the stories and poems were written, I was given some of the material to act in and direct. (I directed the spoken word pieces, including “Atalanta,” “Boy Meets Girl,” and the poems by Dan Greenburg, “Don’t Dress Your Cat in an Apron” and “My Dog Is a Plumber.”) I was looking for ways to make it come alive. I wanted not just to do a reading of the words but to tell the story through the sounds of the experience . I used sound montages the way they did on old-fashioned radio shows. I wanted to bring kids into the experience through the power of imagination, the way radio did. So in the poems, we didn’t just say there were pots and pans, we added all kinds of clanging sounds to bring the pots to life. I wanted to get that same vivid quality in the performances. As I remember, the story of “Atalanta” is written in the past tense, but without changing the words, we played it as if it were in the present tense.You hear the footfalls on the track, and our speech is breathless, as if we were running the race in that moment instead of describing it 60 Alan Alda in the past. It was all to bring the listeners into the story for a deeper experience.The power of drama is that it can allow the audience to be the characters for a while, to feel what they feel—the joy and sometimes the pain. I was hoping that the more we were able to involve the kids listening to the sketches, the more they would empathize with the characters. But aside from the techniques we used, working on Free to Be was fun. I remember a happy day directing the “Boy Meets Girl” sketch where Marlo and Mel Brooks played babies. I don’t think Mel had ever been directed by anyone before, but he was good-natured and stuck with me. The piece wound up with a nice improvisational feel to it, and Mel had a smile on his face the whole time we recorded it. We were taking the fun of comedy and music and celebrating the shift in our culture’s thinking that was taking place then and that we cared so much about. I was already identifying myself as a feminist and working to get the Equal Rights Amendment ratified. During the 1970s and early 1980s, any time I wasn’t in front of a camera, I was traveling around the country, making speeches at rallies and meeting halls and lobbying for the amendment in state legislatures. Marlo was doing the same thing, and at one point we were standing together on courthouse steps in Florida, rallying people before an important vote on the ERA. (Which we lost, but which only made us work harder.) I think I got involved in the women’s rights movement for a number of reasons. People often assume it’s because I have three daughters, and I’m sure that’s part of it. I know if I saw my daughters (or now my granddaughters) denied equality, I would be...