I attended the Joyce Johnson speech in the Dodd Center, and was pleasantly surprised by her openness and interesting life, and her willingness to reflect back on it so freely. She is a bold woman, who used her past experiences to shape her current life and has no shame of past mistakes, as they were all learning experiences. Joyce seems like a warm person, the kind of person who you could sit down and talk to for hours.
             Joyce was not your typical child. In the 1940s at the age of 8, she was on Broadway, understudying a girl in the play "I Remember Momma". Her mother was an avid supporter of her blooming career, and carried a scrapbook with all her pictures and press articles and would show them off all the time. Joyce recalls spending countless hours in waiting rooms with her mother, all in which turned out to be for just a minute of time in an office for auditions. I thought it was interesting that she said she would lie about her age saying she was 8, not 9 and even began dying her hair as she thought it make her more desirable in the business. She explained how competitive and pressured this lifestyle was, and said how young people striving towards the same career as her would never discuss their business at the school. All the money Joyce made went into a special account to support her own education. This was rare, because most mothers were pressuring their children into Broadway in an effort to live off of their money, but Joyce's mother was different than the rest. She was undoubtedly proud of her daughter, and wanted her to carry on all her own success.
             Joyce also talked about her first marriage in 1962. She explains the irony of it in a comical sense, in that one day she received a phone call from a telemarketer asking to speak to Jim Johnson, when clearly there was no one named Jim living at her house and she gave the caller an attitude about it. Then, not too long after, she met a man at a party, named ...