I love a great life story, and Penny Orloff has one. Penny was a working actor and dancer in Los Angeles when a Juilliard scholarship took her to New York, where she sang more than 20 Principal Soprano roles for New York City Opera and played featured roles on Broadway. In a career spanning over 50 years, she starred in 100+ productions off-Broadway, regionally, and internationally. Symphony, theater, and opera engagements have taken her all over the US, Europe, and the former Soviet Union. She has recorded for Vox-Turnabout, Warner-Nonesuch, Protone, and Original Cast Records. Penny’s one woman show, Jewish Thighs on Broadway—based on her award-winning comic novel, available at Amazon.com—toured the US for a decade, including a successful run off-Broadway. She is currently touring in a new one woman show, Songs and Stories from a Not-Quite-Kosher Life. A Tarot reader for over 50 years, Penny has used the cards in her counseling practice for decades. For ten years she was the Art Therapist at a residential drug and alcohol rehab facility in Malibu. She is the author of Art as Lifework, Life as Artwork, a creativity seminar and workbook that has been offered nation-wide since 1991; and is currently at work on her new book, Who Would You Be If You Had Nothing to Bitch About? Her personal development system, Wishful Thinking, synthesizes the human proclivity for magic and symbol with practical steps to the manifestation of your fondest dreams. She is a regular contributor of stories to the Chicken Soup for the Soul series of books.
Old Storyteller
When I was a child, my mother’s family was five generations deep, five generations alive at the same time. Some of those people lived well over a hundred years. They were living history. Their stories and the stories they told of their ancestors’ ancestors were part of a six-thousand-year-old oral tradition.
By the time I was seven, I was consciously collecting stories that had been in the family for generations. I became a reliquary. I would guard and preserve these treasures for the generations to come. And when I grew up, I would be one of those Old Storytellers.
I soaked up random memories from my grandma’s childhood in Russia, my dad’s memories of his long years at the orphanage, my great- grandmother’s tale of her youngest child, my grandma’s little brother Georgie, running off to be a gangster—which I later realized was how my mom and dad eventually met each other.
At the family table, it was understood that nobody under the minimum age of 40 had anything to say of any imaginable interest or importance. Shah, shtil! Shut up and listen—you’ll learn something. Those people had outlived the pogroms, the post-WWI influenza epidemic, the great depression, Hitler. They had survived to tell the tales. So would I.
Early on, I was aware of creating the Old Storyteller character I imagined I could be. I had lots of tribal elders as role models among my mother’s mishpochah: very old musicians who’d played forever (I still have the violin that belonged to my grandfather’s grandfather). Very old singers of songs from a hundred years past (I still have Russian and Yiddish songs that belonged to my grandmother’s Grandma Masha). They had their way of doing Old Age. And some day, I would do that. I would be that.
Time has chipped away at the sharp corners, sanded down the jagged edges, smoothed out the rough and rocky terrain that was a younger Penny. I am “colorful” and “eccentric” now, instead of weird. I realize I haven’t been in a fistfight in over 20 years. PS: I always fought above my weight class. You don’t wanna mess with me…
Cinderella has become the Fairy Godmother. Sometimes, from here, I look back on a younger me, and I remind her who she’ll be when the scars are healed, when the back-against-the-wall fight to the death has ended in survival, when the foolish, forever life-altering choice has given the inevitable result.
More than any successes—and there have been great successes—I realize that, during every meaningful challenge, from time to time this Me I have become used to appear to the girl who was becoming, and said, “Hey, Pen, look who you get to be!”
I didn’t know all the strange details of the journey to that future Me, but I must say I’m about where I expected to be. This is Autumn. This is the Harvest. The wounds are healed. I like my scars. My heart has been broken. And broken again. And will break, again.
One of the great gifts of Age is permission to tell the truth. Another is independence from the good opinion of other people. At 76, although certainly mellower I still feel like the snarky little me I have been, all along. But, sometimes, when I catch an unexpected glimpse of myself in a mirror across the room, I’m astonished to see this old gal, this Old Storyteller I always imagined I would be.
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Breaking into Show Business is like breaking into Fort Knox; breaking out, we’re talking Alcatraz. Penny Orloff’s novel is populated by a meshuggah family, on-again-off-again lovers, diets from Hell, and a Rogue’s Gallery from the Showbiz underworld.
Miriam Rosen has been in love with Show Business since childhood, perpetually fantasizing herself as the Little Trouper Who Finds Stardom and True Love by the end of the movie. After a hundred shows and a hundred one-night stands, love and fame still elude her, and she’d rather suck a tailpipe than face another audition. Complicating her search for the Busby Berkeley ending is her primitive alter-ego—The Beast. This creature can track, kill, and devour a whole cheesecake; can kick the crap out of smaller muggers on the sidewalks of New York; and can’t say no to recreational sex with a famous director on the Third Ring of the New York State Theater while a public tour is in progress. When Miriam finds true love at last, she is faced with an agonizing choice: Showbiz or The Guy.
Check out Penny’s website at https://pennyorloff.com
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February 20th, 2025
I love this story! Kudos to you, Penny. I sense when you die, it will be with few regrets. 😉