The very first time I stepped on stage was in 1965 when a teacher from the Lake Erie Girls’ College French Club, in Painesville, Ohio, asked a teacher at my high school if there were any boys who were proficient enough in the language to play the role of Mascarille in a production of Moliere’s Les Précieuses ridicules being mounted at the exclusive all-girls college. They required a male to play the part. I was a straight A+ student and my French teacher, Miss Hamilton, recommended me. Lake Erie College was wall-to-wall women, around the ages of nineteen to twenty-one.…