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hospitals. I sell it to them. Then I sell it to different organizations that wanted “Take Care” at night. It's an Equity contract dealing with bookings. Then you have a stage manager, you know, just keeping the cast together. Then in the middle of the show someone gets another job and they have the right to give notice, and you have to rehearse somebody else overnight to come back in to the show. Very complicated. Then it goes to the George Meany Labor Center in Maryland, where it's seen by people from the National Endowment for the Arts, Music Division, and it does well there.

Then I'm thinking of, “How're we going to get this thing moving?” We're talking with SEIU already. So I convince Service and UAW, and a number of other unions -- the Amalgamated Clothing Workers -- so it will take a tour of the Midwest, like two weeks in the Midwest. Stop off at some of our places -- you know, pays for you. There's no free lunch here. For the cast, you have to tell the cast before that “When you finish you have to move out of town. If you stop, they'll disappear on you.” You know, it becomes a whole kind of thing.

Then one thing happens to “Take Care” that gives it a fantastic shot in the arm. I had developed a very good relationship with Ray Marshall. I've got to do this in five minutes -- we got to get out. Ray Marshall had come to the conventions, and he was an art buff. He saw “The Working American,” and oh! He could send me this, send me that, and he'd make speeches about Bread and Roses. We got our 50,000 dollar grant from the Department of Labor. We'd all ready gotten it, but he would say, “We're proud that we're part of this.”

So I have the idea of, “Why can't we do this in Washington. Let's do it in Washington, in the den of the beast” -- you know, in the belly of the beast. I get his support and we go, we need a place. The Department of Labor has an auditorium, and we work it out at the Department of Labor auditorium in Washington. I want invitations to go out -- because we also do it in Albany for the legislature -- in the “Egg”, in the big theater there -- sponsored by the legislature, paid for by Blue Cross. The thing is done in the Department of Labor auditorium. The invitations, I'm trying to get the invitation inviting -- I want to get Livingston W. Biddle, Joe Duffy, Lane Kirkland. Kirkland won't do it. I can't get Kirkland, I can't get Kirkland to do it. I think I had the secretary of labor. They're going to come down and do a performance, one performance. They were to come down and rehearse, and I get Ossie to come down because of media. We're working media now. I get Joan Mondale, who had come to the opening of “Working American” in New York, and had then gone to a hospital to see a show -- Ossie and Ruby performing at St. Luke's Hospital -- and had done a





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