Paranoia Runs Deep
by tristero
If I were a conspiracy theorist – I’m not, I’m someone who came out of JFK convinced that Oliver Stone had proved beyond a doubt that Oswald acted alone – I would be getting the tinglies over this amazing little factoid:
[Both the young Richard Nixon and his wife-to-be Pat Ryan] had a role in the Whittier Community Players’ 1938 production of “The Dark Tower,” by George S. Kaufman and Alexander Woollcott. Pat Ryan, a pretty twenty-five-year-old teacher at Whittier High, came to “The Dark Tower” with a smidgen of theatrical experience. Born in a Nevada mining-town shack and toughened by a hardworking childhood on a farm in Artesia, she had helped put herself through the University of Southern California with occasional jobs as a movie extra. But it wasn’t any real enthusiasm for the stage that brought her to the Community Players. As her daughter Julie explains in a biography of her mother, she went only because the assistant superintendent at Whittier High asked her to, and she “found it difficult to say no to a school administrator.” Nixon took to the whole business and several months later was back for more. At the urging of the Players’ director, he went on to appear in “Night of January 16th,” a melodrama by Ayn Rand in which the text itself chewed the scenery.
Tricky Dick Nixon and Ayn Rand sitting in a tree – and way back in the thirties, no less!
Coincidence? I do think so. But still…