Nancy Ames &
The Skin of our Teeth
McLean High School
Nov 1959

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Skin of Our Teeth, group shot    
Dominika (Minnie) von Zahn '61, Lisa Collins '60 (back to camera), Richard Bowers 60, Nancy Ames 60, (standing behind Richard), Jimmy (Jay) Hoofnagle '61 and Nick Scallorn '60 (whom some say looks like Tom G Mathers '59).



Nancy Ames, arm raised   Nancy Ames knockout   Nancy Ames frontal  
Nancy Ames, her hair streaked with gray at 17 through the miracle of stage makeup. 





Nancy Ames swamped by fans       Danny Hall brass knuckles  
Surrounded by her fans !!  Danny Hall, Nancy, Craig Colby (all '60).

Today, parents can buy their kids stun guns for self protection -- you know, Tasers.   We weren't so lucky. We just had stuff like brass knuckles and bicycle chains.   Nancy admits Danny is showing off her brass knuckles (right), but nobody's saying where she got them from in the first place.  Some mysteries remain. 

ABOUT SKIN OF OUR TEETH

Thornton Wilder (1897 – 1975) wrote Our Town, a popular play (and later film) set in fictional Grover's Corner, New Hampshire. Our Town employs a choric narrator called the "Stage Manager" and a minimalist set to underscore the universality of human experience. (Wilder himself would play the Stage Manager on Broadway for two weeks and later in summer stock productions.) The play won the 1938 Pulitzer Prize.

His play The Skin of Our Teeth debuted in 1943 with Fredric March and Tallulah Bankhead in the lead roles. Again, the themes are familiar--war, pestilence, economic depression, fire. Ignoring the limits of time and space, just four characters and three acts are used to review the history of mankind.  If this kind of intellectualism is too much for you, check out the non-fictional life of Tallulah Bankhead.  ("At 15, Tallulah Bankhead won a movie-magazine beauty contest & convinced her family to let her move to New York ". . . definitely a mistake.)
(Adapted from "Thornton WIlder" in the Wikipedia, the encyclopedia that's not written by snobs.)
--end Skin of our Teeth & Nancy

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