• October 09, 1978
• Vol. 10
• No. 15

Lookout

David Richman, 27, directs his actors at the University of Rochester with a script punched out in Braille. Though legally blind at birth and sightless since 12, he says he can tell if actors make a sloppy entrance. "Generally, if people don't sound right, they don't look right," David finds. Born in Philadelphia "with enough vision at one time to know what things look like," David was sent first to special schools for the blind. But then, after his parents brought suit, he was allowed to attend regular junior and senior high school. "I don't remember not being interested in drama," he says, and it really took hold at Harvard. As a freshman he wrote three plays, one good enough to warrant a student production, but he decided to switch to directing anyway. His first efforts (plays by Beckett and Albee) "went quite well," says Richman, "so I kept at it." While getting his Ph.D. in English literature at Stanford, he gained acting experience playing in nine roles. Now an assistant professor of English at Rochester, he is also head of Drama House, the university's theater-dorm. When it comes time to "block" his productions, he gets help from his sighted actress wife of four years, Susan Lichtman, 28. Asked why he hasn't gone into radio drama instead, Richman responds: "That would have been a very easy solution for me, so I didn't take it."

Gerda Atzl-Nugent was just 13 when she fell in love with the sparkling crystal in the shop windows of her native Austrian Tyrol and decided to become a glass engraver. A year later she was enrolled at the local Kramsach Glass Technical School, preferring the academic to an apprenticeship with a master because "with a master you do what they want you to do, but in school we also learn drawing and design. And," she points out, "the top engraver at Steuben Glass in Corning, N.Y. had the same teacher I did." Moving to the U.S. with her student husband, John Nugent (he had spotted her engraving edelweiss in a crystal shop), Gerda, 24, now has her own establishment in Alexandria, Va. called Gerdaglas. She has set up the copper engraving disks of her trade in a tiny 8'-by-11' workroom, where she turns out everything from monograms (starting at 50¢ per letter) to engraved portraits (up to $500). She has also had her share of, er, crash orders. Her most demanding was to produce in three hours an ashtray with a crown inscribed, "To the King of Entertainment"—a birthday gift from singer Carol Lawrence to Bob Hope. She has turned down at least one request. A young woman asked Gerda to engrave a large bird on the customized glass roof of her boyfriend's car. "How," she laughs, "was I supposed to get it under my machine?"