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New York Mirror Magazine

Dateline June 3, 1962
Featuring Patricia Marand


A young Patricia Marand performed for the Navy on a
"Broadway In Review" 16" Transcription Disc.
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A 'C' Grows in Brooklin
* (Chanteuse)
By HYMAN GOLDBERG

An exciting Ebay find that brings us a peek into the life of Broadway's first Lois Lane, Patricia Marand.
New York Mirror photo of Patricia Marand

   By way of the BMT's Fourth Avenue local and Sea Beach express, it takes a little over half an hour to get to Fifth Avenue's Hotel Pierre from Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. But it took a beautiful red-headed Bay Ridge girl named Patricia Marand just a little more than 10 years to make that distance.

   Patricia, of course, did it the hard way, in a kind of roundabout fashion, via Texas, Chicago, New Orleans, Las Vegas, London, Rome and other European cities. But she got to the Pierre's Cotillion Room just the same, where she's now singing in a miniature revue called, "The Eighth Lively Art."

   Bitten early by the theatrical bug, Patricia was graduated six months before her class at Fort Hamilton High, talked her parents into letting her enroll at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. She was there only a few months when, on a dare from a classmate, she went to auditions for a Summer theatre on Cape Cod, landed a job, induced her family to take a cottage on the Cape for the season, and sang in nine musical comedies.

   "I didn't find out until later," said Patricia, "that the theatrical life wasn't all that easy, but for a while it seemed as though I was going to climb right to the top, with hardly any effort."

   When she came back to New York, Pat landed the leading female role in the musical, "Wish You Were Here" [co-starring Jack Cassidy who later played Max Mencken in "It's a Bird It's a Plane It's Superman ©"], then played Laurie [sic] in Oklahoma! worked in Kismet, and Pajama Game, and decided to see how life was in the strange world of nightclubs. She went to Las Vegas for that experience. "I figured if I could learn to handle myself in Vegas," she said, "I could take anything."

   Pat shook her head in wonderment. "The big thing in my favor," she said, "was that I always had that little old home in Bay Ridge to come back to. I see girls in New York all by themselves, hundreds of them, and I wonder how they stand the life while they go about trying to make a career. The things they have to put up with! Without the moral support of my family, I never could have done it. And the financial support, too."

   The Rodgers and Hammerstein office called Pat about that time with support in mind too, and she signed with an Oklahoma! troupe which toured Europe, putting on shows for the troops. "That was the biggest thing in my life," said Pat. "I got a husband out of that trip. He was the pilot of the Air Force plane we traveled in."

   Pat's prize catch, Maj. K. D. Ricks, followed her back to the U.S., and they were married in St. Patrick's Cathedral. He's now flying jets out of Maguire Air Force Base, over in New Jersey, and they have a house nearby.

   When Pat is working, which is most of the time, she's not at home as much as she'd like to be. "But we're together a lot more," she said, "than many married people who are home every day." The Air Force, it seems is flying jets all over the place, all the time, and when Pat is singing at the Shamrock in Houston, Texas, for instance, weekends are a cinch.

   But don't problems arise, we asked Pat, when big Texas spenders see a beautiful young woman whose husband is not around all the time?

   Pat smiled. "Oh, sure," she said, "problems arise. But they're problems only until they're settled. And I settle those pretty fast.

New York Mirror Magazine
June 3, 1962

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Text © Hyman Goldberg, New York Mirror Magazine, June 3, 1962
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