After being raised in the San Francisco area, Jane Anderson moved to New York City at nineteen to seek her fame and fortune as an actress. She found early success, landing a role in the premiere of David Mamet’s Sexual Perversity in Chicago in 1975, doing stand-up comedy, and creating a one-woman show. She soon returned to California and turned to writing out of frustration at the dearth of good roles for women. She started with television, writing episodes of “The Facts of Life” and “The Wonder Years” before turning to theatre. Her plays include Defying Gravity, The Baby Dance, Looking for Normal, and Tough Choices for the New Century.

Beginning in the 1990s, Anderson found some success writing screenplays. She wrote “It Could Happen to You,” “How to Make an American Quilt,” and the HBO movie “The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom,” for which she won both an Emmy and a Writer’s Guild Award. In 1998, just as she and her partner were finally able to adopt a child of their own, she was offered the opportunity to turn her play on that topic, The Baby Dance, into a movie for Showtime. The project earned her two Emmy nominations and a Peabody Award. Following that, she wrote and directed the “1961” segment of HBO’s “If These Walls Could Speak” (which depicts the prejudice and distress faced by an elderly woman made vulnerable by the death of her longtime companion), garnering another Emmy nomination. Most recently, she turned Finding Normal into the HBO film “Normal.” It featured outstanding performances by Jessica Lange and Tom Wilkinson and received an Oscar nomination for Outstanding Made-for-Television Film.

Food and Shelter was first produced in 1990. She states quite explicitly that it is not intended as a political tract on poverty; it is, rather, a celebration of the indomitability of the human spirit and a tribute to the tenacity of these characters’ struggle for survival. Examination of Anderson’s body of work suggests that her approach to activism is to put a human face on the “hot button” issues she addresses. The rest is left up to us.

With that in mind…
In 1999, Dallas’ shelters and outreach programs conducted a survey attempting to record the number of homeless in our city. Over 3,000 homeless people were counted that day. Of that number, some 600 were children, half of those in single parent families (read single women and their children). The survey was conducted under the auspices of the Dallas Homeless Consortium, which was established to provide an umbrella for the outreach, shelter, support, and housing services for the homeless in our community.

For more information on these services and how you can participate in or contribute to them, please visit the Homeless Consortium website. The list of facilities that participated in the survey is under the “survey results” link, and provides a good place to start.

The information on Jane Anderson came from www.hollywood.com.

[March 2004]

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