I got to Vassar which 43 years ago was a single-sex institution, like all the colleges in what they call the Seven Sisters, the female Ivy League and I made some very quick but lifelong and challenging friends. And with their help outside of any competition for boys, my brain woke up. I got up and I got outside myself and I found myself again. I didn't have to pretend, I could be goofy, vehement, aggressive, and slovenly and open and funny and tough and my friends let me. I didn't wash my hair for three weeks once. They accepted me like the Velveteen Rabbit. I became real instead of an imagined stuffed bunny, but I stockpiled that character from high school and I breathed life into her again some years later as Linda in the Deer Hunter. There is probably not one of you graduates it who has ever seen this film, but the Deer Hunter won best picture in 1978. Robert De Niro, Chris Walken, not funny at all. And I played Linda, a small town girl from a working class background, a lovely, quiet, hapless girl, who waited for the boy she loved to come back from the war in Vietnam.