Mice Into Men

At a party in Manhattan's swank Hotel Pierre, a young man with a gold discharge button in his lapel bounded to the platform with the aplomb of an old vaudevillian. His selections from Broadway's Song of Norway and Carousel stopped the show. Last week, one of the guests, a Broadway agent, signed the singing war veteran to a contract, and had high hopes of landing him a fat part in a musical comedy. For husky Sidney Lawson, 23, it was quite a step. Only a month ago he was a member of the Society of Timid Souls, a fraternity of stage-frightened musicians and actors.

Before he went to war, Lawson was a tenor with Robert Shaw's Collegiate Chorale, and afterwards he appeared in some soldier shows. But a year of infantry fighting overseas and six months of paralysis from bullet wounds shattered his stage poise. His voice was as lusty as ever, but audiences gave him the heebie-jeebies and a spotlight froze him stiff.

Then he joined the Society of Timid Souls, a three-year-old, self-help group, which meets in the Manhattan apartment of Bernard Gabriel, a nontimid concert pianist. Once a week for twelve merciless minutes, Lawson sang before an audience of 30 other "timid souls," who stared glassily, milled about, rang bells, booed. When he bowed for applause, they shouted that he was a ham. After a month of sweating it out, Lawson was ready to resume his career.

Says Processor Gabriel: "We get them used to what bothers them, or a worse dose [until] playing in public is really a relief."

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