The Other Terry Saunders

There is a little tiny bit on Terryland about this, but I am hoping to expand it.

When I started doing comedy, like I fear most other young comics, I googled myself incessantly. Back in 2003 I did not appear. But Terry Saunders dominated the search results.

It seems that Terry Saunders was an actress (but with the ending in a y spelling) that was in the 1950′s film the King & I.

Over the last few years I have outranked her in google terms, slowly but surely with more things of mine appearing and my name in listings and reviews, until now a cursory Terry Saunders search shows that I have shunted her from the front page of results entirely.

And suddenly I felt bad, who was this person?

I also signed up to google alerts, where whenever my name gets mentioned anywhere on the internet get an email about it (I know – read into that what you like). It comes in handy for being praised/slagged off in blogs/forums but it also mean I get an inordinate amount of traffic for this other terry saunders.

But always the same thing, just a listing for the King & I and her name in the cast, no information. So I decided to do some digging. And progress has been slow then quick.

A night of googling found a list of the shows she’d been in, as a broadway actress she was in the original King & I musical, also in Follies and a thing called Milk & Honey, but mostly she was an understudy or replacement.

Aside from a few tantalising clues there was nothing about her personally on the internet that I could find aside from lists of the shows she’s been in or a million castlists of the King & I.

Then I found this playbill on ebay, with her name/my name on it. And I must say, it’s very odd seeing your own name on something that isn’t yours. Even moreso when I am very used to my own name appearing on posters for gigs and things.

I carried on digging, and then after a message on a forum about broadway (that was an odd moment, waiting for the email confirmation thing to come through for that website at 4am) I finally have some information. She, it seems is now in her 80′s and lives in the West 70′s of New York City.

I’m starting to feel all Dave Gorman.

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