Anita Short Metz Grossman

Anita Short Metz Grossman, best known as Anita Grossman, (October 1, 1918–September 30, 2002) was a musician, playwright, poet, and political advocate. Grossman lived the majority of her life in Western California, playing music, writing children’s musicals, raising a family, and composing for one of the most recognized American dancers of the 20th century, Lester Horton.

Early life

Born Anita Eugenia Steindler on October 1, 1918 in New Rochelle, New York.

Career

Grossman spent decades serving as an artistic partner to the Costa Mesa Civic Playhouse (CMCP), where she was a fierce advocate for the success of the company in addition to being a playwright, composer, musician, and actress. In June 1976, Grossman appeared at a Santa Ana City Council meeting to fight for the integrity of her beloved company. After announcing that $250,000 was being allocated to the other local theater company, leaving the Civic Playhouse literally shortchanged, she was furious: “Grossman complained of the council’s action allocating $250,000 in federal revenue sharing funds to the construction of a new theatre for the South Coast Repertory at the South Coast Plaza. She said members of her group, which has been in the city for 11 years, wept when they heard of the gift to SCR.”

Mostly, however, Grossman's work involved music, her first love. She was “in charge of music” for a plethora of CMCP productions, including Minne’s Boys, a 1975 musical “tracing the rise to fame of the Marx Brothers” and The Bedraggled Dragon, a 1991 musical production based on the children’s book of the same name, featuring a cast of 39 youngsters praised for “supplying their own special effects” as well as speaking in verse better than many adults the reviewer has seen. During this time, Grossman was also a performer and soloist in many of the local California universities including Long Beach State College, as well as local festivals. Additionally, she served as a dance accompanist at UC Irvine, whom she met her lifelong friend and co-collaborator, Gelia Dolcimascolo. She even became the “surrogate” grandmother to Ms. Dolcimascolo’s daughter Kira.

It is the decade of the 1940s and early 1950s that leads to the most mystery. Credited as co-creator of the musical Joseph McGinnical, Cynical Pinnacle, Opus II, composer of Lester Horton’s Barrel House, and later named in HUAC hearings, it seems as if this Anita Grossman, then known as Anita Short or Anita Short Metz, was not only a musician but an active political advocate for third-party candidate Henry Wallace.

In 2001, she published a small collection of writings on music, entitled, “The Art of Music – A Collection of Writings, Volume I,” including the Georgia – based publication bluemilk, as well as two “chapbooks” (a small pamphlet usually containing poems or fiction) with her colleague and friend, Gelia Dolcimascolo. Her poems in the 2001 poetry collection show the range and depth of who she was as a person in two simple entries. The first poem, Serial Love, uses the style of the similarly named ‘serial music’ in which, “the twelve notes of the chromatic scale are arranged in a fixed order, then played in reverse, or using different dynamics, durations pitches and inversion. However, it is her second poem, To Marti, that really exemplifies Grossman.

Personal life

Grossman spent most of her life in New York and California, and has a daughter, Donna Spruijt-Metz. She passed away in California on September 30, 2002.