Power of Decisions and Choices

Sidney Poitier:
I became an actor by accident. I was a dishwasher in New York City. And I was alone. My family was in the Caribbean, where I came from originally, and I was in New York washing dishes for a living. I used to get my jobs out of a black newspaper called The Amsterdam News. I was in the want-ad section one day looking for a dishwashing job and on the opposite page there was a theatrical page and it said "Actors Wanted," just like it said dishwashers wanted, and porter and elevator operators wanted. So I said what the hell, "Dishwasher Wanted, Actor Wanted," and I looked up the address and went to the place that was saying this and I got to The American Negro Theatre at 135th Street and Lenox Avenue in the basement of the Schomburg Collection Library. There was one guy in there. The theatre was not quite as large as this--it had a small stage like this--and the guy said, "Can I help you?" I said, "Yes, I saw this thing in the paper about actors."
He said, "Are you an actor?"
I said, "Yes."
And, to make a long story short, he said, "OK, here's a script." I never knew what a script was. He said, "Page 21. You read so and so, I'll read so and so."
So I got up there and I'm reading, but I went to school for a year and a half in my life, so I hadn't really yet learned to read very well. I started reading everything marked under "John,"--I assumed that's what he wanted me to read--and I was stumbling over the words. He saw immediately that I was not an actor and he came up on the stage--he was a very big guy--and he grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and yanked me off the stage and marched me to the door. As he threw me out he said, "Stop wasting people's time. Why don't you go out and get a job as a dishwasher or something?"--absolutely true.
I'm walking down the street, going to the bus and I said to myself, "How did he know? Was there something about me that gives off that I am dishwashing material?"
It was that day that I decided to be an actor. Not to be an actor, but just to show him and myself that there was more to me than washing dishes. I intended to become an actor to show him one day and go, "he, he, he" and then give up the business. It didn't happen that way.