Katharine Burr Blodgett kept an inner struggle out of sight as she made history in the laboratory

"In 1929, when she was 31 years old, Katharine Blodgett started an amateur acting career with the Schenectady Civic Players. Her first role for the Players was in a play called Overtones by Alice Gerstenberg. The entire one-act play consists of one long, tense encounter between two women whose inner thoughts are personified on stage."

"Katharine plays Margaret's inner voice, Maggie. Maggie is like a splinter in Margaret's brain, nudging and prodding her. That role turned out to be far more meaningful than we realized when we found out about it—even a premonition of sorts."

"We tend to live our lives as if they were, in some way, already written. Not in a mystical sense, just in a human one. We carry stories about ourselves near the surface of our consciousness, and then, often without realizing it, we start to act those stories out."

Katharine Burr Blodgett's relatives discovered papers and artifacts revealing an inner conflict she carefully hid despite her groundbreaking laboratory work. In 1929, at age 31, Blodgett began an amateur acting career with the Schenectady Civic Players, playing Maggie, the inner voice of Margaret in Alice Gerstenberg's play 'Overtones.' The one-act play depicts the tension between a woman's polite exterior and her critical inner thoughts during an uncomfortable social encounter. This role proved symbolically significant, serving as a premonition of Blodgett's own lifelong experience of maintaining a composed public persona while managing internal emotional turmoil. The discovery suggests that people often unconsciously enact the narratives they carry about themselves, with younger selves foreshadowing older ones.

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