Still acting up for this instructor

Students at Fairfax High School can be forgiven if they don’t know the name of drama teacher Marilyn Moody. She last taught at the school in the 1970s, more than a decade before any of today’s students were born.

But good teachers cast long shadows, and Moody’s former students -- the ones who took drama classes at Fairfax from 1959 to 1971 -- remember her as if it were yesterday.

Which, for many of them, it was.

Some 160 Fairfax alumni turned out Sunday to pay tribute to Moody, a teacher whom many credit with shaping their adult lives. They came from as far as Switzerland, New York and Michigan, and, for a few hours packed with love, nostalgia and musical comedy, were again eager students trying to please the best teacher they ever had.

To the tune of “Anything Goes,” they sang:

“She’d make us each the best, cause she’d teach the best,

Made our plays the best, and our days the best.

We learned skills to make our resumes the best,

In that building on old Melrose. . . . “

“She changed my life forever,” said Celia Celnik Taite, an actress and acting teacher who was one of the organizers of Sunday’s event. “She was the most unbelievable inspiration -- my teacher, my coach, my guide.”

Taite (Class of ‘73) and Judy Rich (Class of ‘60) came up with the idea for the tribute when they realized a few months ago that Moody was about to turn 80. What began as a plan for a fairly small surprise birthday party quickly snowballed as word spread among Moody’s former students, many of whom have stayed in touch.

By the time Sunday rolled around, it was a full-fledged production. The party itself was no longer a surprise -- as the event grew, that idea no longer seemed prudent. But Moody, long retired and living in Woodland Hills, still seemed bowled over.

“As Mike Myers would say, I’m verklempt,” she told the brunch crowd at the Sportsmen’s Lodge in Studio City. As the accolades flowed, she waved her hands frantically in embarrassment.

Most people can recall a favorite teacher, someone who excited them about learning and perhaps inspired them enough to set the course of their lives and careers. But by all yardsticks, Moody appears to have been especially gifted, and the outpouring Sunday reflected the passions she incited in her students.

“It’s interesting how one teacher can change not just all these people’s lives, but the face of show business,” observed Cynthia Szigeti (Class of ‘67), who went on to become a successful actress and improvisational acting teacher, whose own students have included Conan O’Brien and Lisa Kudrow.

Many of those at Sunday’s event have had successful entertainment careers, not only as actors but as dancers, musicians, set designers, producers and, in several cases, drama teachers -- the gamut of show business jobs.

Anita Mann, a dancer and dance producer, said that throughout her career, she has “heard Mrs. Moody in my ears every day.”

Russ Titelman, a 1962 Fairfax graduate who went on to become a successful musician, songwriter and Grammy-winning record producer, wrote in a tribute to Moody that she “was the guardian of the door that opened onto a universe of infinite possibilities.”

“Plus,” he added Sunday, “she was so funny and so tough. . . . We were constantly living in fear of the wrath of Moody, and at the same time, you knew she loved you.”

Her former students were almost uniformly consistent about what made Moody a great teacher: She set expectations higher than many thought they could achieve, then pushed them to realize those goals. In ways large and small, she showed that she cared deeply about each of them and understood their abilities and idiosyncrasies -- sometimes better than they did. She bristled with passion, energy and unbridled, irreverent fun.

Sometimes, she just bristled.

Her students all remember what she called them. It was always their last name, only their last name, usually delivered with several exclamation points, as in, “Bernstein!!!!” or “Burke!!!!!!” Students, for the most part, called her Moody, and still do.

“Hi, Moody, it’s Bob Steinberg, ‘64,” one of them announced from the stage of the banquet hall Sunday. Without explanation, he added: “Here’s something you never thought would happen. Here’s that $5 I owed you from 1964. I want you to know that changed my life for that night.” She laughed.

For her part, Moody was self-deprecating about her role in students’ lives. Asked the secret of her success, she said, “They were such eager students. I loved every one of them.” She added: “Whether they had private problems at home or they just wanted to be part of a group, they needed drama, and I think I fulfilled that.”

Darrell Walker (Class of ‘72), who became a lawyer and executive vice president of the black-oriented BET television network, regaled the crowd with his recollections of “the Moody walk, which was somewhere between a drill sergeant and Marty Feldman in ‘Young Frankenstein,’ ” and “the Moody voice,” which, he said, could often be heard as far away as the football field.

He hadn’t been especially interested in acting, Walker said, but Moody pushed him and along the way taught him valuable lessons about himself. “What I’ve learned in the years since is that that wasn’t an acting lesson,” he said. “That was a lesson in life.”

During the years Moody was there, Fairfax High was a school very much shaped by its time and place. The students were overwhelmingly Jewish, academic strivers who were either the children or grandchildren of immigrants struggling to make ends meet. It was also, by the late 1960s, a turbulent place that was fully swept up by the passions of the antiwar movement and the counterculture.

Moody’s biography might suggest she didn’t quite belong there.

Born in Blue Earth, Minn., she had studied economics and drama in college before taking a job as a teacher in the theatrical mecca of Bemidji, Minn. One morning, she recalled, “they said on the news that it was 40 degrees below zero and the trees were cracking. I said, ‘California, here I come.’ ”

After attending graduate school at UCLA, she took a job teaching drama at San Pedro High School in 1952. She taught there for five years and then briefly at John Burroughs Junior High before landing at Fairfax in 1959. That was the point, she said, “when a Missouri Synod Lutheran Gentile became an honorary Jew.”

Her first year, she produced Fairfax’s first student musical, “The Boyfriend.” She went on to direct numerous other dramatic and musical productions, many of them award-winners, before a back injury in the early 1970s prompted her to scale back on stage work and teach other subjects. She retired in 1979.

Although her health has declined in recent years and she does not walk easily without help, Moody on Sunday looked decades younger than 80, and she showed some of the wit her students remember so fondly.

Though they insisted she was anything but a sentimentalist, she appeared deeply moved as she told them, “All of you here gave me the best part of my life. . . . It was my pleasure to have helped you along the way, and I got more from you than you’ll ever know.”

The day ended, appropriately, with a musical production -- for which, according to co-organizer Debbie Wenner Green, 25 people rehearsed every weekend for six weeks, determined to craft something that would be up to Moody’s exacting standards.

It was. “Well done!” she yelled after one number. Others brought her to her feet for standing ovations.

They ended with “We Love You, Moody,” rewritten by actor and writer Stuart K. Robinson (Class of ‘73) to the tune of “We Love You, Birdie” from “Bye Bye Birdie.”

“We love you, Moody,

Oh, yes we do.

We’re better people

Because of you

One high school class,

Who knew?

Oh, Moody,

We love you.”

Moody proclaimed it “Oscar-caliber.”

Then they sang “Happy Birthday” and presented her with a cake. “These aren’t trick candles, are they?” Moody asked. Then she blew. And blew. And blew.

Kids. Sometimes they just never grow up.

mitchell.landsberg @latimes.com