"I’m that anonymous woman who comes into your house." Beverly Sanders laughs as she describers her special style of celebrity. Anyone who has watched television for the past 25 years knows her face, though a few know her name. "I was in a department store looking in the sales rack and all of a sudden this woman grabbed my arm and started screaming, "look who’s here!" She dragged me away and said, "My God, you’re . . . who are you?"

"One time a woman said to me, ‘I was having the biggest argument with my husband the other night. Then you came on television and I turned to my husband and said, "I see that woman more than I see you."’"

Yes this actress is ubiquitous, but Sanders is far from annoying. She is a delightful, funny and charming woman who is far more that a conglomerate of the hundreds of television roles she has played over the years. Sanders, best known for roles on The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Rhoda, and amassed a remarkable body of work both in and out of sitcoms. She is an actress and person of great depth and now she is a playwright, willing to take some risks and share an episode from her personal life with audiences.

In recent years, many actors have turned to self-revelatory performance pieces, some of which have been too personal and not quite audience-friendly Fortunately Beverly Sanders is savvy enough to know that any piece of theatre must grab its audience before it can make a statement.

Sanders’ play, Yes Sir, That’s My Baby! Is a theatrical journey through a struggle to create a family. The tale touches on infertility, desperation, adoption and the reneging from a birth mother—real events suffered by Sanders and husband, studio musician Harvey Newmark. It was an incredibly painful process, especially when her first adopted child Leah was abruptly reclaimed by the birth mother after a few months. Ultimately Sanders successfully adopted her now 14-year-old daughter Laura and the family has remained intact and happy since.

Sanders had not planned to become a playwright, but as she reached her 50’s she found Hollywood’s once open doors slamming in her face. She recalls, "We are in a very ageist community. Actresses over 50 are forgotten.

"I was really feeling sorry for myself and went into the Dumpster. I’d go to an audition and somebody who is a peer would come up to me and say, "I love your work." Then I’d go into the room and audition for 20 year olds who didn’t know me from Adam and who wouldn’t give me the time of day—not a laugh or anything. It was so hurtful! I was eating myself up with this.

"Suddenly I thought to myself, any time in my life that things have gotten very hard I always just said, ‘ you have to do it for yourself.’ You can’t expect anybody to do it for you.

"So I said to Harvey, ‘I am going to write myself the greatest part! Every ting I want. I want to be funny, to be dramatic. I want the world to just go "Wow!" Then I started writing it. The very act of ding it and getting involved, besides creating something very truthful and honest, was just a real freeing event in my life. It brought me to a new place."

Though she wanted to write, she was not convinced that she could do it. It was her pal Mary Tyler Moore who propelled her into action. Sanders and Newmark were visiting Moore and her husband Dr. S. Robert Levine shortly after the earthquake of 1992 (which nearly demolished Sanders’ living room).

"We visited them while the house was being repaired. At dinner one night I was telling my stories and Robert said, ‘you ought to do a stand-up.’ Now, I have sung in nightclubs where you try to be funny, and if you aren’t funny you can at least start singing again. But getting out there just to be funny, forget it!

" Then before we went to bed, Mary said, ‘we want to buy you a computer and we want you to write a show.’" Moore was in the midst of writing her autobiography and knew its therapeutic value. "Every day she would read what she’d written. She told me I should start. So I started with all sorts of notions and ideas of what I should do. First I thought I’d write about my daughter Laura starting puberty while I was just starting menopause—then I realized she’d kill me."

So Sanders did what most Hollywood types do when the want to create a one-actor biographical show. She went to class. "He said, ‘Write and event. Something that happened to your life.’ I didn’t want to write about my show business career." She knew she had to find a traumatic event. She knew what it had to be, but she resisted it.

"When things happen like the baby being taken away and then getting Laura five months later—that episode was stuffed down so deep that I couldn’t deal with it. Every time the phone rang for the first year we had Laura I wanted to bolt form the house. The phone became my biggest enemy. I just sort of pushed all of the emotions back.

"Then as I was sitting there trying to figure out what to write, it came to me?: The day we went to child services and I pleaded with the birth mother to let us keep baby Leah. It just came out. I wrote it as a three-minute piece. I went into the class but I just couldn’t read it." Instead she offered another section we’d been writing that was less disturbing. "The teacher said, ‘I know this isn’t what you wrote. I want you to do what you wrote next week.’ So I called my friend and co-producer Lucy Johnson to meet me so I could read it to her. She had lived the moment with us. I read it and the two of us were there, just sobbing.

"I did read it the next class and from that point on it was like a flood. I always wondered when people said, ‘I can’t stop writing.’ Now all of a sudden I was getting up at 5:L30 to write every morning and all the memories flowed out—it was very cathartic."

Later she took the piece to a workshop group. "I went in and read some of it and just started working on more and more pieces. Then getting the voices and bringing life to the characters. Finally someone in the workshop said, ‘you know, you need to put it together now, see what you’ve got and do it.’

"So Betsy Hailey, who wrote A Woman of Independent Means, said ‘Let’s get 12 people together in my living room and you can read it.’ This was a year ago.

‘So far I only had the piece about the birth mother taking my baby Leah back, I hadn’t written anything about Leah. Fortunately Jay Sandrich was there. I’d called him about something else and he asked what I was up to. I told him about the reading and he said, ‘I think we could make that.’ I said ‘I don’t remember inviting you—but okay!!’

"After the reading he said, ‘You can’t take someone away from us until we know that person. We have to know Leah. We have to feel dramatically that the play is over.’ He was right, so I had to sit down and deal with those feelings. It was hard, but I got past it and wrote about Leah and it seemed more complete"

Sanders knew she needed a third eye for a director. Someone she could trust not to get caught up in the issues and remain detached enough to help her shape it as a theatrical piece, not just a pouring out of the soul. She had often worked with television and theater director Asaad Kelada, one of the post prolific directors in Hollywood.

"Just before I decided to do the reading I called Asaad because I always felt he’d be the right person. He is a terrific director and a wonderful person. Someone said to me, ‘Why Asaad? He’s not married, he doesn’t have children, he’s not a woman.’ I said, ‘Exactly, it’s for all those reasons that I want him.’

"Here is this gorgeous man from Cairo doing sitcoms and getting it. It was always some universal thing. Every show—he’s so precise and it is so meaningful to him. I have done so many sitcoms for many great directors, but the just do it. Asaad will sit down and tell you why the character might say something like that. He knows where the comedy comes from—somewhere real and truthful.

"So I knew he was the person I needed. I didn’t want to do a show where I was self-pitying at all. I really wanted to show to be funny—I didn’t want everyone to go, ‘Oh, God.’ I wanted the show to be more about the human experience than the specific experience itself."

As Sanders prepares for the opening she is more and more excited about the piece and its possible futures. "I see this piece going off-Broadway, going all over the country. I’d love to do that. I like doing the piece and it is a good vehicle for me."

But she also has a social/political agenda for the piece. "In the last few years children have been taken away from their adoptive parents—like that four year-old boy in Chicago. I have a dream that I will do this at the Goodman Theater and one of the Supreme Court judges will be in the audience and see what happens after you close the door after you take the child away from somebody. The will see what happens to these people. Just the knowledge that we are caring, nurturing, loving people and that because we can’t have children, these are our children"

Aside from her personal joy in the piece and its potential political power, Sanders has also discovered that she can indeed write.