until 1980. During this time, in 1977, she completed the film version of Number Our Days with director Lynne Littman. The film, Myerhoff explained, would not deal with the complexities of the Center’s conflicts, but rather showed the elders at their best. She wanted to give back to the elders what they had generously given her and gain for them some of the positive visibility they sought. That year, Number Our Days won an Oscar for best short documentary, increasing public interest in the center. The book, Number Our Days, came out in 1979 and received rave reviews. It was included as one of the year's ten best Social Science books by the New York Times. As in Peyote Hunt, Myerhoff chose one main male informant, Shmuel, who for her possessed worldly intelligence, self-reflection, and insightful community interpretation. Notably, while Myerhoff celebrated the uneducated female elders’ zest for life and survival skills, she chose highly educated male leaders as primary informants. Throughout her work she maintained that women and men had their respective cultures born from their gendered social roles. In Number Our Days, Myerhoff uniquely combined social science analysis and narrative story telling. In the book’s introduction, she reflected that she did not recognize Number Our Days as a traditional anthropological text because she wove the elders’ voices seamlessly into the study and placed herself alongside them as another character. These choices broke new ground in anthropological reflexivity and transparency. As a result of the book’s popularity, Myerhoff began to teach workshops on performance, life histories, ritual, and storytelling at NYU and the Hunter/Brookdale Center for the Aging. Myerhoff continued her work with the elders of the center until 1981. In 1980, she organized "Life not Death in Venice," an ambitious art exhibit at USC featuring the work of elderly Jewish artists. The elder’s created this title as a pun, taken from the novella Death in Venice by Thomas Mann, for their protest march for safer streets after a reckless biker killed one of the center’s members. In addition to the film, book, and art exhibit, in 1981, Myerhoff helped adapt Number Our Days for the stage, performed at the Mark Taper Forum. In her essay, “Surviving Stories: Reflections on Number Our Days” she described the ways the elders responded to their new found publicity and their constant negotiations for control over their representation. Myerhoff told of the inconsolable