Where It All Began

Here is a picture of where it all began, taken more than twenty years after my auspicious debut at the local community theater. Originally the local post office, when that facility was relocated, the building was purchased by the local community theater for a dollar. The security catwalk, where managers watched to make sure the workers didn't steal made a great light booth. By comparison the space was primitive to the high school auditoriums that I worked in, but was down-right palatial compared to some of the venues I worked later in life as a professional.

Like many, many kids, theater groups represented a haven from the all-too-cruel real world. My first play, ever, was as the mute stage manager in a children's theater production called "Land of the Dragon." I stole the show, if I do say so myself. That taste addicted me and in my early teens I was lucky enough to land in various local productions of Finian's Rainbow, and The Music Man. I moved a lot as a kid, but the summer after my sophomore year I settled down in Le Mars, Iowa and began my theatrical career in earnest.

Because the local community theater was sort of dependent upon the high-school students for the larger shows, they coordinated their larger musicals. So, in three years I did Anything Goes, Mame, Guys and Dolls and Annie Get Your Gun. I directed three children's shows. And when I wasn't preparing plays, I was competing in speech and music competitions.

But I always sort of think as the Postal Playhouse as my artistic home. My last performance there was when my college toured through the area and performed Hamlet. I only played the Ghost and various smaller roles, but that performance was the closest I ever felt to being a star. As we packed up the bus after the performance, a photographer from the local paper came to take a picture of me receiving a two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar scholarship check. It ran on the front page of the local paper.

The last time I saw the Postal Playhouse the lobby had been untouched since it's post-office days, with the exception that the clerk's windows had been removed to allow entrance into the theater proper. Old movie-theater seats had been mounted on platforms of various levels that could be moved to form different seating configurations. There was a simple lighting square hung from the ceiling, and there were probably a dozen ten-foot flats that were stiff with the paint of dozens of productions. Off either side of the lobby were rooms, one for the administrative office and one serving as the paint room and concession area. The full basement served as the dressing room and housed thousands of costumes, clothes donated from area closets that had been cut and restitched into various outfits.

Of course, I didn't have a clue as to what I was doing and I shudder to think what artistic crimes I committed on that stage. But it's quite possible that stage saved my life, but the very least it served as the springboard for where I am now and I am eternally grateful.