The Great Study Reorganization

One of my Lichtenbergian Proposed Efforts for 2022 is to reorganize my study, which has occupied the former attic space of our house since 1988. I think I am about 80% done with the project, which so far has involved moving a couple of things around, buying three more shelf units, discarding one old shelf unit, and a whole lot of culling. I’ll provide a full report when I’m done just so you can see that my study actually has a floor you can walk on.

Today I worked on organizing over 100 35mm slides from my first days as a theatre director here in Newnan. As a fresh BFA grad, I had ideas about what theatre could and should be, and although there was a community theatre group already — from which I had sprung — I found that the most fertile ground for my ideas was young people, teenagers, high schoolers.

They were energetic, bright, and super willing to learn what I had to teach. And so I launched myself into Midsummer Night’s Dream, School for Scandal, A Flea in Her Ear and a half a dozen others, proving that these classics were not only accessible to young amateur actors but to local audiences. Soon I became the artistic director of the whole ball of wax and continued for the next twenty-seven years until I bowed out with Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro.

Hotel Paradiso, 1975

Those kids — now approaching (or past) 60 — did it all: they built the sets, they drafted period costume patterns, they built 18th-c. wigs, they learned the skills of comedy. Several went on to careers in theatre, including founding theatres of their own and performing on Broadway; one is currently running NTC. I’m proud of what we pulled off.

Ah, nostalgia.

I’m having the slides digitized, so I’ll eventually share some of those photos with you. I suspect that many if not most of them will be too blurry to be useful, but technology these days is miraculous, so we’ll see.