I was brought up on a potato farm in Hodgdon, Maine. I went to school in Hodgdon and, later, for high school in Houlton. As a child I was immersed in so many of the activities of late 1950’s early 1960’s small town life. I sang in church and the Community Chorus, played in the band, worked with my father and the hired men on the farm, rode my bike to school, loved the parades and all the activities of the Potato Feast, etc., etc. After college I returned to Houlton for a nearly 6 year stint as owner/operator of a small convenience store on Route 1, heading south out of Houlton. During those years I gained a more mature appreciation of the people, the “characters”, the joys and sorrows and the wonders of small town life. In 1982 I went to NYC to try my hand at the acting profession and as a professional singer. I worked as an actor/singer for 10 years, earning my Equity card and even appearing in one Broadway musical. My favorite acting gig in those years was a workshop production of ” Grover’s Corners”, a musical treatment of “Our Town”, the Thornton Wilder classic. The musical was by Schmidt and Jones, the creators of another classic, “The Fantastiks.” The project never made it to Broadway but it was a tremendous experience working with the talented cast and that brilliant creative duo. There was so much resonance between the story and my memories of life in MY small town! I actually brought in copies of “The Pioneer Times” ( the only newspaper in the world interested in Houlton Maine) and the director used it for a kind of reference point for certain scene set ups. The whole experience was wonderful.
After 10 years as an actor I was offered an opportunity to teach theatre ( acting, stage craft, directing shows) at Horace Mann School, a private prep school just north of Manhattan. Through a strange series of events I became the head of the Theatre program in just a couple of years. I ended up staying there for the next 25 years and enjoyed many wonderful colleagues and students and grew a lot in my own knowledge of acting and the world of the theatre. My Acting Seminar was for the older students. During the first trimester we studied and performed monologues extracted from the “Spoon River Anthology” by Edgar Lee Masters. It is a vast canvas of characters,each represented by a sort of epitaph, an assessment of one’s life made from beyond the grave. All lived in a small, tangled, town in Illinois. The terseness of the character sketches forced students to make strong specific choices. I often found myself coaching the students with back up material from my small town background. I mined my memory with detailed and often wild stories about the characters from my little town and it helped the kids understand the veracity of these wonderful, poetic characters painted by Masters.
Halfway through my teaching career we were blessed with a new theatre facility. For the opening production in the new theatre I chose “Our Town.” It allowed for a very open set presentation allowing the audience to really SEE a lot of the actual structure of this new stage. It also allowed us to feature the great potential of the much expanded lighting. This was an opportunity for me to fuse the two great experiences of small town theatre that I had enjoyed so much , the Wilder play and the individualized character development in small town life that we had been rehearsing for years in Spoon River. I found a way to use the score from Copland’s movie score to “Our Town” in this production too!
So. The music that moves me is this Copland “Our Town” theme. Sometime in the mid 1990’s I heard it for the first time on WQXR in NYC. I went out and bought a CD by Leonard Slatkin and the St Louis Symphony playing it. I played it a lot. SOOOO many mornings when I would be sitting at the dining room table correcting papers at 5:00A.M. it would come on the radio. Somebody at WQXR must have loved it as much as I !! And whenever I heard it , it sent me on a memory trip back to Hodgdon, back to Grovers Corners, Back to Spoon River, back to individual events and faces from my youth. It always calmed me. Some days it made me sentimental. Some days it made me cry with some kind of unanswerable longing. Whatever, it ALWAYS moved me. Copland captured some ineffable spirit of the beauty and the strength and the sadness and the joy all wrapped up together in the life of a small town.
And that’s my story.