Gratitude Friday 8 22 25 Ruddigore and the 1985 Muhlenberg Summer Music Theatre

Recently, I reflected on the summer of 1985, which was 40 years ago. I was twenty and it was a difficult summer for me. At the time, I was dabbling in college part time as a theater major at Muhlenberg College in Allentown. My life goal which I was not fully dedicated to, primarily due to my increasingly out of control drug use was theatrical lighting design. I wanted to work on the road with rock and roll bands. A life course that certainly would have taken me in a very different direction and perhaps much shorter path than the road I ended up on.

That summer, I ended up getting involved in the Muhlenberg Summer Music Theatre program. We worked on two shows that summer, Ruddigore by Gilbert and Sullivan and The King and I by Rodgers and Hammerstein. The set and lighting design was ambitious and as an underling, I worked day and night on the production, although at times I was a mess from drug and alcohol use. Muhlenberg has a huge stage, if I recall correctly the same size as the Met, 54 feet from proscenium arch to proscenium arch, with a wing (the offstage part) the same size. The set for Ruddigore was on casters and we moved this huge set on and off the stage as part of the show. It was easily the most professional show I was every involved in, even as I was decidedly less than a fully contributive member of the team at times.

What was happening was that my loss of control was increasing and my tolerance was becoming less predictable. Use prior to that was more often all upside with little downside. For me, like for many people drugs worked great until they didn’t. This summer was when the downsides were picking up momentum and interfering with my capacity to function. I was scared about what was happening and felt deep shame and remorse about the impact that it was having on those around me. Nothing worked the same way as it did before. Blackouts and wild behavior were regular. It was not pretty.

It was not until the next year that I got into recovery, and it was an even uglier year than 1985. But 85 was when things turned really bad for me. Surprisingly to me, my feelings about that summer have changed with the healing over of 40 years of wounds. The thing I deeply loved about the theatre was the common purpose and being a part of huge project operating in real time. It was the last year of my life I was involved in a production company. Looking back, having this life experience in some ways made it easier for me to develop a recovery troupe a few years later. I yearned to belong to something again and I did find where I belong.

While I left my theater days behind me in recovery, I do recall some great times. I can also see that the theatre served to provide me meaning and purpose in my late teens when I had no other and in this way, buffered me through a lot of pain. The chapter did not end the way I had hoped, but it was a critical one to the course of my life. It is funny how life is like that. It was a terrible year with the best outcome of any over the course of my life as pain forced me in a new direction.

A few years later, I ran into a neighbor at a local restaurant. He was having dinner with a friend from out of town. When the friend remarked that his connection to Allentown was that he was a set designer at Muhlenberg, we determined we had worked together on Ruddigore. I realized he was none other than Timothy Averill. I was a major headache for him over that summer, although his memory was much more forgiving of that experience than my own. A few weeks after that, my neighbor rang my doorbell and gave me the color rendering of that 54 long set we worked on. Tim wanted me to have it. It is in my home office, and it is one of my prize possessions. He cannot even know what it means to me to have that one-of-a-kind rendering.

Looking at it regularly had helped me heal and restored some of the fonder moments of that summer 40 years past. Muhlenberg ended their summer music theatre program in 2019 after 39 years. I can look back and feel honored to have been a part of it even if it was not what I thought it would be like, or to take me in the direction I had thought it would.  I found some pictures from that show 40 summers ago here.

I may never be a part of a theater production again. Part of me would want to be, but my current lifestyle does not lend itself to that kind of time and energy commitment, yet the theatre is in me still. I know what the organized chaos of the show feels like and to be an in the moment problem solver as the show must go on.

I am grateful for that long ended chapter in my life and what it meant for the rest of the story. Of course, life has these twists and turns, and with time I can more fully appreciate the twists and turns of my own as the course has become clearer to me over the years. While I miss the theater, I love my life most of the time and the direction it took. I am grateful even for the painful parts as it is where the healing started.

What are you grateful for today?