Summer Theater

There was a little summer theater for me, too--at Camp Birch Trail in Minong, Wisconsin, where I played one of the old ladies in a musical version of "Arsenic and Old Lace," and at the Cherubs program at Northwestern University. Our "Arsenic" was musicalized with parodies--"There's a Place for Us" from "West Side Story" became the closing song about Sunnyvale, the rest home where Abby and Martha would spend their last days.

I was 11 the first year I went to Birch Trail, and I made a friend there, Bibi Pasternak from Memphis, Tennessee, who told me about a strange movie she'd seen on late-night TV--"Little Shop of Horrors". Long before the Ashman-Menken version, my friend Judy Fell and I wrote our own "Little Shop" musical based on what Bibi had told us--a plant that eats blood. We presented the script to Bibi as a hostess gift when we went to visit her in Memphis in the winter.

When I eventually saw "Little Shop" in 1982, I was in the front row, and the giant plant scared the crap out of me by sliding practically onto my lap.

Cherubs was Northwestern's program for students between junior and senior years of high school in a variety of pursuits--drama, debate, journalism, music, dance. The campus was about 20 minutes south of my home (I would have been happy to go there for college if it weren't so close), and I wanted to go, but I thought the competition for the drama division would be too tough, so I applied in radio-TV-film. I had a great summer there, with great teachers; one was Dave Liroff, who went on to be general manager of WBGH in Boston, a big producer of PBS shows, and another was Lloyd Garver, who became a writer and producer on various TV shows. I saw several plays well performed by the drama division students that summer, and I particularly remember Claudia Catania, who went on to become an actress and producer.