How We Came to Run the Gamut
By Clark Nicholson
Chapter 2:
“Stumbling”
(Warning: This is the real story, so I should tell you that there isn’t a lot of theatre in this formative chapter, however, what happens in the following absolutely shaped events and personalities which would eventually come together and take the name of Gamut. Take a deep breath. Here goes.)
So, when we last looked back into the annals of Gamut arcana, I told you of a conversation between my then girlfriend and myself about what sort of a company we would like to build. And, as I said, I’m happy to report that, if my memory serves me well (and, it usually does, but not to the extent that I would ever let it get in the way of telling a good story), most of what we talked about then is what we eventually achieved. However, what’s really important in this telling is that this did not fully realize itself for many, many years, and truly, some of these developments are only now coming to pass.
But, the point of the story is the telling of the tale, so I’ll get about that.
Melissa and I were working our winter gigs in Columbia, SC. Things were getting less and less tenable there for us in each of our respective companies. Advancement wasn’t happening, our wages were paltry, and we got robbed in company housing multiple times. So, I took a powder for a bit, completely stopped all theatre and went to work first for my father’s twin brother, renovating rundown government housing, while Melissa continued work, for a bit in her old job. Then, I went to work for my father full-time in Newberry, SC as a sign painter, and Melissa left her theatre job to move in with me.
She, a Central PA girl, took a huge chance and moved to my home county of Saluda, SC. We set up our first home in a rented house, reputedly haunted, at the end of a long and largely uninhabited road. The house was big, creaky, old, with no telephone (this was long before cell phones, kids) and was only heated by a wood stove, which I taught Melissa to use, as well as teaching her, one memorable afternoon, how to drive my stick shift truck, since that was the only vehicle we had.
This time was very strange and solitary. We were out in the middle of a very large field surrounded by woods, and our neighbors’ houses were across the field a half a mile or so away. We got to know each other even better… and yes, friends, the house was indeed haunted. Going into that subject here is a bit far afield of my subject, but suffice it to say that Melissa and I saw and experienced things that made us believers then, and ‘til this very day.
It was spooky.
So, during this time, we continued to plan what we wanted to achieve, but I was going to work every day in our one vehicle, and she was left alone in this remote house with no telephone, and no easy way to interact with the outside world. My hours were long, and it was a strain on both of us. Also, I learned that my father and I were not cut out to work together long term with him as my boss and I as his employee. He was wildly creative, but profoundly disorganized. This caused great tension, most specifically because we were losing money and yet he refused to believe that this wasn’t going to be my job path for life. I tried to let him know that I appreciated the work, but that I wasn’t going to be a sign painter for the rest of my life. I was, by God, going to be an actor. Somehow.
Melissa and I made it through that year, somehow. It definitely wasn’t her natural element, but she racked in and rose to the occasion, despite my tensions with my father at work, and our mutual discomfort with living in such isolation in a spooky old house. On some occasions we’d throw parties, and our friends still doing theatre work would come out to our house out in the middle of nowhere, but they were wondering the same things we were: Just what were we doing?
As we moved into the Spring of that year, time came around once again to prepare for the summer work. We both planned to go back to our annual Summer gig and the place that we had come to think of as our Summer home, The Lost Colony Outdoor Drama. We went to several Southeastern regional auditions to see if we might get different and better roles in The Colony, and…. Surprise!.... we planned to get married there at the end of the Summer season.
But, as John Lennon said, “Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans.” And what happened next rocked us pretty hard as a young couple and as a budding set of theatrical business partners. She got hired back with a promotion: a principal role and I… got zilch. Nada. Nothing.
Now, this sort of thing happens in theatre. I know this well. But, it still didn’t make it any easier. My old boss in the technical department (I had been a props assistant during the previous season) had moved on, and the new boss, a well-loved fellow from before my time had come back in as a production head. And, I wasn’t in his picture. This stung. Bad. But, worse than that, I couldn’t figure out how we were going to make it all work out. Melissa needed to go back to take this advancement, but I couldn’t afford to go with no job waiting for me there and no housing if I wasn’t working at that theater. And so… it seemed that our plans to marry were also in great jeopardy. We weren’t even going to see each other for months; much less be able to plan how we were going to get married with our paltry finances. This put us both in an uncertain and dark, dark place.
Meanwhile, things were getting more tense between my father and me. He wanted me to continue to work for him and take a job as a part-time local radio DJ to satisfy my “creative aspirations,” and I had no inclination whatsoever to do this. Every day things at work got more and more tense. And, I was doing absolutely no theatre, and it was looking like I’d gotten on a poverty-level hamster wheel that I was never going to get off of.
So, Melissa and I, before she went to The Lost Colony, decided to get married quickly and get it over with. We had a grand total of about $200 to make this happen. We called a couple of dear friends in Galax, Virginia, approximately halfway between my home in SC and Melissa’s home in Central PA. We got it together in two weeks; told her family, my family, and all of our friends. It was a unique and lovely impromptu celebration out in the middle of the woods on a dead-end trail in the Southern Virginia woods, reputedly were the Galax kids all went parking to make-out. It was a lovely day, and we were surrounded by dogwoods in bloom, our families, and our theatre friends who sang and danced and got us all hitched. Magical.
As we drove away from Galax, we took a short jaunt up toward the North East, to visit Melissa’s family, and see where she had grown up. It was a nice getaway, and frankly, I really needed it. Things had gotten explosively bad back in my Pop’s sign shop. I was deeply depressed with the turn my life had taken, and my Pop was furious that I wasn’t happy with being a sign painter for the rest of my life. It had all come to a nasty head the day before the wedding, when we had an explosive argument, and he fired me.
So, I had this in my mind when we went off on our honeymoon to see Melissa’s home. Melissa knew that I was miserable, and that made her miserable, and although we’d re-planned and made our wedding happen, the fact still hung in the air that she was going back to The Lost Colony that coming summer in a principle role, and I was stuck, now, without a job.
And, it was in this mindset that I came to first see Central PA. I was floored by the beauty. The mountain ridges and the Susquehanna river were lovely. Like, postcard lovely. I found Harrisburg to be a charming little city. We went to City Island and road the tiny train that was running back in those days, we walked on the trails of the mountains and valleys, and we watched the sunset over the river. I was really quite taken with the feeling of the place.
I met Melissa’s large, loud, joyful family, and realized that she had come from a large, nurturing group of people. And, another thing was very plain: they missed her. All of them were asking, “Missy, when are you coming home?” And, I thought, Oh, wow… they don’t understand. We’re theatre people. We may have been set back a bit over the past year, but the nature of our chosen life-path means that it’s going to be well-nigh impossible for her ever to come home.
The third day of our visit, I called my Pop to apologize for any part I might have contributed to the fight we’d had just before the wedding. I still, to this day, feel that I didn’t do anything to cause that, but I wanted to mend fences as best I could. He was surly and monosyllabic. He told me that he needed me back at work, immediately, if not sooner. And, I just didn’t know what to say. I needed money in the short term, but this was the last situation that I wanted to perpetuate. I loved my father, but this dynamic was soul-draining and toxic.
As we left Central PA and headed back to SC, with a truck full of Melissa’s stuff to take back to our haunted house in the middle of the field, I told Melissa, “I just don’t want to go back to that. It’s killing me. My father and I fight like cats and dogs, yet he doesn’t want me to leave.” And, Melissa agreed, and so, with a full load of furniture and clothes loaded in my old Toyota pickup we headed south out of PA… just as we came to the agreement that, after this last summer season of The Lost Colony, we would, as new husband and wife, come back to Central PA. And, we began to think that the plans that we had made on the interstate between Columbia, SC and Atlanta, GA would now, very possibly, be established in Central, PA.
We got back home, now a young married couple, unloaded all of Melissa’s stuff into the spooky old haunted house, but we didn’t unpack it. I went back to work for my Pop, but I told him in no uncertain terms that this was temporary. I had gone to college, trained to be an actor, toured all over the country, and that would be my trajectory. I would work through the Spring and the Summer, but when Melissa finished her summer at the Colony, we planned to settle, at least temporarily, in Central PA. It didn’t go over well, but that was that. I’d drawn my line in the sand.
The Spring quickly passed into Summer, and Melissa was off to The Lost Colony. I stayed back in SC. We’d gotten married the month prior, and now we would be separated for at least three. And, despite the fact that she was in NC, and I was in SC, we still were geographically over nine hours from one another, as she was on the far eastern bank of islands off the NC coast, and I was in western SC. It is actually just as much distance between my boyhood home of Saluda, SC and Roanoke Island on the Outer Banks as it is from Melissa’s girlhood home of Millersburg, PA to the Outer Banks.
So, it was a terrible situation for a young married couple just starting out. I was lonely and disillusioned, and felt really separated, not only from Melissa but also from my other love: Theatre. I was miserable, and as I remember, not in a good place at all in regard to my emotions. I’d work for my father all day, then come home to an empty house in the middle of nowhere, with no telephone, and of course, no internet; that amazing invention was still some years off, yet.
I’d call Melissa during the day, when I was at work, and she seemed happy, but somewhat confused about where we stood as a couple, and what our future plans would be. We were floating on the waves of an uncertain sea of Fate. It seemed that things were just wrong, and not in hope of soon becoming right.
Then, after about 6 weeks of this, a big change happened. My friend, Robbie Fearn, who had been an Assistant Stage Manager at The Lost Colony, and now had moved up to Production Stage Manager, called me at my Pop’s shop, and asked if I was up for a bit of an odd professional offer. “Sure!” I said, I’m sure much too eagerly. “Tell me what it is, and you’ve got me!”
Turns out that Robbie and some other nice folks he did theatre with during the year as members of The Melodrama Theater/Little-Big Children’s Theater company based in Durham, NC were doing a short tour of the Old North State with the two-person, multi-character comedy by Jaston Williams, Joe Sears, and Ed Howard, Greater Tuna. They didn’t need an actor, but they did need a sort of combination stage manager/lights and sound operator/roadie. He wanted me to support the tiny, two-person cast in this endeavor as we toured the state for a couple of weeks, and then make our way to the Outer Banks to run the show for the rest of the summer as a dinner theater offering several times a week at a resort hotel. And, I would be housed right across the street from company housing at The Lost Colony!
I broke the news to my Pop, who took it about as well as he could, worked out about a 10-day notice, then spent one final terrifying night in the haunted house (if you buy me a beer sometime, I might tell you about it), packed all of my and Melissa’s stuff, and with the help of my mother and my sister, drove it to Millersburg, PA, where I unloaded the boxes into the house that Melissa grew up in, and that we still live in to this day. Then, I shook her parents’ hands, hugged my mom and sister, and set out to meet my new touring partners, Don Bridge and BC Ellis.
Don was the Founder and Artistic Director of Melodrama Theater and the Little-Big Theater company, which he had created with his wife Lisa who was a life-filled, energetic lady with equal parts self-discipline and playfulness as she not only set the tone as the matriarch of the company, but also the Sing-Along Lady, clothed in full-body leotards, and so full of joy that she infectiously shared with all the kids before the Little-Big shows. And, there was BC Ellis, the Technical Director/Actor/Props Artisan/Puppeteer/Cartoonist/All Around Oddly Cool Guy. And, also, our mutual friend, Robbie Fearn, who’d hooked me up with the job in the first place, and who I’d always looked up to as a sort of a big brother and mentor. He was such a fun, creative soul, and a dedicated and principled theatre professional when he was on the job, and such a Dionysian force of creative energy and poetic reflection at all times.
But, I really must tell you more about Don. He was a bit older than me, as I was about 27 at this time and he was just turning 40, and he was funny, and very outgoing when he was “on”. But, he also impressed me as a very reflective and analytical person, yet perhaps not in regard to those subjects that you might expect. He was serious about what was funny. It was a study to him. He knew classic Looney Tunes, The Marx Brothers, and Danny Kaye, and not just as a passive “fan.” No. He’d studied them. They were the giants in his life’s pursuit. And, it was this attitude toward that which caused laughter that made a huge impression on me. I’d always loved comedy, but watching Don, I felt that I was watching a craftsman. He worked to get “bits” right. They were, and of right, ought to have been, important to him. And, I’d say that in no small part, this was a reason why they became so important to me.
So, I headed down to NC, met Don and BC, did the short tour, and then headed to Roanoke Island on the Outer Banks to see Melissa. It would be her birthday when I arrived, and I was so excited to see her. I’d saved up my money and was bringing her a brand-new synthesizer keyboard that she’d wanted when we first got married, but I just hadn’t been able to afford it back at that time. Now I’d scraped together the pennies and was bringing it as a surprise. On the way out to the island that evening, I distinctly remember listening to a compilation tape that was out at the time of contemporary underground artists covering the songs of Roky Erikson and the Thirteenth Floor Elevators, called “Where The Pyramid Meets the Eye.” And one song in particular just seemed to bloom out of the speakers in a riot of new life. It was a cover of Roky’s song “I Had To Tell You,” and if you can find it, and if you ever feel like you’ve been down so long that everything looks like up, then listen to it. For me, it was like coming back to life after having been buried.
So, I snuck onto Roanoke Island, and Melissa was in the middle of a show, and wouldn’t be back until late, so I had some time. I placed the keyboard just inside the front door of her apartment, put a portable jambox tape player beside it with instructions to just “push play”. And I waited on a bench, over in the shadows at the edge of the woods.
In about an hour, she returned home with her lifelong best friend, Laurie Beasley, and they were surprised with my gift, and the instructions to play the song. Melissa pushed play, and these words rang out into the night:
Chaos all around me
With its fevered clinging
But I can hear you singing
In the corners of my brain
Every doubt has found me
Every sound of riot
Everything is quiet
But the song that keeps me sane
I can hear your voice
Echoing my voice softly
I can feel your strength
Reinforcing mine
If you fear I'll lose my spirit
Like a drunkard's wasted wine
Don't you even think about it
I'm feelin' fine
I can hear your voice
Echoing my voice softly
I can feel your strength
Reinforcing mine
If you fear I'll lose my spirits
Like a drunkard's wasted wine
Don't you even think about it
I'm feelin' fine.
And so, the long and darkest period of doubt that had come in the wake of us making our exuberant plans some year and a half before came to a thankful close. I was back with my partner. Gamut was still far ahead in the future. But, this tough year was essential in showing us that we’d have to hold on, be focused, and do our parts to compliment each other when we could.