I just love theater people. My favorite
thing to do is to sit down and have a conversation with people who speak the
same language. Not to say that I don't enjoy other conversations, but
a conversation with someone who understand what you feel about theater and
who knows most of the same people you do is very special (and very rare).
Today I had one of those conversations.
Each year, at the start of the school year, I
usually meet with the publicity person for the Department of Theater and
Dance at UC Davis. I started doing this many years and three publicity
persons ago.
We used to meet at Ciocolat cafe, have a
coffee and a pastry and discuss the department's plans and what seemed like
logical stories to do.
In those days, The Davis Enterprise
had a special "Spotlight" section each Thursday, where we could do big
splashy feature stories with lots of pictures. I would visit the set,
interview lots of people, transcribe the interviews and then write the
story. I usually did a second visit, attending a rehearsal to get a
feel for the upcoming production.
Then they paid me twice what they pay me for
a feature story now and it took so much time to do the prep work and get it
all finished that I really made next to nothing (if not much less than
that). But I met fascinating people and improved my interviewing
skills.
Now the Spotlight section is gone and I
rarely do features (it's not worth the work for what I make at the end of
it...times are tough in the newspaper business and there is great
competition not only for space, but for dollars).
So in the past few years, my meetings with
the publicity person have been pretty curt, pretty business like, and pretty
short.
I have liked all of the women with whom I
have worked, but I had not yet met the new person in the job, who came on at
the end of last semester. I was in Iowa when the university did its
first production this semester, and my colleague covered it for me.
Ciocolat is gone now too so when the new
person and I decided to finally meet, we had to find a new place and we met
this morning at Crepeville, not quite as nice, but it worked well. And
Gilbert got me rock star parking, as usual, right in front of the door.
Her name is Kathryn and she's been around
theater most of her life. She is new to Davis, but she has been part
of one of the theaters where I review in Sacramento for years and we know
the same people, have seen the same shows, have the same opinion about the
shows we mentioned (we both hated the Chorus Line at Music
Circus last year, for the same reasons, for example).
We also shared personal stories -- we were
both medical transcriptionists in our past lives, for example.
We sat and chatted for over an hour (my
previous meetings are usually 30 or so minutes) and I look forward to
working with her this year. She gave me great information about the
upcoming shows and suggestions for interviews. I now do phone
interviews where I can transcribe as I talk to the subjects. I don't
get the same feel for a show or my subjects as I do face to face, but I
don't have to do the extra transcription afterwards either (how glad I am to
be a fast typist and an experienced transcriptionist!)
I'm excited about my upcoming feature story
because my interview subjects seem to be fascinating, highly accomplished
people and I think talking with them is going to be fun.
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