We did too many shows to count, including two week-long state tours and every public school in the Grand Forks/East Grand Forks area. Rough estimates were over 10,000 people, making us the most-seen play in GF Central and ND state history. Our two pinnacle performances were as an honored performing troupe at the state conference of the North Dakota Association for Children and Adults with Learning Disabilities and at the International Thespian Conference in Muncie, Indiana.
Our cast was basically the all-stars of theatre for that year (juniors and seniors, with deference to anyone in class of '90): Steph Hill, Terry Bayne, Beth Moran, Andi Meyer, and Sparrow Nowland. We started rehearsals during summer vacation and did our final performance the next summer at Muncie. We got really close, had a lot of fights, and a mess of laughs. This was also my first chance to work with Cyndee Brown as a director. She gave me a lot of free reign, but knew how far to take it before she cracked down. I could tell I was going to like her. Her husband Dean helped write the show, and her kids had to come along because it's hard to have both parents gone for a week. I recall loading up the van and doing roll call: "Two big Browns, two small Browns, Steph, Beth, Terry, Bill, Andi, Sparrow, the token sophomore (Lindsay), and Tim the bus driver."
Unlike a lot of the shows, I really felt like this one mattered. We would do a piece about feeling left out, or being teased, and each and every one of us saw in every audience at least one face light up as someone said to themselves, "Yeah, that's how my life is." It felt good to reach the audience and make the connection. Sometimes you could tell the ones who were ignored, sitting alone on the bleachers or off in a corner of the auditorium; each of us made a special point to make eye contact often during the show with these kids. We didn't talk about it; we just knew we were all doing it.
Memories? Two stand out...
First, Terry had nicknamed his cyclops "Big Ed" and we had a lot of fun at his expense telling "Little Ed" jokes. Of course, the code talk convinced Megan, who was 5 at the time, that Terry's nickname was "Ed". Well we're cruising down the road, looking out the windows, and Megan is taking turns climbing in everyone's laps and peeking out the window. As she was climbing down from Terry's lap, she jammed her foot into his unprotected crotch. He gave a really loud yelp and bent over, flushing bright red and in obvious pain. Megan, horrified that she had hurt him, reached a sympathetic arm to pat him on the shoulder and innocently said, "I'm sorry, Big Ed." We almost had to pull the bus over while we laughed.
The other memory that will stay with me forever: at the state conference we performed our show for a group of learning disabled kids and some adults. Steph and I had a real tear-jerker piece called "Mother's letter" that even had hockey and football players wiping eyes and calling each other "fag". The letter was an actual letter written by a woman with a boy who was always getting picked on in school, and Dean re-wrote it into a piece where a fictional older brother finds the letter and realizes what a shit he has been to Michael all these years. When we finished the performance, we were shaking hands and talking when a couple of teenage boys walked up. "Hi," one said,"I'm Michael." "I'm Bill," I said. Then it hit me. What was even more of a shock was that the other kid was his older brother, a brother we thought we had made up. He had tear tracks down his face from crying. He had tried to talk his way out of the conference that day because it was another of those "special" things for Michael, but his mom dragged him to it. The piece hit him hard, and he wanted to thank us all for opening his eyes. Their mother was a mess of tears, but she kept thanking us. Michael will always be in my memory.
In 1988, Imagination Station won an award for being the #1 person or group to bring attention to the issues of the disabled. One of our performances was videotaped by a parent at one of the schools, and six copies were made. The principal wrote a letter to our school that the tapes were on a three-week reservation list and that other schools were asking about them. I think this is the proudest I could ever be of anything I've done.