Stiles Old Upstairs Apartment

As of course many of you know, the old Richland Theater is now the permanent residence of The Richland Players. We do 5 plays a year, and every play we do we put on our make-up sitting at tables in a big upstairs room that used to be the livingroom area of the Stiles family apartment. Our dressing rooms used to be their bedrooms, our kitchen used to be theirs.

Whenever a member of the Stiles family would use their second, smaller hallway bathroom, they would walk past the projection booth. We still use that small bathroom, but the projection booth is now the lighting and sound booth, and before every performance, after I've smeared makeup on my face and before I go out the kitchen exit and down the wooden outdoor staircase to the sidewalk leading to the stage entrance where we all enter and take our places in the dark behind the walls of whatever the set might be---before I leave the Stiles apartment and go downstairs, I ALWAYS go into the lighting booth and lean over the shoulder of the lighting designer and peek down at the tops of the heads of the audience in their seats down below.

Always. Every time. And it's always thrilling and fun in the same sneaky way it must have been forbidden but fun for those Stiles brothers, growing up there in that upstairs apartment all those many, many years ago.

It HAD to have been.

BECAUSE NOBODY ELSE IN RICHLAND GOT TO DO IT.

Just them.

And now there's just me.

Because just about everybody else in the Richland Players is too young to remember ever watching movies there in the theater, and occasionally turning around in their seats and looking up at that flickering light coming from that little window up there near the ceiling---and wondering about the shadowed faces sometimes visible peeking over the projector.

So nobody else in the Richland Players shares my thrill of being a little kid up there doing something he's not supposed to do. Me and the Stiles brothers.

But maybe not for long. The last play I did there, the director asked me to stay out of the light booth and stop bothering the tech crew.

That's just wrong, and on so many levels I wouldn't even want the Stiles brothers to know about it.

TDK '65'

• Last Time Around
  
• Charlie Nevins
  
• Young Men And Fire
  
• Austin Healy
  
• Cathy
  
• David River's Birthday
  
• Han's Pavilion
  
• Muscles, Our Neighbor
  
• John Browne, Learning to Dance
  
• Your Brother Mark Browne
  
• Buster
  
• Celluloid Lies
  
• Nuked
  
• Learning to Box
  
• Dog and Goose
  
• Buses and Such
  
• Stealing
  
• Hookybobbing
  
• Stiles Old Upstairs Apartment
  
• Sign Of The Time
  
• Learning to Drive