Theatre El Dorado

For a good three decades, Placerville had a vibrant community theatre group known as Theatre El Dorado (TED).  The venue was an exhibit hall at the fairgrounds that was converted into a traditional proscenium stage.  Through the years the next door space was acquired as a storage and dressing room area and an adjunct building was built to house costume storage and a combination box office and concessions stand.  As a kid growing up I was in the audience quite a bit, but never enough.  Although I performed on that stage at age eight in the Placerville Children’s Theatre production of The Point, the first TED show I saw was Annie Get Your Gun and this was also the first live musical I had ever seen.  I credit that production with starting my interest in musicals.

In the beginning, there was not a lot of theatre going on in Placerville past what Jim Garmire at El Dorado High School was putting out.  After the old EDHS theater auditorium was demolished, Garmire was forced to consider alternate spaces for his productions.  This included a converted classroom on campus, the occasional use of the band room with its tiered floor meant for the orchestra, but suitable for audience seating and the fair grounds building that became known as the Discovery Playhouse in 1972.  Richard Harrison was the theatre professor for the American River College (ARC) campus made up of temporary buildings on the hill above the fairgrounds and began using the exhibit hall buildings for classroom and production space.  The fair manager, Cyril Hill, was a theatre enthusiast looking for ways to fill the empty halls when the fair wasn’t in operation and allowed for Garmire and Harrison to come in and build their productions.  So, EDHS and ARC took turns producing productions at the fairgrounds.  Starting in the big exhibition hall in the spring of 1972, ARC had You’re a Good Man Charlie Brown and EDHS had Brave New World.

The set up and breakdown required of productions in the main exhibit hall (the “garage” as Bob Hope once called it) was too much trouble and so Cyril Hill gave over the smaller hall across the walk way to the theatre folk and this was dubbed the Discovery Playhouse.  Adding to the product produced by ARC and EDHS, Ponderosa High School began using the space for productions combining high school and community actors with shows like The Boy Friend.  Garmire started producing shows with the same sort of casting mix such as Brigadoon and Lil’ Abner.  Harrison’s community projects included The Fantasticks and Comedy of Errors.  These community/student combo productions were actually developing the talent that was coming out of the woodwork of Placerville and so by 1977 Theatre El Dorado came into being.  ARC continued to use the venue for a while, including Pantomime ‘79 featuring a ten year old me, but the beginning of TED was the beginning of the schools going back to chiefly producing on their own campuses (see post “Little Theatre”).

The TED founders included Richard Harrison, Jim Garmire, Jim Orr, Lorene Davis, Charles and Margine Copeland, Russ Howard and Pete Miller as well as many others who were instrumental in all aspects of the rapidly growing community theatre.  Pete Miller was also my high school drama teacher for three years and Jim Garmire for one year.  Russ Howard was an English teacher at EDHS and had produced mysteries and light comedy plays during the 1960s when nothing else was happening in terms of live performing arts.  Credit for the first TED production goes to Charles Copland’s The Mikado.  Copeland was also the first TED president, though I remember him during my time as the guy who directed classic musicals once a year for the Mormon Church.  I remember his productions of The Sound of Music and The Music Man being very popular.  Jim Orr had a knack for getting really great performances out of people and generally inspired everyone involved with his productions to excel.  You always knew you were going to have an excellent experience, whether on stage or in the audience, with a Jim Orr show  (see post “InterArts,” for more on Jim Orr).

When I was in junior high school a large and formidable figure by the name of Scott Sherrill was hunting around the schools for a boy to play Patrick Dennis in Mame.  My mother didn’t want me to audition for plays outside of school because my grades were always in jeopardy.  At 13, my voice was transitioning and I was on the tall side, so I wouldn’t have passed as the 10 year old character anyway.  Ironically, another 13 year old, who still had an unchanged voice and was on the short side got the role.  I really enjoyed that production of Mame, though I was certainly jealous of that kid playing Patrick.  Auntie Mame was played by Georgette Barton, an English teacher at EDHS who was a very active member of TED and one of the most professionally polished musical actresses you ever saw.  There was a solid decade of regulars who really heightened the level of performance for TED from the late ‘70s through the late ‘80s.  A few other great productions that delighted me were The Robber Bridegroom, Joseph...Dreamcoat, My Fair Lady, Anything Goes, and Spoon River Anthology, a Jim Orr show that was also taken to the Edinburgh Fringe Theatre Festival in Scotland.

I didn’t tread the boards of the Discovery Playhouse again until I was a senior in high school.  It was the ‘85–‘86 season and Scott and Penny Sherrill devised a musical revue called Lights Up.  Lucy D’Mot, another great TED contributor, wrote the title song and made up an accompaniment of canned music with Don Geraci, the resident drummer and sound wizard.  TED usually had live bands, but since this revue was an original creation, there weren’t ready to go orchestrations to rent from a licensing house.  Lucy and Don laid in multiple tracks to create a colorful arrangement, but the show itself was a bore––at least so my friends all told me.  They seemed to feel the group numbers were entertaining enough, but the sea of solos in-between were static.  We had a choreographer who seemed to know her stuff, but disappeared on us after a few early rehearsals.  Scott and Penny Sherrill ended up choreographing all but two numbers themselves, which amounted to grapevine left and grapevine right.  Every costume was done in gray and burgundy––an attempt at unification that just became monotonous.  Scott Sherrill was heard saying, “I think we’ve got a damn good show!” every chance he had, but that was his job.  A cute little ballet trained dancer named Lara Barden and I were the teens of the production, but we weren’t given anything to do past adding to the chorus numbers.   Still, I had a great time doing the show and learned a lot of musical theatre material from that production.

I immediately followed Lights Up with an EDHS production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and then hopped into another TED show called A Christmas Radio Show 1944.  This was a variation on a Christmas reader’s theatre show that had become a TED tradition called Gift of Words.  This time the idea was that we were in a studio giving a Christmas Eve radio broadcast during World War II.  I was cast as a teen studio office boy and did very little radio work, but enjoyed the process and the recreation of the world of old time radio, which had been an interest of mine for a while.  There was a local AM radio station that used to play vintage radio programs on Sunday nights and I was usually tuned in.  Don Geraci built all kinds of sound effects props so that we could give an authentic radio drama.  The live audience got to see all the period detail come to life and a radio audience could listen in and let their imaginations transport them back to 1944.  TED had performed a radio drama a season before with War of the Worlds for Halloween, so the Christmas show was a logical next step for the concept.

As I was finishing my undergraduate studies at CSUS where I had transitioned from a focus on performance to a focus on directing, I proposed a production of the original 1904 stage version of Peter Pan.  This version is very rarely produced in the US as the 1954 musical adaptation basically took over as the version.  However, the nonmusical play is full of interesting material that was cut for the musical to make room for songs. I was intrigued by this script and had been dying to see a production of it for years.  As is usually the case, in order to be able to see a production of a rare play that fascinates me, I usually have to arrange to direct it myself.  Peter Pan at TED marked the beginning of a series of projects I have done based on my great desire to go back in time and see long lost productions of note.  This was in 1991 and since I was familiar with all the better talents that usually made the best TED productions, I was able to gather a great crew to help make the magic happen.  Due to the success of that production I was asked to take over direction of Ah, Wilderness! two seasons later when the original director had to drop out.  This was fine with me, for I had already put the play on my personal wish list, so I dove into it with fervor, again gathering all the folks who helped me on Peter Pan to make up the production staff.

Peter Pan and Ah, Wilderness! had scenery designed by TED’s stalwart of set design, Mark Haney.  Mark Haney was a professional stagehand and scene shop carpenter at CSUS and worked as a local jobber on Music Circus and Sacramento Community Center Theatre productions.  I knew him from CSUS and since he had been the regular Technical Director for TED for years I naturally asked him if he wanted to design Peter Pan.  I brought him a script and a simplified flying plan I had found in an old theatre tech book to show him my idea of how we could fly the show.  He immediately thought that it would be more fun than anything he’d done in a while and didn’t hesitate to agree to support the project.  TED required a director proposing a production to assemble a staff as part of the proposal, so having Mark Haney on board and convincing the board that it was possible to stage an effective Peter Pan in the Discovery Playhouse was key to getting the project accepted.  Mark also worked back stage on a national tour of Peter Pan with Cathy Rigby shortly after TED accepted the play into their season.  This lucky break became very instructive towards all the little problems and ticks of staging Peter Pan that one just doesn’t know to think about until you’re quite deep into the project.  So, after working on the national tour production, Mark came up with a scale model for the TED production that was simple and operational and would utilize the turntable that was still in place from a few seasons before.  I say “simple,” but that is a relative term, for no production of Peter Pan is simple.  With all of our careful planning I was quite worried during the final week when all the tech was coming together.  So many elements and people had to work together to make the magic happen and I don’t think I saw it happen smoothly before opening night.

I also had C. Willard Haynes on board, who had done lighting design once before at TED, but who was regularly the staff technician at CSUS.  He looked at the project as the kind of creative challenge he couldn’t refuse.  Willard was also a genius at building special lighting effects from scratch.  Pete Miller signed on as “Assistant Director” and generally staged the battle scenes, though his main purpose was to serve as a kind of assurance to the TED board that a 22 year old director would get this crazy project to opening night.  Although not a musical, the play does have some musical requirements and so I asked Lorna Perpal, the choir teacher at Ponderosa High and a regular TED player, to be vocal coach.  My composer friend Jason Schafer wrote some incidental music and a lullaby (whatever was used in 1904 was unavailable) and Don Geraci and Lucy D’Mot arranged and recorded all the underscoring we needed.  The flying, sword fights and set changes all need music or the show is pretty flat.  In this way the musical version is actually better.

Peter was played by my college chum, Scott Hamilton, who was 24 at the time, but physically convincing as a teenage boy.  Although there was a tradition of casting female stars as Peter, I wanted to cast an actual boy since I wasn’t going to be worried about a star .  But, Peter is a big and complex role and I wanted someone with experience as well, so Scott was perfect and we went into the process advertising him as pre-cast.  He was on hand to read with all of the auditioning Wendies and Captain Hooks and made a fine real life leader for our Lost Boys who were between the ages of 8 and 14.  The first flying rehearsal bruised Scott pretty badly––not because he was flying into the scenery, but because the harness was binding.  He went to a sports shop and bought some padding to make the harness more comfortable and at any rate, he wasn’t in the sky during a performance as much as at a rehearsal when we were doing the same flying sequences over and over.  The kids who had to fly seemed to simply delight in the whole thing and never complained about the harness bruising them.  Opening night the pulley broke during the “Marooner’s Rock” scene and Scott fell out of the sky, but not too far as he landed on a set piece of a rock a few feet below.  Still, the sight of him falling was shocking and the audience collectively gasped.  This was right before the end of the first half and so we had the intermission to figure out what to do before the next major flying would happen.  When I got back stage to check on him, Scott and the stage manager were already working out a plan of action for the second act.  Between that performance and the next, all the flying apparatus was reinforced and tested and we never had another flying mishap through the rest of the run.

Ah, Wilderness! was the last time I worked on a TED show and utilized a lot of the staff members who had worked on Peter Pan.  I was very entrenched in Sacramento area theatre shortly thereafter and driving up the hill just became unnecessary.  I saw a few more TED shows over the following years, but the original members were fazing out and the new folks were somehow not living up to the same standards of earlier years.  TED served me in the best way it possibly could, for it gave me some opportunities to build my directing resume that helped me to work my way into Sacramento’s theater scene.  I will also say that there was no community theatre in Sacramento that was as well organized as TED and when I agreed to be on the board of the Lambda Players in downtown Sacramento, I helped to advance that organization mainly based on my knowledge of how TED was organized.   However, by the end of the 1990’s, TED was falling apart.

One of the final key players of TED, Lanny Langston, who was in Peter Pan as a pirate, started the Imagination Theatre with Peter Wolfe, generally producing children’s theatre and family oriented productions starting with a production of Grease at the Shakespeare Club.  Between 2000 and 2002, TED dissolved with members establishing a short-lived replacement company known as the Motherload Performing Arts operating in the Veteran’s Hall next to the fairgrounds.  The fairgrounds management asked Imagination Theatre to occupy the empty Discovery Playhouse and so the new group took over the venue in 2002.  I’m sure they are still dealing with having to project their lines over the car races at the next door track––an unavoidable nuisance and characteristic of TED productions.

All good things must come to an end, or so they say, but I mourn the loss of TED for Placerville’s sake.  The young energy that started TED hung in there for thirty years, more or less, and as with any business (a community theatre is indeed a business), it is imperative that new young talent is cultivated to take over as the old guard steps down.  This didn’t happen with TED and so now it is gone.  After twenty years the Lambda Players in Sacramento dissolved as well and I’m sad for that too.  An interesting connection to those two groups is that one of the last productions I worked on for Lambda Players had music performed by Don Geraci and Lucy D’Mot who I had worked with at TED on Lights Up, Christmas 1944, Peter Pan and Ah, Wilderness!  So, this is my eulogy for the late great Theatre El Dorado of Placerville.  It was a useful organization that gave pleasure to everyone.

Peter Pan at TED in 1991

Christmas in Placerville

I never actually spent Christmas day in Placerville because we always went to visit my grandparents in Salinas, but leading up to Christmas is as much a part of Christmas as the big day itself.  Placerville went out of its way to celebrate the Christmas season, starting with a big sign as you drove into town: “The Christmas Tree Capital of the World.”  The proof of this claim was the annual line of lighted Christmas trees all along the downtown stretch of Highway 50 and the large pine tree near the courthouse reaching into the sky. Although, in the days of my childhood the lights were strung on that big tree from top to bottom, making it look like a giant football, it was still festive.  Indiana, PA also claims to be the Christmas Tree Capital of the World and I suppose other places do too, but El Dorado County is full of Christmas tree growers so the title fits.  There is also an annual Christmas parade down Main Street, though for some reason I don’t believe I ever saw it more than once.  I don’t get back to Placerville every Christmas season, but when I do, it seems as though Main Street becomes more Christmasy with every visit.

The biggest deal about Christmas in Placerville for me was the rather complete decorating of our house.  In the days when my mother was at home with a newborn and a three year old boy, she filled her time with crafty Christmas decoration projects, making all of our tree decorations as well as wall hangings, garlands and table items to adorn every room in the house.  A lot of those old decorations have gone by the way and have been replaced by others, though a few originals remain.  Let’s take a tour as if it were the old days.

The outside of the house had a simple line of colored lights, so nothing outlandish there.  At some point in the recent past a pair of automated wicker deer have been added to the front yard.  The wreath on the door has changed over the years, but is always filled with an attractive combination of berries, ornaments and seasonal flowers.  On the other side of the front door hangs an oversized stocking with decorative toys and ornaments popping out of the top.  Across the hall banister is a lighted garland.  To the left over the hall leading to the bedrooms hangs ribbons with bells on the end.  When I was small my father used to carry me to bed on his shoulders so I could reach up and ring the bells or hit them with my head.

The hallway:  To the right is a crafty picture created by my mother depicting a Main Street bustling with Christmas activity.  The picture is made of fabrics cut out and glued and bedazzled with sequins.  I named all the characters in the picture for the people in my life at that time.  My God parents, Uncle John, Aunt Beth and their daughter Tonya are there.  Neighbor Mrs. Sullivan is driving a car with a tree in the back and her daughter Kim is standing with her dog Sandy.  My immediate family is there and my friend Jon Black from down the street is poking his head out of a window.  I am pulling a little red sled of the kind I actually had.   To the left is a holiday wall hanging on the bathroom door and on the bathroom sink counter is a red candle sitting in a gold wreath holder with two gold flaked statuettes of deer.  My brother’s room had a diorama in the form of a “book” titled “The Christmas Story” that was opened to show little felt cut out characters depicting the Nativity.  My room had a stuffed Santa and deer that sat on a book shelf.

Out in the kitchen, one of the surviving originals is a wall hanging on the pantry door that shows the characters of the “Twelve Days of Christmas.”  The family room had the tree in a corner between windows and the first theme I can remember was blue and green birds made from scratch by my mother.  After a while, Mom made an entirely new set of ornaments with a Nativity theme that was comprised of the three wise men in multiple numbers, stars, camels and angels.  We had an honest to goodness gold star on the top.  After another several years, Mom went to work again and changed the tree to a Santa theme, which included plush Santa heads, candy canes, toy soldiers, bells and bows.  Today the tree has moved to a position closer to the fireplace and is decorated with a large collection of store-bought ornaments in wine tones, gold and glass––it’s quite beautiful, but less original.  My mother worked for Val Sullivan decorating the trees in her Last Straw gift shop on Main Street and her Christmas shops in Sacramento for years, so these new store-bought ornaments came from those shops along the way.

On our large brick fire hearth sat a large gold baby deer, looking something like Bambi and surrounded by ornaments in a bed of pine branches.  Hanging from the hearth are the stockings, which in the early days were in the form of toy soldiers and a doll for my mother, but were remade to match the Santa themed patchwork quilt styled tree later on.  The stockings always traveled with us to Salinas and we still use them to this day.  That’s right––we’ve never given up the stockings––Santa still comes.

Traveling into the living room along the side of the brick fireplace, which has room for a lighted wreath, there used to be large ornamental papier-mâché wise men with candles in their hats positioned on an end table.  Those have disappeared now and are replaced by an elegant lady dressed in cranberry and costumed for Christmas 1870.  Other garlands and gold deer statuettes complete the picture.  The dining room has a centerpiece of pine branches, ornaments and candles in dusty rose colors.  When company was coming over at night, all the candles would be lit and the various lights plugged in making the house glow with a warm Christmas cheer, underscored by Bing Crosby on the stereo.  All this Christmas would go up right after Thanksgiving and come down right after New Years.  I was always sad to see the decorations go, but putting it all away had the effect of moving on to the next phase of life for the year.

There seemed to be a lot of Christmas parties when I was young.  My parents participated in a progressive dinner that meant I had a baby-sitter that night, but for part of it a huge group of people came into the house for my parents’ contribution to the evening––maybe the cocktails, maybe the main course, maybe very late for dessert.  I would be hidden away in the back of the house with the baby-sitter, a TV plugged in and bad reception.  Other times my parents were just out at parties and my brother and I, or sometimes even with the Sullivan girls, would be happily entertained by a baby-sitter, some TV Christmas special and a game or two.  I always thought those evenings were rather fun and as much a part of the Christmas season as the tree and the lights.

Those very classic Christmas specials we used to watch annually, such as “The Grinch”, “Rudolph”, and “Charlie Brown,” were all first aired in the late 1960s, so they were always there and they are still shown, which is kind of amazing.  Burl Ives as the snowman singing “Silver and Gold” is still pretty charming and Linus telling Charlie Brown and the gang what Christmas is really all about never fails to bring me back to those years of sitting on the carpet before the TV in little red pajamas excited that the evening was special because there was a Christmas cartoon on TV.  By the way, the child that voiced Linus in that “Charlie Brown Christmas” was brilliant.  That voice is perfect and no Linus voice since quite does the job.

The Salinas arm of Christmas is generally a sunshiny time where surfers are out at Carmel beach on Christmas eve day, and fires in the fireplace are generally too warm, though we have them anyway.  I know nothing of a white Christmas and with Placerville being about ten miles below the snow line, it doesn’t usually see snow on Christmas either.  However, there was one year when I was six years old that we drove home the day after Christmas and found Placerville covered in snow.  We always rolled back into town rather late and on this night our car wasn’t going to make it up our rather steep hill.  So, we parked the car at the bottom of the hill, took hold of what suitcases we could and my parents hiked up the hill with their six and three year old boys.  I remember that hike seemed impossible, but I guess we made it and that was my only white Christmas.

Characters from left to right are: Derek, Val Sullivan, Sandy and Kim, Mom, Dad, brother Mark, Jon Black (in the window), Aunt Beth, Uncle John, Cousin Tonya, snowman, Me pulling the sled.

Small Towns of the Movies

There are several films I love where small towns are a kind of supporting character.  Back to the Future was one of the really big hits when I was in high school and that Courthouse Square of the fictional town, “Hill Valley,” seen as both the typical dilapidated American downtown of the 1980s and the vibrantly useful downtown of the 1950s, has a rich history.  That scene where Michael J. Fox skateboards around the square really gives you a good look at that particular downtown back lot set at Universal Studios.  The studio tour takes you on a tram through that set and many others, though at the time I took that tour, Back to the Future had not yet been made.  The most famous use of that set before Back to the Future was in To Kill a Mockingbird, which never leaves my top ten list of most favorite films.  You will recognize that square and especially the prominent courthouse in several other films, most notably, The Music Man and Bye Bye Birdie.

Courthouse Square in Back to the Future (film clip).

I visited Cooperstown, NY for the first time recently and the Main Street looks like it could be used for the set of The Music Man or perhaps Bedford Falls from It’s A Wonderful Life.  That film is in my top ten as well.  The several block stretch of Main Street Bedford Falls was a set built especially for the film.  The details of the Main Street give character to the entire film.  The town has a tree-lined center parkway, neighborhoods with white picket fences and a dozen little shops of note.  There is Gower’s Drug Store, which has a soda fountain, the Building and Loan and the Bijou Theatre.  Remember, as Jimmy Stewart runs through the snowy, Christmas decorated Main Street, that he yells out, “Merry Christmas, Movie House!”?  An interesting factoid is that the snowy scenes of Bedford Falls were filmed at night during July and so all that snow is fake, but it looked so real that the film won a special Academy Award for the development of amazing movie snow.

Bedford Falls at Christmas

That Bijou Theatre represents a kind of phenomenon in America, which was the small town single screen movie theatre that was called “Bijou” more often than not.  Bijou is a French word that generally means jewel.  These theaters started to pop up in the 1880s for the purposes of vaudeville and were managed by the Keith Albee circuit.  By the 1920s these Bijou theaters were converted to movies and although many of them have been demolished or repurposed, there are still several dozen operating Bijou theaters in the U.S.  Pay a visit to a Bedford Falls style Bijou when visiting Iowa City, Monmouth, Chicago, Knoxville, Cincinnati, San Antonio or Pittsfield.

Another very favorite film, Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, was filmed on location in Santa Rosa.  Today, Santa Rosa is quite expanded and changed, but in those days of the 1940s it was a sleepy little town that personified small town America.  It looked like any small town from the east coast and through the midwest.  They could have filmed It’s a Wonderful Life there except for the issue of making it snow.  Although the impressive library seen in the film is gone, the all important house is still standing at McDonald Avenue and 4th Street.  Hitchcock filmed on location because the kind of small town set he required wasn’t in existence in Hollywood and with building materials scarce during World War II., filming on location was more practical.  However, when he found that he needed to re-shoot some scenes after having vacated Santa Rosa, a replica of the house had to be built in Hollywood for those extra scenes.  You’d never be able to guess which scenes were filmed at the real house vs. the recreated house.  The other building from the film that is still standing is the train station, though trains no longer stop there and the building is used as a visitor center.  There is also a nice busy street scene in the film showing an old courthouse, but that environment has been largely developed and so Shadow of a Doubt captures a Santa Rosa that no longer exists.

Santa Rosa at the time of Shadow of a Doubt.

Take a field trip to small town America through Back to the Future, It’s a Wonderful Life, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Shadow of a Doubt.  You’ll not only catch a glimpse of that simpler idealized way of American life, but you’ll get a very good film education seeing the work of some of the best directors, writers and acting performances that ever came out of Hollywood.

Tree Chopping

There were two big days in December when we took part in Christmas tree chopping parties.  We always got our tree the first week in December with the first group.  Before my parents moved to Placerville when I was one year old, they had a busy social life with other young couples in the Concord and Walnut Creek area.  They arranged monthly dinners together and called themselves the “Knife and Fork” group.  Later this idea was duplicated in Placerville as “Couple’s Gourmet.”  Since my parents defected to a world of pine trees, the Knife and Fork group trouped up to the foothills with a fresh batch of kids to reunite and also score a fresh cut Christmas tree.

Apple Hill was primarily known for its many apple barns selling absolutely everything that could be made from apples.  There were also wineries, pumpkin patches for Halloween and many Christmas tree farms.  A favorite of all tree farms was “Santa’s Acres.”  This was the nicest, best organized and run farm and usually there was good old St. Nick on hand to listen to our Christmas dreams and to hand out candy canes.  There was also a pyramid of hay bales to climb on and with the band of kids along for the trip––in those days before ipods, iphones, ipads and Game Boys––these things went a long way to keep us entertained.  My mother did seem to take forever to pick out a tree.  I would point out several that looked good enough to me, but Mom had to walk around them, check for uniformity, measure the height and look over all the trees to make sure she had the best one.  Most years, Santa’s Acres had the tree we needed, but if not, we traipsed to several other farms and all this seemed to take up most of the day.

Of course there was a stop for a picnic lunch and apple pie from High Hill Ranch, which had a fishing pond and a mall of local artists selling their arts and crafts to add variety to the day.  Later on, the group headed down the hill with threes strapped to the roofs of the cars, twenty minutes or so off the highway into Coloma to have a big dinner at the Vineyard House.  There was chicken pot pie, thick baked carrots and bread pudding made by an actual grandmother in the kitchen.  I loved the Vineyard House because it was old, haunted (so everyone said) and had a beautifully spooky graveyard across the street.  After dinner, the Knife and Fork group had about a two hour trip home, but we had a short twenty minutes.

The next trip involved families whose mothers and wives belonged to the American Association of University Women.  This was a big group of people and thanks to the fact that Mr. Peek owned the Michigan Cal Lumber Company, we all drove way up into the El Dorado National Forrest and the snow to cut down a blue spruce right out of nature.  Since we already had our Christmas tree by this point, my brother and I would chop down our own small trees to have in our rooms.  Later that night, the adults would go to a big dinner together while the kids all stayed home with baby-sitters, but we had a great time decorating our own little trees and falling asleep to the blinking colored lights forming magical patterns on the wall.

Before hiking into the woods to find a tree, the group would all park on a good flat open area for a picnic in the snow.  Everyone brought their own lunches, but Mrs. Peek always had hot chocolate for everyone and Carl Borelli, who owned a fish market, always had an open table of shell fish to sample and taught me how to swallow clams on the half shell.  The kids were some older and some younger and some that I had been in school with from kindergarten to high school graduation.  How often does that happen?  Even as an adult, when I would occasionally join in on the annual tree chopping trip and the kids were bringing along a new generation of babies, a smattering of my age group would be there when they could.  Around the time that the group of original couples turned sixty, the tradition was brought to a close, but for three decades it served as a wonderful part of the Christmas season of a kind that can only happen in small town America, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains.

The tree farms were numerous enough that the City of Placerville felt they could put up a sign stating that the town was the “Christmas Tree Capital of the World.”  To prove it, the lenghth of town along Highway 50 was lined with Christmas trees lit with colored lights.  Near the old Town Hall was a very large pine tree that was also decorated in colored lights.  A drive through the area at night was a magical vision.  Add to that the wreaths hung on the Main Street lamp posts and all the shop windows decorated with holiday cheer and you had the picture of an old fashioned Christmas that you might find on a Christmas card.  In fact, you could find it on a Christmas card thanks to the painter of light, Thomas Kinkade.

My mother, being the stay at home mom that she was, hand made enough ornaments to cover a six foot tree.  Eventually, the fresh cut trees became a good looking fake tree and the decorations became glass store bought ornaments in wine colors and gold, which is still the theme of the tree to this day.  My parents still decorate the entire house from top to bottom with Christmas ornamentation in every corner, even though my brother and I are rarely home to see it.  We actually have Christams day in Salinas where my mother grew up.  The Grandparents lived there and my mother’s sister lived down the block, so now that I fly in from New York, I don’t always get back to Placerville to visit the “Christmas Tree Capital of the World.”  However, when I do visit, it is nice to see that long row of colorful trees along Highway 50 and the whole town looking like Thomas Kinkade’s Christmas card.  He painted Placerville to look like it did in the 1920s, but although any old timer can point out the many changes, it doesn’t look so different in person than it does in those nostalgic Kinkade paintings.

The Magic Show

Lots of boys go through a magic stage.  They get a kid’s magic set of simple tricks, they pick up a card trick or two, or they figure out how to make a coin disappear into thin air.  Then there’s another kind of kid who takes it a step further and starts haunting the magic shops.  For me they were on K Street in Sacramento, Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco, Cannery Row in Monterey and in the back of Thinker Toys in Carmel.  Trick by trick I evolved into what is known as an apparatus magician.  An apparatus magician is a magician who uses rigged items to present illusions: empty boxes that produce live animals, scarves that change colors or disappear into your hand, the Chinese wands, the linking rings, a magic table with secret compartments, the flying cane.  As the boy amasses his collection of illusions he reads all the books in the library about the Great Blackstone and Harry Houdini, or tricks one can do with ordinary household items.  He never misses a David Copperfield TV special and is in the audience when the magician plays Lake Tahoe.

When I was in elementary school my Grandparents hired a local teenaged magician to entertain the family on Christmas eve.  He had a lovely assistant in costume and he was properly decked out in a tuxedo.  He had doves and a black velvet magic table and plenty of colorful balls, scarves, ropes, boxes and wonderful toys.  I wanted them all.  I wanted to be him.  I might have camped out in front of his house and bugged him to death if I had any idea where he lived.  That magic show on Christmas eve showed me that magic wasn’t just for TV variety shows, but it was for anyone and I might some day put together my own magic act and perform at parties.

My brother Mark had a lovebird named Sam because we were told it was a boy.  Then one day Sam laid an egg and he was Samantha.  That bird was unruly and chased people around the living room.  He liked to land on shoulders and in my case bite a mole I had on my neck.  When I was in junior high school I had collected enough good tricks to put on a decent magic show and managed to land my first birthday party gig with Mark as my assistant and Sam stuffed into the box that seemed to be empty.  We always had to prearrange for a place to sneak in the bird so the party guests wouldn’t see it and clear the place of dogs and cats.  The trick was so much more amazing when you didn’t know a bird had arrived to the party.  Sam was usually pretty good about just hopping out of the box and waiting for Mark to scoop him up and rush him off stage and back to his cage.  However, on a couple of occasions Sam embarrassed us by flying off into the room and landing in an unreachable spot.  We would have to stop the show while Mark climbed around the room trying to capture Sam.

We always did the bird trick first so that Sam wouldn’t be tucked into the box for too long and then the show could continue without any worry about mishaps.  I can’t even remember the entire program now, but it included the linking rings, the Chinese wands, several amazing things done with an egg coming and going, three or four magic scarf tricks, a set of boxes that covered cutouts of rabbits that magically hopped from one container to the other, pouring the pitcher of milk into the newspaper cone and disappearing into thin air.  Mark stood by to hand me things and I worked off a magic table that I built myself from directions I found in a magic book.  By the time I was 16 the show had grown to its final version, which probably lasted a half hour.  We didn’t advertise, but word got around and we were asked to perform at various parties––both for adults and kids.

I had seen David Copperfield do an amazing trick with a floating cane.  You knew there was a string or a wire, but you just couldn’t figure out the physics of how it was attached based on what seemed to be incredible movements of the cane.  One of my shops had the trick and I snatched it up, but the problem with it is that you’ve got to have theatrical lighting to help out the illusion.  The close quarters of a living room performance make the illusion impossible to achieve.  My last magic show was also my first chance to perform the trick because it was going to be in a large school classroom and I could control the light.  I brought along a portable clip light with a blue bulb in it and had my friend Anna help out by turning off the regular lights and aiming the blue light at me as I danced the cane through the air all around me.  This was my finale at that particular performance and the last time I performed that same magic act that I had been doing all through high school with little variation.  It was performed around the last week of high school after Mark and I had driven all over the hills of El Dorado County with Sam swinging on his perch in cage on the back seat––his little bell that he liked to hit with his head ringing away (sometimes he stuck his head under the bell and wore it like a hat)––bringing our little magic show into living rooms for several years.  Then all at once I went off to college to study theatre and left magic behind.

I still think it would have been fun to pursue life as a magician, but I never researched the path one takes and couldn’t imagine how to advance my interest.  Magic was not a subject I ever came across in the college catalogs in my high school’s career center.  It has to be more than moving to Las Vegas, but that would probably have been part of it.  Had it been possible to be a magic major I might have done it.  Looking back on it now I realize that I was trapped in a certain limited routine and since the path towards a career in theatre was apparent, it was natural that I would take that path.  I was happy with my tight and simple thirty minute show and never branched out into sawing girls in half or trying to make the Statue of Liberty disappear.  I liked the performance aspect of it the most and studying theatre in college fulfilled that aspect as well as simply being more practical.  There is nothing practical about becoming a magician, but a few people make a fat living at doing just that.  My grandfather loved magic shows and perhaps harbored secret dreams of making elephants disappear.  I think he would have liked to see me become a professional magician.

My magic shops are all gone now.  The one on K Street in Sacramento went when that street was turned into a pedestrian mall.  I don’t think the changes to K Street had anything to do with it, but it was just that magic and gag shops no longer fascinated boys the way they used to.  The other magic shops I regularly visited were in heavy tourist spots and hung on a bit longer, but none of them are around now.  Video games had come along, which was the first step towards an era of electronics that have made many things of science fiction become science fact, but along the way the card tricks and the magic wands lost their allure.  The casino circuit still supports a handful of magicians, so there is an audience that wants some of that good old hokum on occasion, but did you notice that somewhere around the time of the Apple computer that David Copperfield stopped showing up on TV?

Presenting the Chinese wands during the last magic show in 1986.