Bob Hope Summer

Small towns can get very excited when a celebrity visits, but when the celebrity is legendary there almost isn’t anything to match it.  The celebrity was Bob Hope and he was coming to Placerville to do a benefit show in support of Marshall Hospital.  The tickets were a whopping $100 to $500 each and for 1984 that was outlandish.  Although there was a pretty good crowd in attendance at the main exhibit hall of the fairgrounds (there wasn’t a proper theater in town that could handle Bob Hope), there had been worry that the show wasn’t selling as well as the promoters had hoped.  News was going around that plenty of tickets were still available in the days leading to the performance.

That summer I was busy doing a variety of things.  During the day I was baby-sitting an energetic kid named David.  His father was a great friend of my parents and having been recently divorced, needed someone to take care of his son during the summer days when school was out.  David’s father picked me up in the mornings and took me home around five.  During the day we somehow found enough to do to while away the hours.  A neighbor let us use their pool and I was able to entertain David with magic shows and showings of my Super 8 movies.  In the evenings I went to rehearsals for a crazy show under the miss-titled Bride of Frankenstein.  The lackluster script by Tim Kelly, a playwright who made a pile out of writing stage adaptations of every well known public domain piece of literature in existence, was greatly enhanced with gags, puns and interpolated ‘60s pop music by directors Mark Anderson and Joan Prinz, who dropped a beach party movie theme on top of the whole thing.  It more properly should have been titled, Frankenstein a Go Go.  This was surely a copyright infringement and I am dubious as to whether or not the play was even licensed to begin with, but the final production was undoubtedly an improvement on the source.  The show was out in Coloma at the Olde Coloma Theatre and so I spent the summer getting in my driver’s training hours on the winding Highway 49, thirty minutes one way and then back the other.  I also squeezed in a week of working as a mime with my brother at the county fair, so the summer was packed.

Bride of Frankenstein was not the usual fare for Coloma.  The theater specialized in melodramas, most of which were written by the board members of the organization and were cartoon versions of the genre rather than actual material from the heyday of melodrama.  As long as you could boo and hiss the villain, the audience made up of area locals as well as visiting white water rafters and campers, was happy.  Our show was raucous enough to allow for audience participation, but it was no melodrama.  Our show was a beach party slash Universal horror movie musical mash up.  I played Dracula and now I can’t imagine how the character was integrated into the story, though the “Bride” fell in love with Dracula instead of the monster.  I ended up singing “My Girl” with reworked lyrics as “My Ghoul.”  

The director loved to ask people to guess how old I was after the show.  At fifteen I was six feet tall and in my Dracula make up and tuxedo I looked like I might be in my young twenties.  When I came out after the show all cleaned up, people would still guess I was twenty-two.  Then the director would laugh and announce that I was only fifteen and shock everyone.  This was his ritual every night and I have to say that I kind of liked being thought of as older, or maybe I loved the idea that I had so transformed on stage that I had fooled everyone, but then I got back into the car with my learner’s permit and continued to rack up my driving hours.

There were eighteen performances of “Bride,” which may have been the longest run of any show I was ever in.  About the fifteenth performance I found myself running on autopilot.  I walked on stage aware of my surroundings and then my mind began to wander.  Towards the end of this particular scene my mind brought me back into the play and I suddenly realized I was unaware of the previous ten minutes, yet I was still following the correct blocking and saying the lines in my Bela Lugosi accent.  It was like I put in a tape of the show and pressed play and the performance just came out of me as usual. No one seemed to notice that anything had gone wrong, but it was a little bit disconcerting to have not been aware of ten minutes of the play while I was on stage in the middle of it.  I won’t say that it never happened again in other productions, but it never happened again in that play.  Where it happened to me after that was in  musicals where I was completely choreographed and it was easy to have the show in your bones and to run on autopilot.  This basically means you’re getting bored in the show and it is a kind of a discipline to find ways of making each performance fresh so you don’t check out.

I remember that we were all talking about Bob Hope during one of our performances of “Bride” and the stage manager quipped, “We’re sold out, too bad Bob Hope isn’t.”  Although the word going around was that ticket sales hadn’t been as strong as the promoters had hoped, 1250 were in the audience to see the comedian.  Hope appeared with vocalist Patricia Price, a former Miss Alabama who toured with Hope often.  For music there was the twenty piece Bill Rase Orchestra of Fair Oaks––the “go to” Sacramento area event orchestra.  The Mountain Democrat dubbed Hope the biggest name to hit Placerville since Horace Greeley, the famed editor of the New York Tribune, rode in on the stagecoach from Nevada in 1859 with Hank Monk, the folk hero driver famous for his speed breaking trips.

Earlier in the day of the show, Mark Bailey had driven up to Placerville to possibly buy a new car.  During the previous two weeks he had lost his job, his girlfriend and had two cars break down.  An unexpected lift to his depression came when he spied a quarter on the ground and picked it up.  Upon inspecting the coin he saw before him an advertisement for “The Bob Hope Show.”  Being in Placerville he couldn’t imagine that the actual Bob Hope could possibly be involved, but Bailey decided to investigate.  Finding the main hall at the fairgrounds, Bailey walked into a side door to find Bill Rase and his orchestra tuning up.  Workers were running around, putting the finishing touches on the warehouse-like hall to transform it into something more fitting for a show biz star.  Just then, from across the hall, the doors opened and in walked Bob Hope.  Bailey was amazed and having already nabbed a program, walked up to the old gentleman and asked for his autograph, which was given.  Bailey continued to hang around and no one bothered to notice him. He latched on to a TV crew and offered his services as a camera pack carrier and saw the show that night for free.

When Bob Hope walked on stage, played on to “Thanks for the Memory,” the audience stood and cheered.  He joked that he couldn’t top his entrance and that he should probably get off the stage while he was ahead.  Outside, the Christian Action Council had organized 150 protesters who didn’t like Hope’s pro-choice politics, but they couldn’t put a damper on the event for the audience barely noticed the protesters were there.  When the audience calmed down to finally let Hope get his first words out he joked, “I haven’t played a garage like this since...” and the audience started in laughing before he could bother to get out the name of the last garage he had played.  “So this is the Placerville Cultural Arts Center,” said Hope looking around the hall, “Looks like something from Shingle Springs.”  At the end of the show, in good old small town fashion, Hope was presented with a cake baked by Louise Nelson just for the occasion.  It is debatable whether or not I would have been able to see Bob Hope due to the steep ticket price, even if I wasn’t busy in my own show, but I felt that I was missing something special.

  

Trevor Parsons saw Bob Hope.  He was given a $500 ticket to go as a way of giving the boy something special to lift his spirits, for he had been diagnosed with Leukemia in 1980 and died in 1984, only a few months after having his picture taken with Bob Hope for the news paper.  Trevor was a sports kid who loved baseball and competition swimming, but by the time he entered El Dorado High School he was unable to participate, though he did play the trumpet in the marching band at football game half time shows and marched down Main Street for the annual Homecoming parade.  Although his battle with Leukemia was very public and he had great support, including meetings with celebrities like Mr. T., Bob Hope and Lou Scripa, the world record holder for sit-ups donating his pledges to Trevor on TV, the boy passed away only days after his fourteenth birthday.  

The Bob Hope summer was fruitful, what with steady baby-sitting money coming in, the county fair mime gig, playing Dracula at the Olde Coloma Theatre and getting all my driving hours in.  Summer always ends with my Birthday and that year I turned sixteen, so I could finally take that diver’s test.  My family celebrated my Birthday in San Francisco seeing a musical revue of Jerry Herman songs, Jerry’s Girls.  The show starred Carol Channing and the original Annie, Andrea McArdle.  That show also introduced me to Leslie Uggams, who blew me away and I have seen her in many things since.  Bride of Frankenstein ran through September and in October the Olde Coloma Theatre had its annual “Outhouse” awards and I received a little outhouse statuette as “Best Newcomer.”  Only in small town America do you get awarded with a statue of a toilet and still consider it an honor.

My Grandfather kept a book in the end table bookshelf next to his TV chair called Words to Live By.  This book had wonderful quotes by notables like Robert Louis Stevenson, Thoreau, William Blake and Helen Keller.  Bob Hope wasn’t one of the contributors, but inside the cover my Grandfather had taped a newspaper clipping quoting Hope.  It started with a question which was very similar to the one asked by Mountain Democrat reporter Lee Wessman to Hope about his amazing youth and vigor at the age of eighty-one, which made him seem that he hadn’t aged a day in twenty years.  Hope replied to Wessman, “If you can get a laugh and a little love every day, you look better.”  The quote in the browning clipping taped into my Grandfather’s book answered, “Always have something to look forward to––a project, an event, a plan to help someone, a hobby.  But keep moving.”  My Grandfather never showed me that quote or that book.  I found it after he died and have always had it with me.  My Bob Hope summer happened to exemplify his credo and I didn’t even know it.