How I start my day at The Playhouse

This is me at 8:15am Monday through Friday at The Playhouse. Large coffee, checking the e-mail, taking a picture of myself...you know, normal stuff.

I made my April resolution yesterday to tell you my Playhouse stories more frequently and I thought it might be important to start with my own.

Despite the fact that I now have a title and a business card at The Playhouse, my relationship with this special place started 21 years ago when I was raven haired youth (I'm not lying) who sang and danced his way through a summer musical production of GREASE. I played Roger, The Mooner, and, no, life did not imitate art that summer (much).

From there, I went on to act in quite a few shows at The Playhouse (I loved, loved, loved being Pseudolous in A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE FORUM many years ago!) and even somehow convinced my advisor at New York University that I should gain 16 credits of college credits by being an intern at The Playhouse for six months.

My love of The Playhouse has roots, folks. Deep roots. I'm not alone in that. On that first production I performed in during the summer of 1989 I met Playhouse friends like Lee Szczepanski (one of our Board members), Jan Szczepanski (one of our long standing volunteer stage managers), Marty Wallner (lighting guru) and Tommy Lueck (song-and-dance man extraordinaire. It's pretty hard to get The Playhouse out of your system.

I hope to be able to tell you fun stories about all the folks I mention and more of our superb volunteers as we go along. Today, you get me and my cup of coffee. (I purposely set the bar pretty low on this one because I know our volunteers are infinitely more interesting than me).

Hey, also, we decided to start a Voting Club for our Waterstone Bank 90th Anniversary Challenge. We're looking for a group of people who will vote 25, 50, or 100 times a day until April 30th so we have a shot at winning $30,000. If you want to join the Voting Club, please send me an e-mail to jwest@sunsetplayhouse.com.

Thanks much! Now April Showers, hit the road...

Best,

Jonathan West
Managing Director