How We Came to Run the Gamut
by Clark Nicholson
Chapter 4: “Come Pick Out Your Space”
So there we were, my new wife and I, in Central Pennsylvania. I’d briefly toured through here several years before with another two-person outfit, and we’d visited Melissa’s family previously, both before and after we got married. So, I wasn’t completely unfamiliar with the place, but now it was to be my home… at least (as I spoke about at the end of the last chapter) temporarily. We had decided to get “day jobs” while we established our touring company. We looked around a bit in Melissa’s hometown, as we were now living on the second floor of the old Victorian house in which she’d grown up. It was an enchanting 150 year-old place that her father had gotten for a song back in the early Seventies. It was kind of run down at the time, but he had a wife and 6 kids, 3 boys and 3 girls to raise, and so he’d moved his family over from the Lancaster area and then really broke his back to fix the charming but rickety place up and make it nice.
Little did I know it at the time, but this house would become the place that I would live for the second half of my life. I came to it at the age of 27, and now, at the age of 55, I still live in it. And, I’m still working on it. But, it’s a lovely old place. Melissa’s mom, a sweetheart, and my friend, passed on a few years ago, now. And, all the other family members who grew up here have moved out and about to different phases of their lives. But, Melissa’s dad, whom I also call “Dad” now, lives in one of two apartments downstairs; Melissa and I live upstairs on the second floor, and currently, our daughter, Carolina Jo, lives downstairs in the other apartment.
And, that house is pretty important to this story, because, if we hadn’t had an affordable place to live, we never, ever could have put the time into building what would eventually become Gamut. So, it’s really a pivotal development that we were able to live affordably at this time. I’m not too proud to tell you that it was a time that we were so poor that we had actually been living off of Melissa’s Amoco credit card for stretches of the previous year. I kid you not. We had long stretches with no money, and only were able to eat whatever food we could find in Amoco gas stations. So, to actually have settled into a stable place that was just a couple hundred a month, instead of a couple thousand, like many of our theatre friends who were trying to make it in Manhattan and Chicago, was a blessing.
The lesson that we were learning… and that we continue to learn to this day… is that your creativity isn’t curtailed by your given circumstances. In fact, it is those given circumstances which give what you may create both a base and a frame. The base was this old house in Millersburg, PA, about a half an hour north of the Capital of Pennsylvania: Harrisburg.
Now, let me tell you about the town of Millersburg, PA… a lovely little place, and, as it turns out, the place that I have, by far, lived the longest in my life. My first impressions of it were of three fictional, but resonant towns: Edgar Lee Master’s Spoon River of his poetry collection The Spoon River Anthology, Thornton Wilder’s Grover’s Corners from his classic play Our Town, and Frank Capra’s idyllic dream of a small town in the film It’s a Wonderful Life, Bedford Falls. It occurs to me, as I write this, in my time in Central PA, I’ve had a hand in recreating each of those three towns in one way or another onstage. So, it’s in a way, fated and all tied together that this would ultimately become “home base.”
It’s a lovely, very small town, with a gazebo in the middle of the town square and a plaque to commemorate “Koppy” Koppenhaver, who portrayed Santa Claus for local kids on that spot in the square for many decades. It’s bordered on the North and South by the Mahantongo and Berry’s mountain ranges, respectively, and the western border is the bank of the wide and ancient Susquehanna river. To cross that river out of Millersburg there is a paddlewheel ferry service, which still runs to this day: the last steam, paddlewheel ferry in the country. When you want to cross, you drive down to the bank, get out of your car, go over to a tree where there is an old white door, open the door face out to the river, and, across the mile-wide river, the skipper of the ferry, Captain Jack back in those days, would see the white door, and begin the 45-minute chug over to pick you up. That ferry still runs, and it is just at the bottom of the hill from the very house in which I sit as I type this.
The Millersburg Ferry actually refers to one of two ferries, The Falcon and the Roaring Bull, which take turns chugging across the wide Susquehanna river to passengers back and forth. This ferry line has been running since 1817, and for those 200 years the method of calling the ferry has not changed. A white door on a tree on either side of the river is opened out so the ferry captain can see it, and it signals him to come and pick up another passenger. Melissa and Clark live just a couple of blocks away from this charming old institution.
So, that’s Millersburg, and that was the place that we thought would be the home of our company. Remember, we were planning on being a touring company. Melissa and I walked around town, scouting out things that might help out in trying to put together a company. The first thing we thought about was making some sort of cooperative offer to the Millersburger Hotel, an ancient inn (which no longer rented rooms, by the way,) restaurant, and watering hole in the center of town, right off of the town square. The top floor of the Millersburger was a bank of rooms, which hadn’t been used in many years. It was, and still is, basically a non-functioning part of the building. We wanted to make a deal to pay nominal rent, and possibly exchange some labor to fix up the floor, in exchange for housing a few actors. Melissa and I didn’t want just a company of two. As I remember, we wanted to get at least two more actors besides her and me.
We started out to try to get gigs. We had, as you remember, our original adaptation of Thornton Burgess’ Mother West Wind Stories. Don Bridge had been nice enough to offer us, free of charge, the usage of several of his children’s theater scripts. So, we were eager to get into libraries, daycares, and schools to start doing our thing. But, that was easy to wish for, not so easy to do.
We actually sent out a more than 100-piece mailer, typed and photocopied at Kinkos, along with a couple of printed pages of Melissa and me doing Mother West Wind as promotion. This was in 1991, in the days before everyone had computers, remember. So, our layout and design of our promo brochures were printed, cut apart, and hand glued onto the facsimile page. Then, to ensure that our envelopes were not just thrown away as junk when they got to the schools, we got watercolor paints and decorated all of the 100+ envelopes… because, we thought it would be a good idea, and really…we were just a couple of late 20th century hippie kids with a dream.
And, not one single one of those mailers got any response at all.
We had to make a living, so first, Melissa’s brother, Mark, got us a line to talk to Denny Williams, a local fellow who had (still does) a small take-out restaurant business off the square in Millersburg called Williams French Fries.
Denny was a unique guy, and was (still is) a bit of a Millersburg legend. He’d been working at the local tool company in Millersburg some years before, back in the 70’s I believe, and they went on a long strike. During that time, to make ends meet, Denny pulled out his dad’s old French fry deep-fryer that he had used yearly at the Gratz Fair, in the small town about 20 minutes north of Millersburg, Gratz, PA.
Denny set up, like so many other things in this chapter, on the town square in Millersburg, and sold fries. And sold them. And sold them. And sold them some more. He was a big hit; such a big hit, in fact, that he didn’t go back to work at the tool company when the strike was over. Instead, he opened Williams French Fries, on the square, and sold burgers, shakes, fries, milkshakes, and the like. And then, he branched out further. He began to buy catering French fry trucks. I believe that when I first met him in 1992, he had 5 or 6, and some were huge, full sized kitchen affairs.
The Gazebo in the Town Square of Millersburg, PA. Just off to the left of this shot is Williams French Fries, where proprietor Denny Williams gave Clark and Melissa their first jobs to sustain them while they worked to establish what would eventually be Gamut Theatre Group. Off the right side of the shot is the Millersburger Hotel where Clark and Melissa initially wanted to house their traveling troupe. And, on the spot from where the photo is being taken is the plaque commemorating “Koppy” Kopenhaver’s many years of service to Millersburg as Santa Claus.
So, while Melissa and I were working on getting our touring company started, we entered the French fry business, working flexible, but thankfully, plentiful hours on the French fry trucks. Now, I want to tell you briefly why I’m going into a bit of detail concerning Denny and his business: because he was smart enough to know that people like Melissa and I would work very hard for him if he was cognizant of the fact that we were trying very hard to start our own endeavor. And, no, French fries don’t have a whole lot to do with making theatre. However, local businesses can do a whole lot to incubate, encourage, and make the entire community a better place for all. And so, I’ve always maintained that Central Pennsylvania would never have Popcorn Hat Children’s Theatre, Harrisburg Shakespeare, Gamut Theatre Academy, TMI Improv, or any aspect of Gamut Theatre Group had not Denny Williams given Melissa and I jobs, and then been flexible and understanding about our schedules. A rising tide lifts all boats, y’all… and believe it or not, the tide that lifted the boat that would eventually become Gamut was inside of a deep fat fryer. No lie.
So, we cooked a lot of French fries, and I personally peeled, I kid you not, literally tons and tons of potatoes. And, when we were not doing this, we searched and searched and searched for places that might take our shows. And no one… no one at all was interested. I was grateful that Denny had provided work for us, but I was getting really depressed and angry that we were not doing anything at all creatively. I felt that we had made a grave, grave mistake. There were many tense times between Melissa and me during these days. Melissa at least had a familiarity with the area, as it had been her home. For me, I was terrified that I had left my own region of the country to ultimately peel potatoes and drop fry basket after fry basket into hot lard. I smelled like a French fry even after a shower. And, I wasn’t doing anything that I had trained or prepared to do.
Along about this time, Denny started a new venture: he bought a diner down the road toward Harrisburg in Halifax, PA. It had been around for decades and everybody knew it as Lennies Diner. Denny picked it up, fixed it up, and set about to rename it. First, he was going to call it “Denny’s”, but, you know…. Somebody had already beat him to it… so, in an hilarious and improbable move to put his brand on the place, but maintain name recognition, he named it “Denny’s Lennies”. And, it stuck. It’s been Denny’s Lennies for nearly 30 years, now.
And, with this new venture of Denny’s, Melissa got the quintessential actor’s day job: she became a waitress. I stayed out on the trucks.
The reason it’s significant that she became a waitress at Denny’s Lennies is because this is where she met a young man who was also waiting tables there, Todd Gingrich. Todd was just out of high school, and he was smart, polite, and handsome. He looked like a young prince. And, as luck would have it, when Melissa and I were finally in some sort of shape to need a young Prince to go onstage, Todd became that Prince. He was a good friend to Melissa, and he was also eventually set to become the first new actor in our, as yet, un-named theatre company.
The Millersburger Hotel on the Millersburg Town Square, built 1856. Although it is still refered to as “The Hotel”, this establishment no longer rents rooms, but confines business to its restaurant and local pub. Melissa and Clark initially planned to try to house actors on the unused 3rd floor of this establishment. But, fate would see to it that those plans were altered.
But, for now, Melissa was a waitress, and I was a potato peeler/cooker. And, this was less than satisfying, and went on for some time. We were getting frustrated, and about to throw in the towel on aspirations for forming a company in Central PA. I was ready to be out of here. Go. Be gone. However, Melissa convinced me that we should try one more tactic: we should go to Harrisburg, and find the (now, long defunct) Harrisburg Arts Council. It had an address on 2nd Street in Harrisburg. So, we took a non-restaurant, non-French fry day, and we went to wander down Second Street in Harrisburg to find The Harrisburg Arts Council.
An artist’s presentation of Lennies, later to become Denny’s Lennies, where Melissa lived to fulfill the old adage, “Once an actor; always a waiter”. Interesting side note, Clark’s Pop, whom we left in Chapter 2 painted this picture which is part of a very large mural in Denny’s Lennies, and he also made the sign in the current picture, inset in the upper left-hand corner. How does Jud “Pop” Nicholson come back into the story? Well… you’ll just have to stick around to see.
But, here is the thing: it didn’t seem to exist. We walked up and down the length of the street for several hours, and there was nothing that appeared to have the address, which was listed in the phone book (remember those?) for the Harrisburg Arts Council. We had come to the extreme Southern end of the street, and nothing. Then, Melissa and I both noticed that sitting on a small triangular traffic island, across Second Street, in the nexus of 2 other streets was a small house with a very small parking lot. Could that be it?!
We braved the crossing, since there was no crosswalk or any signage to indicate what this little structure was, or how to get there. We came to the front door, knocked, and a very fashionable, whip-smart, brassy lady named Janice Radocha answered the door. Janice was, and is, a fine local Central PA artist, and was at that time the Director of the Harrisburg Arts Council. She said “Hello” and immediately ushered us into her office, invited us to sit down, and tell her who we were and what we were about.
Such a welcome breath of fresh air! She was interested! Now, remember, we still had in mind that we were primarily a touring company, so what we asked was if there was any place, like a church rec hall, gymnasium, lobby, whatever, that might be interested in hosting us on something like a regular basis. Perhaps monthly?
Janice looked alternately skeptical, and then intrigued. “Hold on,” she said. “I’m going to call my friend, Mary. She might let you do a show every now and then in front of the clock.”
?
“Mary” was Mary Roth, director of Tenant Relations and Special Events at Strawberry Square, in the center of downtown Harrisburg, right across the street from the Pennsylvania Capitol. And “the clock” was (and is) a two-story kinetic, Rube Goldberg type sculpture of a contraption that has many billiard balls whizzing and whirling and spinning and banging and clanging, right in the center atrium of Strawberry Square.
The Strawberry Square Chockablock Clock, now just known as “The Clock” was the area that Harrisburg Arts Council Executive Director Janice Radocha first suggested as a semi-regular performance venue for Clark and Melissa’s Children’s theater, soon to be officially known as “The Popcorn Hat Players”. While the site is unique and intriguing, the sound made by the clock and the acoustics of the atrium itself made this spot prohibitive. Luckily for us, Mary Roth, director of Special Events and Tenant Relations for Strawberry Square, had a different idea in mind. And, it was an idea that would change everything!
And, Strawberry Square? That’s a fascinating whirling, whizzing, kinetic sculpture of a building, that surrounds the aforementioned clock. A true description of it is going to be lacking, but put succinctly, it’s a large, multifaceted, multi-use facility that housed (and in many cases, still houses) multiple specialty shops, takeout eateries, clothing stores, offices, Verizon Telephone headquarters (then Bell of PA,) and the Pennsylvania Treasury Department. It was created in the early Seventies by an innovative architectural design, which enclosed two half-blocks of the downtown under a roof, effectively turning what had been Strawberry Alley into an enclosed hybrid Mall/Office Complex/Community center.
The Strawberry Square retail and office complex is located directly across the road from the Pennsylvania Capitol. What it is is sort of hard to explain. The first two floors are occupied by retail shops, restaurants, a gym, and now, an Arts centered High School, The Capitol Area School of the Arts (CASA), but the floors above are given to the State Treasury department in the tower on the left of this picture, and Verizon telephone in the tower on the right. And, it’s also what would be the home of what would become the Gamut Theatre Group for nearly 25 years.