Shade

It was around this time that the famous Subway Mayonnaise story happened. We were playing on Friday instead of Wednesday, and would soon move to Saturday to avoid conflicts with rehearsal for the times that I was in a play. (Which was fairly often.) 

Things went like this for awhile. I would game with Dave and Robert on the weekend and work and have rehearsals during the week. I even went on a small tour with an original production of a show called, "Shade."

The Center Stage Players didn't normally do shows about disability. They would do the same mix of plays as any other community theater, but they would "blind" cast a mix of disabled and able bodied actors, putting them on stage together, and the results were magical. 

As a disabled actor, I got to work with talented able bodied actors from the wider theater community and they got to work with me. Friendships were formed and barriers broken down. And, I am heartbroken as I turn to the internet now and look for evidence of the things that we accomplished, and discover nothing.

Well, very nearly nothing. I found this single article about, "Shade."  This play was the one exception. It was about the lives of normal people living in the normal world ... normal people who happened to be disabled. The play was a series of vignettes. Some were funny, and a few were heartbreaking, but all were very human and very relatable.

Shade was written by Dan Taylor who had founded the theater program at the Center. It was good because it was based on genuine experience. It was honest and real, and it got the Center Stage Players noticed, at least for a minute.

And we went on a little tour of small towns and we performed it in competition. It was a pretty amazing time. The Center Stage Players was an amazing theater troupe.

Sadly, I fear that this memoir and the article that I linked above might be the only evidence that it ever existed.