In Boston, when I was very active with music, which, to be honest, I wasn’t active the whole time. I used to do this community theater gig and it was really the most amazing gig I ever had. I was given complete artistic freedom and I could just come up with whatever I wanted.

The director and producer of the community theater was this Chemistry professor at MIT. He was very strange. And we clashed a lot. I was young and I didn’t care if he was paying me, which he was. If there was any one gig I would like to have. That was it.

I would be there for rehearsals from the beginning and develop themes for the characters. A couple of the plays were Ibsen’s The Master Builder and Chekhov’s The Seagull. All of the plays were classic plays. The director was a little inept sometimes but it was one of his dreams. He wanted his own Chemistry Lab (MIT) and he wanted run a community theater and he wanted to direct classic plays. He also wrote a song for each play. The songs were terrible.

So one of my jobs was to produce and record his song. Not only produce it, but score it, arrange it, find appropriate people to perform it including the singer and then somehow make the song recognizable to him while still making it sound good. I have a reel of 8 track tape in my box in the living room with The Seagull arrangement on it. I haven’t heard it in 20 years.

I also participated in blocking and the character’s motivation. Sort of just critiqued and helped him put on these plays. It was my first experience in drama and soundtracks of any sort. And it was really a great experience in producing stuff I didn’t like and making it sound as good as I could whether I liked the piece or not.

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