Mr. Brown

My high school drama teacher, Dana Brown, was amazing. Actually he had already moved away before I even got to high school, but I still claim him as my teacher.

You see, I grew up in a town of about 580 people in Western Oregon. The biggest entertainment was the high school football games. One year the stadium blew down in a storm and the whole town got together and built a new one. Sports were the big draw, not art.

Along came Mr. Brown.

I have no idea how he did it, but he gathered people from all the neighboring small towns and created community theatre like we’d never seen. These were full-scale, quality productions.

In Fiddler on the Roof, he convinced the local sheep farmer’s wife to be the Fiddler, and taught her to walk backwards and fiddle at the same time. The mild-mannered wife of the middle school principal was the ghost in Yente’s dream, screaming like a banshee.

In the Wizard of Oz, the sheep farmer’s daughter played Dorothy. The Lion was played by the Agriculture teacher and he was hilarious. The social studies teacher played the Tin Man and his wife played Glenda, the good witch. My sister and I got to get in on that one—she played a Munchkin and I played a winged monkey. We would dance and sing all the way home from rehearsal.

It was an extraordinary experience. And poignant too. My sister ended up in the hospital with a serious medical condition a few days before the show opened. So the entire cast and crew showed up at the hospital to cheer her up. Dorothy came in full costume.

It was amazing to see the level of professionalism and dedication these people put forth. Who knew this cluster of small towns had such hidden talent?

But really, I think the talent was Mr. Brown’s. He took a ragtag group of ordinary people who had never been on a stage in their lives and helped us see the light shining within us. He showed us that we are capable of so much more than we imagine. And when we work together, we can make magic.