First to go was Douglas Balentine in a tragic camping accident in The Big Bend area of Texas. Our association with Doug went back to 1975 when Annie was hired as the “mystery dancer” for the Casa Manaña Playhouse premiere of Out Where the West Begins, the first collaboration between playwright Johnny Simons and Douglas’s musical miracle working. We all worked at Casa Playhouse for the 1975-76 season, where Doug’s talents ranged from the Cowardly Lion in Johnny’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz to composing and leading the band in the latest Simons and Balentine production of Paul Revere. While mounting our eight children’s shows for Casa, we were also preparing their iconic collaboration, The Lake Worth Monster, for a restaging at TCU for the American College Theatre Festival. The show was restaged on at least three occasions at TCU, The Hop, and The Speakeasy as “practice” runs for the company of musicians, singers, actors, and technicians. The big event was the regional festival held at the Scott Theatre, and the evening was capped when two of the adjudicators had a shouting match over the merits of the show in the theatre’s parking lot.
Johnny, Diane, and Douglas left Casa in May 1976 and spent their summer mounting a production of The Three Cuckolds in the courtyard of Grissom and Friends, a very funky collection of artisans housed in an old motel on Hwy 80 in far west Fort Worth. (Shirley Grissom is still in business at the same location.) With tin can light fixtures hung in the trees and drapes of dyed cheese cloth for scenery, the trio laid the roots for Johnny’s desire to create “illegitimate” theatre on their own terms. By the fall of 1976, they had moved indoors of George’s Back Door restaurant for the winter and had formally started producing their original works as The Hip Pocket Theatre. Douglas and Johnny went on to write and produce too many new and original works to count, and we were lucky enough to have been involved in many of the productions from these seminal years. My last production with the theatre was Old Tarzan in Fall 1986, which marked Douglas’s return to the theatre after taking a hiatus after the grueling tour 1983 tour to Scotland and London.
Douglas was one of the most talented singers, musicians, and composers on the planet. We were very sad to have missed his memorial celebration in Fort Worth in January 2009, but we were already committed to a research trip to NYC for the Carrie Robbins book.
Douglas was 57.
In early April, tragedy again struck the Balentine family with the sudden passing of Patti, the wife of Doug’s older brother and trombone playing band member, Bruce. One of my vivid memories of Patti was her introducing me to Nutella spread on toast when the 15 company members with children shared a flat for almost four weeks in Edinburgh during the 1983 Fringe Festival. Mighty tasty!
Patti was 59
Steve Lovett
Our third strike came with the loss of a friend of 40 years from our undergraduate days at Trinity University, Steve Lovett. Steve was an accomplished actor and playwright, and we were very lucky to have spent some time with him summer 2008 when our mutual close friends Donna and Maureen were married in Northridge. Steve passed away suddenly while in rehab after bypass surgery. (More on Steve in the The Buffalo Chip Design Team & The Water Tower Theatre post).
Steve was 58
It is now mid-September, and our losses for the year did not stop at three. We just heard yesterday that we lost Kathy (Kat) Runge on September 15. Our association with Kathy and Dennis Runge goes back to January 1974 when I started graduate school at TCU. Dennis was the faculty Technical Director in the theatre department, and Kathy Gregory was his significant other (I guess the term was “girl friend” in those days) and a costume designer in the graduate program. They had met while Dennis was finishing his masters at Fresno State and Kathy was an undergrad. I first met them at their apartment over in the Monticello area near 7th street in Fort Worth. Dennis is a story unto himself, but I remember Kathy as a vibrant, fun loving, talented, rubenesque California girl who drove a classic fast-back Mustang. They were soon married and eventually moved to a cozy house just a short walk from TCU.
We survived grad school in a monumentally uneventful academic environment (both Dennis and Kathy were in my thesis show). I went to work at Casa Manaña once I had completed my course work and spent the next year starting my thesis. (It took a year to start, and 2 months to write). Kathy finished her thesis, and immediately took a teaching job at the University of Northern Iowa. We stayed in touch, and since I had relatives in Iowa, we made two memorable trips to their amazing house in Waterloo. The first was in August, 1977, when we took a road trip together to attend the American Theatre Association conference held at the Palmer House in Chicago. Our high point of that conference was the closing masquerade ball for which we spent a whole day making our masks out of paper plates and other found craft items. When we arrived at the ball, we realized that the rest of the folks either just showed up sans masks, or rented elaborate costumes for the event. The other memorable moment while we were on the streets of Chicago was hearing that Elvis had been found dead in Graceland.
The second trip to Iowa was the summer of 1979 shortly after the birth of Luna. We were actually on a month long bus trip across the US. Again, the visit was filled with good times, sweet corn and tomatoes from the garden, and lots of just, plain fun. I think it may have been in Fall 1980 when the Runge Fandango pulled up stakes in Iowa and moved lock, stock, and barrel to Brooklyn to explore the NYC theatre scene. Kathy ended up working at the Julliard costume shop and Dennis’s one-week temp job at Henson and Associates turned into a multi-year steady job with the Muppet enterprise. We would meet occasionally in Fort Worth to work on Hip Pocket Theatre productions for Johnny and Diane, either at Oak Acres or for some command performances at the Fort Worth’s Kimball Museum. We did not spend much time together until the summer of 1983 with the preparation for and the six weeks at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and Queen Elizabeth Hall London tour with a company of 45 musicians, actors, technicians, and their children. Kathy and Dennis spent the summer living behind the Simons’ estate on Fairmount. Kathy worked on PR while helping Diane with the costume extravaganza. Dennis and I worked on the production end. Both Dennis and Annie also performed in three productions (two of which were premieres) which were mounted in Ft. Worth before packing up for Scotland in August.
While in Scotland, we performed six evenings a week. In addition to costume duties, Kathy was also in charge of preparing the post-production Taste o’ Texas that we served after each performance – chili (tasted like lamb to me), nachos, and iced tea. The taste was pretty close to authentic, but the chili was too hot and the tea too cold for most British palettes. After closing in Edinburgh, we all packed the company and most of the gear into a bus and hit the road for London and a week of performing at Queen Elizabeth Hall. We were all excited about being in the Elephant and Castle B&B – a hotel with breakfast every morning and your own shower!!!!! (Annie has to tell the story of the sleeping bags!)
After returning to Fort Worth after the Scotland tour, many folks went their separate ways. We went back to Alabama, Douglas left Fort Worth for the Texas Hill Country, and Dennis and Kathy moved back to California. We did not see the Runge Fandango until 1986 when Annie and I, now with two children in tow, attended the USITT conference in Oakland. Following the conference, we visited the Fandango while on a brief California road trip. By this time Wylie (one of several Edinburgh babies) had joined the family. They were living in Fresno and Kathy was working at the family business, Gregor boats (the home of welded aluminum boats). Our most memorable time was a visit to the mountains and staying in a kerosene lamp lit cabin ensconced in four feet of snow. This was our first visit to California, and we were amazed to be walking along a sunny beach just 3 hours later.
A repeat visit was staged in 1988 for another USITT conference held in Anaheim at Disneyland. We visited the Runges with our newest addition, Vincent, about 8 months old, in Fresno and caravanned down to LA. Kathy found us a cheap place to stay right across the street from the Magic Kingdom – The Princess Motel. We even convinced close friends from Ohio, Mark and Ginny Shanda, to stay there too and save some big bucks. As it turned out, the Princess had seen her better days, and her main amenity was a prophylactic machine in every room. To top things off, all five of the kids were sick at one time or another during the five days of the conference. The Kingdom was not very Magical.
After the Disney experience, we had another long gap in face to face encounters but kept in touch with news of kids, graduations, etc. We had moved to Colorado and there was talk of a train trip to Denver by the Fandango, but it never materialized. We settled for phone calls, eventually email, and a few chance encounters of seeing Dennis at USITT conferences. We did finally connect face to face again in 2007 after Annie had joined me in California at my current teaching position at California State University Northridge. Visits were made to the Clovis house with Dennis’s amazing garden, and some short trips were made to LA. On one of these Annie joined Kat in her new convertible sports car for a top-down, girls gone wild, road trip down to Anaheim for one of the craft trade shows. Perhaps the favorite of our recent encounters was meeting them in Fort Worth to visit the Hip Pocket Theatre during its 30th Anniversary Season. We pulled into Fort Worth very late after a straight thru drive from Denver and checked into our cheap hotel on 1-30 and Cherry Lane. The next morning Annie’s cell phone rang, and it was Kat telling us that they were in the same hotel. Both soon realized that they were hearing each other’s voices through the walls and they stepped outside to see each other face to face. The Fandango had camped next door. We then had a wonderful weekend of experiencing old sights, sounds, friends, and tastes. Fried fish and okra at Zeke’s is hard to beat.
Although I had to catch a flight to Mobile, Annie and our youngest, Vincent, dropped by Clovis in August 2008 on the way back from San Francisco. Vincent was only 8 months old the last time he encountered Dennis and Kat. This time he was immediately pressed into service driving Dennis out to restock the beer supply and Kat completed his education by teaching him to make Mojitos and Caipirenias for all. Vincent had the opportunity to listen to the elders re-spinning some of their more extreme tales of their youth. When Annie cautioned Vincent that he was hearing stories about his mom and dad that had never been told to the other children, his response was, “Mom, we have visited the Hip Pocket Theatre and met your friends. We’re not that dumb.”
We did not know it would be our last visit with Kat when we dropped by for a couple of days last April. This time we got to see Wylie for a brief moment when he dropped by to borrow a truck. As always, we had great food, a bit to drink, and shared many memories of adventures, friends, and our kids. Kat with her Armenian heritage (I think Gregory was anglicized from Gregorian), was very excited about Vincent being assigned to Armenia with the Peace Corps and she was following his blog. She sent Julie a huge box of materials from her scrapbooking days for Julie to use in her pre-school class. Her generous spirit and loving attention was being sent out to the new generation.
Please, no more. One was too many, four unfathomable.
Kathy (Kat) Runge was 59.
