Former actors and longtime patrons filled the auditorium as I walked through the front doors, and I had two banker’s boxes on a hand truck.
They had printed a book for the seventy-fifth. Glossy, a hundred and twelve pages, and I had bought one at the door like everybody else and gone home and read it in my kitchen the week before.
Nineteen forty-nine through nineteen ninety-eight is thorough. Cast lists, photographs, the fire in 1971, all of it.
Nineteen ninety-nine to now is eleven pages, and most of it is the new artistic director’s mission statement.
There is a reason for that gap and the reason is that everything from those twenty-six years is in my basement, because I am the one who kept it, because nobody else was going to.
Two boxes. Every program from every production since 1999, three copies each. The sign-in sheets. The seating charts with the regulars marked, which is how we knew to hold row F for the Ganns because he uses a walker and she will not sit apart from him.
And underneath all of it, the thing I brought that box for.
The theater’s first program, October of 1949. Not a copy. The one Wendell Amos gave to my mother when she was nineteen years old and painting flats.
Inside the front cover, printed, is his note to the audience, and it has not been reprinted in any program since 1962.
This is not my theater. It belongs to whoever is standing at the door on a Tuesday in February when it is raining and eleven people came. Those are the ones who own the place. The rest of us are only visiting.
I set the boxes on the lobby table and I did not make a speech, because I am not built for it and because two hundred people were there for a party.
I gave them to the woman who runs the historical society, who I called that Tuesday, and I told the director where they were going and why, and she was not happy about the way I did it and she had some right not to be.
She came to my house in November. She is thirty-three and she came from a company in Louisville and she had genuinely never considered that the programs came from anywhere.
We got the archive back. It is in the lobby now in a glass case her board paid for, and the 1949 program is in the middle of it under that printed note, blown up big enough to read from the door.
They are printing the note in every program again starting this season. That was hers. I did not ask.
I still fold programs. Tuesday nights, six o’clock, and there are four of us now instead of one, and one of them is her, which I did not expect to last and it has lasted two seasons.
Anyone can hand out a program. That is true and it was true when she said it. The trick is being there on a rainy Tuesday in February for twenty-six years, and Wendell Amos wrote down in 1949 exactly what that is worth, and it had been sitting in my basement the whole time.