One character which was hard to cast I was asked to take. Stage work and acting really doesn’t appeal to me so I was reluctant to take it, but I wanted the show to go on so I said I would do it. That was the only time I ever took an acting part. I was President of the group for two years and I really did enjoy the organising. We all worked hard but we also had very many happy evenings which made it all worth while. Sylvia trained the ballets and performed in the productions, and Alf had a number of roles as he quite liked the theatre and was very good at acting. We were also members of the Howick Little Theatre group. I enjoyed producing plays while Alf and Sylvia took various parts. On one occasion Alf was Widow Twanky in the pantomime Alladin and we had a lot of fun stuffing a huge bra to make it fit him. We also had great fun and merriment trying to teach him to walk like a woman and use his hips! Up and down our hallway at home he went trying very hard to wiggle his hips! We all had a lot of laughs. That particular show coincided with Sylvia’s twenty-first birthday. She had the part of the Geni as well as dancing and training the children’s ballets. The whole cast surprised her on the last night with a beautiful birthday cake on stage at the end of the performance, and both the audience and cast sang ‘Happy Birthday’ as she blew out the candles. These shows were a large part of our lives then and we had many laughs and lots of fun. Rodney performed with another boy in one show, but like me he did not enjoy performing. |
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