While giving a dental lecture in Maine to a small group of alternative medicine people, I was able to slip down to Portsmouth, NH and consult with Jim Marlow, a college professor and playwright from the Boston area. We had met Jim at the Great Plains Theatre Conference in Omaha a few months ago. Jim and I have had plays read in that competition and this year I was asked to direct the reading of one of his.
It was then we learned he is quite an expert on Charles Dickens and wrote a musical comedy taken from Dickens. I’m now in the midst of re-writing my own Dickens musical comedy, Pickwick’s Holiday. How could we pass up this coincidence? We exchanged scripts in June, and after my July lecture, met at Rudi’s Restaurant in Portsmouth. Dental presentations take about everything out of me, but driving a couple hours to dine with a perfect gentleman who knows more about Pickwick, Scrooge, Nickleby, Oliver Twist, and any other aspect of one of the greatest writers of the English language was ….. hard to exaggerate.
It was like having my own private “Professor Dickens” adding exquisite phraseology and texture to my play from the pen of the Master himself. Where would I ever had discovered the perfect phrase for the horse character pulling the Hansen cab in the play set in 1838? “Neddy, the ugliest horse on hoof.” Or the “Theory of the Tittlebat and Tittlebird.” Only in the World of Pickwick, Marlow and Dentistry.
The next few months will be exciting too. The Chanticleer Theatre has asked me to direct one of America’s most powerful stories, “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Thirty years ago Atticus Finch was the role I was not given to play. So wife Bonnie and I started our own theatre company, the Grande Olde Players. What a run that has been. And here we are, still practicing dentistry while enjoying with the voluminous writer, Charles Dickens, and Harper Lee, the author of one book. Would that I could do one root canal so well, so world renowned.