I began writing Marion's Fire 5 years ago in the summer of 2018. Both my parents died in 2017, my father at the beginning of the school year, and my mother at the end of it. It'd been a year from hell, not so much because of my parents' deaths, although that wasn't easy, but because of my teaching assignment in San Jose while living in Santa Cruz and the road conditions that year.
Yes, road conditions. Due to highway shut-downs caused by torrential rainstorms, landslides, and weekly car accidents on one of the most treacherous highways in the state, I had three-hour commutes each way to and from my teaching job. And, well, teaching high school has its challenges in and of itself. Let's just say that high school drama students can be very dramatic. I needed a little recovery time by the end of the year. So, I decided to take a year off and write that great American something. After all, I had spent 3 years of my life working on my MFA in Creative Writing and hadn't done much with it in the five years since graduating. It was time. I knew I wouldn't have much money coming in, hopefully, unemployment if I was lucky, and I would need someplace cheap to live. I was willing to live in my car if necessary, but I thought I'd see if I could find something a little better than that. I ventured out and found a cheap mobile home in the small town of Grass Valley, California. With my meager savings and good credit, I qualified for a loan, snapped up that haven in the woods, and hunkered down with my 10-year-old computer.
I spent my "sabbatical" year, writing Marion's Fire. The following year in 2018, I returned to full-time work as an Adult Ed teacher but used all my spare time to work on revisions. By 2020, I felt ready for a table reading, but with the pandemic raging on did it as a zoom reading. I received some great feedback; clearly, more revisions were in order. After more revisions and another year, I held a table reading in San Francisco and realized, there were still more revisions to do. By 2021, I felt ready enough, or at least bold enough to try to get Marion's Fire produced. I met with Paul Emery in the spring of 2021 and he offered to produce a local staged reading with the caveat, "if you can get it together" to be ready in time for his winter series of shows. I soon discovered producing a new musical is a full-time job in and of itself, and teaching was seriously getting in the way of that. I took a leap of faith and quit my job when the school year ended in June of 2022 so I could focus on getting Marion's Fire out into the world.
Paul lit a fire under my a**. In the past 5 months, we've come a long way toward that goal. We are in full swing of things now. I say "we" because it's no longer just me. I've got a team growing at a healthy pace with Paul Emery as the Staged Reading producer, Brandon Butrick as the composer, Peter Johnson as the musical director, Anjelica Potter as the web designer, Rebecca Blanton as the grant consultant, CharRon Smith as the tax account, Corinne Gelden as the rehearsal advisor, Sands Hall as the script and production advisor, and a cast of 20 people!
The staged readings will just be the beginning. The big vision is to go from small-town Nevada City to big cities across the country (Sacramento, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Minneapolis, and so on) until we get to Broadway. This is where you come in. Your donation can help pay for the costumes, sets, props, make-up, rehearsal venues, programs, cast and crew salaries, and all the myriad of things needed to put on a production. Won't you help Marion's Fire take her first step in this world wide journey she is about to begin?
