A Love Affair with Annenberg

Neil Plakcy C’79
A Love Affair With Annenberg

During the five years I spent at Penn (four as a student and one as an administrator) I engaged in a four-year love affair. Not with a person, though; with an institution. The Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts.

It began at the start of my sophomore year, when my friend and dorm neighbor, Debbie Prince W’79 and I were both looking for jobs. Debbie reported back one day that she’d found you could work as few or as many hours as you wanted as an usher at Annenberg without being on work-study. I already had a work-study job, but I thought it would be fun to see plays and get paid for it, so I signed up.

There were about 30 ushers, supervised by the house manager, an Alaska native named Robin who favored plaid flannel shirts and was working on a graduate degree in something. She kept us in line, which wasn’t easy to do, as we were a rambunctious bunch.

Sometimes it seemed like we were the flotsam and jetsam of the University, oddballs who’d floated up on Annenberg’s shore. We were black and white, gay and straight, American and foreign-born, current students and recent graduates who couldn’t break that umbilical tie to Penn. Some were flamboyant, some shy; some were members of performing arts groups on campus while others loved theater. Some just loved the chance to get paid while studying outside the theater doors during the performances.

There were four theaters in the complex. The Zellerbach was the main stage, where the big traveling shows performed. The Harold Prince theater was smaller, often used for student productions. Experimental shows and those which expected a very small audience performed in the Studio Theater, a small shoebox on the lowest level. In the Annenberg School building, the Annenberg Auditorium was used for certain large classes, like “Monday Night at the Movies,” and for the Off-Broadway’s Best series.

Each week Robin would post lists of assignments. There was an assistant house manager, who was in charge of making sure everyone was at his or her post, doing the appropriate job. Each door in the theater had a head usher and then one or more ushers assigned to it; there were also ticket takers, who stood in front of the theater and tore stubs. Robin scheduled based on expected attendance and legal requirements, and you had until three days before the performance to initial your assignment and accept it. If you still hadn’t initialed by the deadline, the assignment was up for grabs and anyone who wanted to see the show, or just wanted the extra work, could scratch out your name and write in his or her own, initialing at the same time.

If you were broke, or your coursework was light, you could snatch up as much work as was available. One spring break, the show Oh Coward was touring for a run of eleven days. I worked nearly every performance and by the end of the run I think I had most of Coward’s ditties memorized. Some of the other ushers and I were still singing them years later. I got to see virtually every student performing group as well as some of the stage’s best stars, Rex Harrison and Colleen Dewhurst and Estelle Parsons, along with classic and experimental plays.

One of the best assignments was to usher for the center’s gala fund-raiser. Men were requested to wear tuxedos (if you had one; otherwise a dark suit) and women formal dresses or gowns. During the dinner portion of the gala we got to eat, too, at makeshift tables set up in the green room. I vividly remember a dozen of us, all in formal attire, dancing to The Time Warp from The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Those galas were also your best bet for celebrity-watching. The high point of my ushering career came at a benefit performance of the film The Children of Theatre Street, about Russian ballet students, narrated by Princess Grace of Monaco. She was the honored guest, and I was the usher who showed her to her seat.

Working at Annenberg gave me the chance to be a part of a community. I didn’t have to join a fraternity or play a sport to find my place; Annenberg gave that to me. So much so that I remained as an usher after I graduated and already had a full-time job in the University’s Placement Office.

One of the advantages of a massive university like Penn is that you can always find someone who thinks like you do, laughs at the same jokes, loves the same movies or books. I found my community at Annenberg, where I learned about love and theatre, friendship and work ethics, responsibility and devil-may-care abandon. I’m forever grateful that I did.

Neil Plakcy is a freelance writer and web developer based in Hollywood, Florida.