Curtain Call: 2006-2007 – 40 & Fabulous
My second season at Society for the Performing Arts was memorable in a LOT of ways. SPA was also celebrating its 40th Anniversary. For a guy like me, who writes about Houston and the things that make it a great city, being a part of this momentous occasion was one of the highlights of my time at SPA. Permit me a short history lesson.
Society for the Performing Arts was created in 1966 shortly after the opening of the Jesse H. Jones Hall for the Performing Arts. When it opened, it remained dark, or not in use. City leaders, including Mr. Jones himself, set forth to create an organization that would present a series of performing artists to fill the hall’s empty dates. Forty years later, SPA has become the largest performing arts presenter of its kind in the southwest, and has presented more than 800 performances in Houston’s Theater District. That’s a lot of dancing, singing, banging, drumming, joking, conducting and playing!
The ’06-”07 Season opened on what became one of the more interesting nights of my life, and featured my first true moment of being in the presence of a true legend. We opened our season that year with Carol Burnett. It was a spur of the moment gig that she put together to raise money for her daughter’s playhouse in California. She did a three-show tour of Texas with the Houston stop coming on Friday, September 29, 2006. The performance that night looked a little like this:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wvcxibuf9uk]
There was a cast party on the Jones Hall stage with Ms. Burnett after the performance. Those on-stage cast parties are going to be one of the things I’ll miss most.
Speaking of cast parties, we always seemed to have more fun with those dance companies, and two companies Hubbard Street Dance Chicago and Tania Perez-Salas, provided two very memorable evenings. Hubbard Street hit Houston on Saturday, October 14, 2006. There was a cast party at a local gallery after the performance. As we got to talking to some of the dancers, the idea to take the party to Rich’s (when it was still gay) was thrown out, and readily accepted by the dancers. Well, you know how it goes . . . “after the show is the after party, after the party is the hotel lobby . . .” A coworker and I ended up back at the hotel with the company. Now I would LOVE to regale you with a hot story with deliciously salacious details, but we simply ended up hanging out in their rooms, chatting it up. The most exciting part of this story is the sun was rising in the east when I grabbed my car out of valet to head home for the evening. Not sure what I would have done had the opportunity presented itself that night, and little did I know I would be given such an opportunity less than a month later.
Saturday, November 4, 2006. Another dance performance, another cast party. I should tell you that Hubbard Street was something of a breakthrough for me when it came to dance. I discovered during that performance the kind of dance I enjoyed. I came into this night with an anticipation I had not yet felt for a dance performance. They did not disappoint. The piece pictured above was particularly memorable. The cast party was held at the home of one of our board members. Over the course of the evening, I got into an argument with one of my coworkers about our obligations when going out with artists after a performance. I was of the mind that if we took them somewhere, we were responsible to get them back to the hotel. He believed they were adults, and fully capable of getting home on their own. In the end, we were both right and both wrong. In any case, one of the dancers misunderstood the argument to be about which one of us was going to get the opportunity to, um, get to know him better. I ended up leaving the cast party with this dancer, and heading to (surprise, surprise) Guava Lamp. Me, being your faithful Houston tour guide, just wanted to show this dancer what our gay bars had to offer. However, once we got to Guava and ordered drinks, I CRASHED. It was just a LONG week, I guess, and I suggested we head out. The conversation in the car on the way back to the hotel went little something like this,
Dancer: Where are we going now?
Me: I’m taking you back to your hotel.
Dancer: I thought we were going back to your place . . .
Me: Oh no baby, I’m going home to go to SLEEP.
AWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW-kward!
The conversation was null and void after that exchange. He silently got out of my car, and walked into the hotel. I took my happy ass home to sleep the sleep of a thousand nights.
As I state above, the 2006-2007 Season helped me begin to appreciate the artistic side of what SPA presents. That moment of clarity came towards the end of that season during our presentation of Diavolo. A local non-profit booked a private performance through me as their annual fundraiser. I got the chance to watch Diavolo from the super secret viewing booth in the back of the Cullen Theater. While watching their final piece, Trajectoire pictured above, I was overcome with a sense of awe that brought me to tears.
It might have been my happiest moment as an employee of Society for the Performing Arts. Well, at least until that one night during the 2007-2008 season . . .