It's a Trap!!!...Mousetrap That Is!

These are the earliest play pictures I have on Facebook (disregarding some high school pictures I have pu on in the last year).  This is from The Mousetrap, the great Agatha Christie drama, performed by WACT (Waycross Area Community Theater) in 2009.  Here I play Paravicini, a slimy character with a vague European accent and an eye towards the criminal.

The assembled cast of The Mousetrap.  Michael Lee, kneeling in the blue shirt, is a mainstay of WACT, having been in productions now for close to twenty years.   In the back is Meagan Clare Ellis (later a very effective Red Queen in Alice In Wonderland, to my bumbling King), Alex Middleton, Weston Manders (who later attended Oglethorpe on a Shakespeare scholarship), Rhonda Powers (also a mainstay, and a great friend), myself and Melodye Lee, our Director here, and one of my favorite performers of all time - acting opposite her in Plaza Suite was one of my  favorite theater performances ever!  Sitting on the chair armrests are the talented Derrick Woods and Brock Gilliard.  Seated is Laura Rentz Setzer, who had about the best British accent I had ever heard in community theatre.

I'm not sure I'm supposed to be looking at my watch onstage.  Oh, well.  This was actually the second time I had done The Mousetrap.  When I was in my mid-twenties, I played Sgt. Trotter at the Pumphouse Players in Cartersbville, Georgia.  It was also one of only two plays that I tried out for and failed to get a part, when I tried out several years later at a theater in Decatur, Georgia.  The part I was being considered for and failed to get?  Paravicini!

Here I am with Derrick Woods, calling out to the heavens.  Derrick has been largely written out of WACT history, because of some problems he had.  Whatever he did, I'm not real good at rewriting history.  He was an integral part of WACT, as was his entire family, for a very long time.  He was a first rate performer, and I was in plays with him from 1997 and on.  I wish him the best, and that the power of faith and perseverance restores him.