To the Editor:
I was dismayed to read Lucille Craib’s letter and Eleanor Cade Busby’s essay about The Lincoln Community Theater. The underlying discontent and hurt feelings came through clearly.
I am sympathetic because I know how hard it is to see a beloved institution change. It’s like bringing up children. We invest so much love and care in them and in the end they grow and change and leave and we feel unneeded and unwanted. Like children, institutions have to grow or they become stale and people lose interest in them and then they go belly up financially and then it’s over.
I love the Lincoln County Community Theater and I am so delighted to find the Opera Series, the movies, and all the other imaginative events that take place there. Yesterday (June 22) Young at Heart, a group of local seniors from 60 to 100, put on a show at the LCCT commemorating Broadway. We danced, sang, told jokes and generally had a wonderful time. The house was packed. We do one more show Sunday.
There is nothing more “community” than this, believe me! This is the third year YAH has performed.
I may be going where angels fear to tread but here are two suggestions that might be helpful:
I would suggest that, if it hasn’t been done already, Lucille Craib and Eleanor Cade Busby get together and write a history of The Lincoln County Community Theater. It would be a great addition to the community.
Why not borrow back some of the costumes that had the most meaning, put them on mannikins and put the mannikins on the Lincoln Stage? Ask all the people who gave so much love and care and work for the LCCT to appear on stage with their stories, songs and maybe a scene or two from a former show.
Use the costumes as a springboard for their stories. Have a bang up party to honor all that LCCT was and include the community. It would be a great send off for one era and greeting for the new era.
You are right. Audiences are different now. We want the world to come to us no matter where we are. There is a huge variety of events now available to us at LCCT. I have never been an opera lover but HD Live at the MET has changed all that. My world has broadened and in the end isn’t that what progress is all about?
“Forty Years of History” doesn’t have to leave town.
Anne Buell, Chamberlain