On December 17th, I took part in the performance of Tales of Christmas Past at the Battle Creek Regional History Museum. This was a project that I worked on for about two months. I conceived of the idea to create a very special Christmas program at the museum in December, featuring stories and poems from old newspapers from the 1800’s that I had been collecting in early October.
I previously had created a video on some of these stories in 2021, and I thought people would enjoy hearing them read by a cast on stage live. I first approached Donna Rickman from the BCRHM Board on the idea, and she loved it and agreed to be part of it. I next recruited my friend Dave Eddy, who is the retired WBCK Morning Show host who is known among the community as the ‘Morning Mayor’. I then reached out to my friend Bobbie Mathis from the Union City Society for Historic Preservation, who has been a guest on my podcast a few times this year. Through Bobbie, I was able to recruit two other cast members who had preformed in a cemetery tour in Union City this past summer, Brian and Jill McCombs. This made a cast of six performers, including myself.
Over the next several weeks I transcribed stories and created scripts for the cast, and worked with Donna on some of the material. She had the suggestion to add the introduction on the Victorian Era. Kurt Thornton from the Museum Board also made the suggestion of including a few pieces, and after a lot more brain storming, we involved Biggby Coffee and Honor Credit Union who agreed to come on as sponsors and allow us to sell tickets in their establishments. BC Sound also gave us a discount on the sound equipment, so we added them as sponsors as well. Critical Computer Solutions helped us with volunteers to manage the sound effects in the program.
From there I worked with the museum President to design the plan for ticket sales, and I designed the artwork used in the posters, brochures and on the tickets. I also began marketing it on social media. We ended up selling tickets to two performances, seating 90 people in each show. We sold out both performances, and all who attended said they enjoyed the evening. The cast did a remarkable job, and it was great to work with them on this project, as they were all very professional and came prepared to the rehearsals and added their own individual spark to each story or poem we read. The event was such a success, we have plans to repeat it again next December.
