I Hated to Do It: Stories of a Life by Donald C. Farber Page B

was still a lot of champagne left. We were not anxious to waste champagne, so guess what, we drank a lot that night before going to bed. It was all so exciting.
    The next weekend our daughter Patty got married. It rained so hard that the wooden dance floor inside the huge tent actually floated.
    We have had lots of parties and lots of celebrities at our house, but Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz provided a lot of fodder for the newspapers and magazines when they came with their entourage to the little, and I mean little, town of Mount Marion between Kingston and Saugerties in New York State. Parking was a problem, but we managed.
    Kurt the Volunteer Fireman
    Kurt was big on volunteer fire departments, and as we know,
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
featured a volunteer fire department in the story. Sometime in the eighties Kurt was invited to a small suburb north of Albany, New York, to get an award as an honorary volunteer fire chief. We drove up there with Kurt, and it was all so much fun, especially our carrying on with our plastic fire department hats. The firefighters all showed due respect for Kurt.
    We had for some time been planning to take Kurt to the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Ontario, Canada, and had arranged for him to be a guest speaker when he was there. It seemed the smart thing to go to Canada from there, and we combined the trips into one. The only problem was that the plane we could get to Toronto from the airport nearest to this small suburb was a tiny, tiny plane that carried eight passengers. What we didn’t know was not only was the plane tiny, but the leg space was totally inadequate for someone as tall as six feet, three inches, which Kurt was. He would not complain and was squished into the plane. The trip to Stratford turned out to be a huge success, and in Canada Kurt enjoyed the same welcome he would receive in all other parts of the world.
    The Stratford Shakespearean Festival of Canada
    The Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ontario, is theatre that is as good as it gets. For years, stars like Maggie Smith and Christopher Plummer worked there for an entire summer getting paid a small pittance compared to what they would earn working for a short time on a movie. The festival was the brainchild of Tom Patterson, who was a veteran of World War II and a journalist writing for
Maclean’s
magazine in 1953. From the time that he was a teenager, he had thought that his hometown of Stratford, Ontario, should be home to performances of Shakespeare’s plays.
    Patterson, with no experience in the theatre, came up with the idea of a theatre festival and enticed the well-known Shakespearean director Tyrone Guthrie to get it going. Alec Guinness was persuaded to perform the first year. The Festival Theatre, what is now the important main stage, began in 1953 as a tent standing over a wooden thrust stage, which was surrounded on three sides by the audience. Such a stage had not been seen by theatregoers for centuries. Designed by Tanya Moiseiwitsch to specifications proposed by Guthrie, this stage has subsequently influenced the design of over a dozen other theatre buildings throughout the world.
    With the overwhelming success of the festival’s first season, plans were made for a permanent structure. Designed by architect Robert Fairfield, the award-winning building opened in 1957.
    I have a load of reasons for liking Canada. It all started for me when, after my first book was published in 1968, I was invited to teach a weekend class at York University in Toronto to the top theatre people of Canada. My students were not only the persons who ran the Shakespeare Festival, but also the persons who ran the National Ballet of Canada and the Canadian orchestra. It was fun, and the York people liked it so much they invited me back to teach a course spread out over thirteen consecutive weeks, which meant I would have to fly to Toronto and back thirteen times.
    I was scared of flying. I was petrified. Think about it: