A few years ago, I was sitting in an intimate little theater in Lakewood quietly waiting for a performance to begin. I was behind a couple who ran another theater company across town, and they knew me as a longtime local arts journalist.
The woman turned around in her seat and asked: “Hey, John, what do you know about this new Denver Actors Fund I’m hearing about?”
I chuckled a bit, thinking she might be gently teasing me. After all, I had been regularly pestering this very couple – and anyone else I could think to pester – for several years now about joining my grassroots little nonprofit’s growing efforts to help local theater artists pay their medical bills. I mean, when I get going, I talk to people about the Denver Actors Fund like normal people talk about their babies and not-so-normal people like me talk about our cats and sunflowers.
But her blank stare made it plain that if she was kidding, she was not in on her own joke.
So I awkwardly explained that, um, er, aw … actually, I was the one who started the DAF back in 2013. And I will never forget her response. It was the first time I had actually heard anyone verbalize the expression, “Pshaw.” That’s what she said … “Pssshawwww!”
Followed by an immediate, “Oh, be serious, John!”
After staking my proprietary claim a bit more forcefully, she skeptically conceded the remote possibility that I … the former theater critic? … maybe could have had a hand in starting a fund that, as of last week, has now paid $1 million in medical bills incurred by Colorado theater artists on and off-stage.
But the curious journalist in me had to know. “Why is that so surprising to you?” I asked. And without missing a beat, she shot the verbal arrow into my heart as efficiently as an Olympic archer: “You just don’t seem the type,” she said.
And … curtain.
Now, I absolutely can see how 12 years as a daily theater critic might make any jaundiced observer think my sustenance surely must be nothing more than blood and the collective self-esteem of the entire Colorado creative community. I don’t come off as a do-gooder in person. I can be brusque in conversation and wholly intolerant of sentiment. My humor often escapes the world at large (one of two reasons the working title of my memoir is “No One Gets Me!”). In my years as a critic, now a decade behind me, readers were quick to interpret my holding the theater community to a high critical bar as a call to arms. I keep threatening to turn the most vitriolic of my reader correspondence into “Hate Mail! The Musical!”
(It’ll be a comedy, I promise: The critic dies in the end.)
It turns out I was not, in fact, raised by wolves but rather by human parents who saw service as our everyday responsibility. My father coached boys and girls sports teams, and he used his position as a Denver Post sports writer to start an annual youth golf tournament at City Park G.C. that gave hundreds of inner-city kids the rare opportunity to experience competitive golf.
When Denver Gazette Senior Arts Journalist John Moore was 10, he tracked the sad returns when his mother unsuccessfully ran for Jefferson County Clerk & Recorder.
When I was 10, my working mother of eight ran for Jefferson County Clerk and Recorder. As a woman in the 1970s, and a Democrat in a heavily Republican county, she knew she had no chance of winning. But she saw it as her duty to run, and even though I’m not sure what a county clerk actually records, I’m still a bit traumatized that she didn’t receive every single vote. Point is, my parents believed that service was our ordinary civic obligation.
I think my experience as a journalist actually put me in the perfect place to take the lead in setting up a fund to help local artists with their sudden situational medical needs. We’re not like normal people who are often immobilized when terrible things happen. Journalists are trained to expect the unexpected to happen every day. When it inevitably does, we have a job to do – and we do it.
Denver actor Faith Goins-Simmons performed at a benefit concert for the Denver Actors Fund after the death of her 13-month-old son. 'The Denver Actors Fund helped us try to live life after this horrific experience,' she said.
Back in 2013, a lot of unexpected terrible things were happening to local theater artists. Shelly Bordas, a single mother who was nearing the end of her four-year battle with cancer, wanted only to live long enough to take her son on a Disney cruise for his fourth birthday.
An actor, director and set builder (all one guy) went in for an outpatient shoulder surgery that was so routine, it took place as he sat up in a chair. But the procedure was so badly botched, it left Robert Michael Sanders without the full use of his fingers. Never to again offer a firm handshake, wield a hammer or play the guitar. “That was 30 years of working on one thing, and becoming proficient and successful at it – and then just having it taken away from you for good,” Sanders said. “That is an indescribable loss.”
Then there was the local playwright who was fitted with a temporary colostomy bag after colon surgery. He was an Army veteran who had done two combat tours, but his military benefits had run out. As he was being wheeled into the operating room for the second surgery that would take the bag away and give him his life back, someone from the billing department ran in and put a stop to the procedure because he still owed money from the first surgery.
As fate would have it, I was recovering from my own colostomy surgery at the time. I had left the Denver Post just a few days before landing in the E.R., and found myself with both the time and influence to organize a fund, with the help of local actor and attorney Christopher Boeckx. A few months later, we issued our first check – $240 to an actor who couldn’t work after being hit by a car as he crossed the street.
We tend to think of all performers from Hollywood to Holyoke as celebrities leading charmed and impossibly glamorous lives. But in Colorado, almost every artist who chooses the creative life essentially chooses to struggle for our amusement, edification and enlightenment. They tend to work part-time or gig jobs that offer flexible hours but no benefits. The health-care system is jacked for everyone, but artists who commit to walking the tightrope of daily life with no safety net are especially vulnerable when the worst happens. And the worst happens, eventually, to everyone.
When we passed the $1 million threshold last week, I was asked by a reporter if I have any stories that are particularly meaningful to me. That’s hard to answer because we now have more than 500 meaningful stories to pick from.
Like the beloved actor who died of cancer 11 days after the birth of his second daughter. Or the pregnant mother who was ordered onto bedrest for the final six weeks of her pregnancy – and during that time, her 12-year-old daughter was diagnosed with cancer and had to undergo surgery to remove a tumor without her mother present. (Everyone recovered, and after the infant’s eight days in the intensive-care unit, we paid the $5,200 bill.)
There was the wrenching story of the woman whose seemingly healthy 13-month-old son inexplicably died just a few hours after starting to exhibit signs of a minor cold. We helped by paying the cruelest of all medical expenses – her son’s burial. Or the gut-punching story of the woman who learned at 8 months pregnant that her daughter had died in the womb. To add to her misery, she had to be induced to deliver the fetus. And after all that she was hit with a $5,000 bill, which we paid.
We’ve purchased wheelchairs, hearing aids, oxygen tanks and more. Of particular delight, I once went shopping at Victoria’s Secret with a props designer who needed a bra to support her new prosthetic boobies (her word) after breast-cancer surgery.
The money we have sent out has changed lives. It has gotten struggling people out of medical debt they might have languished in for years. We also have provided affordable mental-health care through a partnership with the Maria Droste Counseling Center, free emergency dental care through Dr. Brian Kelly of Hakala Dentistry, free teledoctoring through Hippo Health, and our little army of more than 100 volunteers have provided practical, neighborly assistance ranging from rides to grocery deliveries to snow-shoveling to old-fashioned personal company.
Beth Malone, soon to be seen on Apple TV's 'City on Fire,' performs Monday in Johnstown.
The DAF is an all-volunteer organization that raised the first $1 million largely through the grassroots help of local theater companies, youth groups and individual artists staging cabaret concerts on our behalf. A big one of those is happening on Monday (Aug. 15), when Colorado native Beth Malone, a TV and stage star who was nominated for a Tony Award for “Fun Home,” performs her “Thanks a Million” concert at the Candlelight Dinner Playhouse in Johnstown.
She’s doing it, in part, because her 29-year-old cousin, a longtime local stage manager, was diagnosed late last year with ovarian cancer and has been through chemo and multiple surgeries that have left her with, yes, a temporary colostomy bag. We have paid all of her out-of-pocket medical expenses so far. It all comes back around, apparently, to colostomy bags – and service. Which is really just an opportunity to show our better selves.
(Even if no one believes it was you.)