"Like A Transfusion": Stepping back into the spotlight

A movie poster of Come Blow Your Horn starring Frank Sinatra. Featured right is Jill St. John as Peggy.

BY JESSACA WILFORD

Peggy Evans

It’s kind of a funny story how I got involved in this show but let’s rewind a couple of years. I have been involved in theatre since I was 13 years old. Theatre was my outlet from everything. I decided to go to Gloucester County Institute of Technology for theatre. So I spent my high school year immersed in it and never really did anything else. 

In the summer of 2007, I met someone who introduced me to Off Broad Street Players. I auditioned for Beauty and the Beast, was cast for the ensemble, and loved every minute of it! I stayed with OBSP for the next year. At the same time, I was still actively involved in GCIT’s theatre department. At one point I was doing three shows at once. It got to be too much for me. Some people can handle it but I couldn’t. 

I had spent my whole high school career portraying other people I never really got to figure out who I was. So when I graduated high school I decided I was done with theatre for the time being.

Fast-forward to March 12, 2010…

My phone rings. 

I answer. 

It’s Walter Webster. 

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Me come out for a show?! After two years off? I didn’t think I still had it. I was scared out of my mind. But another part of me told me I was ready. I needed to get back to the thing I love, the thing that I truly missed. I said yes and here I am.

So far the rehearsal process has been great! I was able to jump right back on the horse…as my mom put it. I think I’m doing pretty well. During the first read, it all started coming back. Things that I didn’t even know I knew, I was thinking of. Everything I thought I had lost was suddenly in the forefront of my mind again. It was like I never left! It was a though I had done it yesterday. I think that’s what made it ok. I mean what made me not run out of the room screaming. At first I was a little timid, but I knew I could do it. Everyone was so encouraging so that helped a lot.

Peggy. Mmmhhhh Peggy. She is so fun. She is like the best character to play after my break. So carefree and flirty. Two things which I am not. I think that’s why I like her so much. She comes off as dumb but she knows what she is doing. It is such a release to just get in her head and toy around with things. The accent is coming along but it is taking time to perfect. 

The other night I was talking to my best friend and she was like “Jess, you sound so weird. What is wrong with your voice?” here I had slipped in some Peggy and she was not used to it. Ha it was funny! I love it and am so excited with the way things are panning out!

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Jessaca Wilford is a student at Cumberland County College and a graduate of Gloucester County Institute of Technology where she studied theater. She has been featured in "Beauty and the Beast," "Jesus Christ Superstar," and "South Pacific" and notably with GCIT in "Once Upon a Mattress." 

Come Blow Your DIET!

This Sunday our cast ran all of Act One without scripts, which was very crazy and draining, but the pay off was AMAZING! The entire cast gathered and brought their own dishes for the traditional potluck dinner after rehearsal.

The unique part is that at the first rehearsal, cast member Jim Cook Jr. (Buddy Baxter) vowed in order to get healthy for the performance, to completely become a vegetarian. With this change of diet, it inspired other cast members to switch from the traditional covered dish meals to more healthier dishes! Below are pictures of the leftovers...

This dish, by Jessaca Wilford (Peggy Evans) is a completely vegan rendition of spinach and sausage casserole. It included fresh cut spinach, faux mozzarella cheese, and faux Italian sausage. 

This was a delicious non-meat version of traditional Matzoh Ball Soup. It was prepared by Joyce Massey (Mrs. Baker)

Jim Cook Jr (Buddy Baxter) made a traditional penne pasta dish sans the meat, an original recipe sauce that he developed while living in Italy. 

Director Walter A. Webster usually brings KFC fried chicken to covered dish dinners, but decided to make a switch to a healthier chicken-based dish by bringing personal Chicken Salads with Romaine lettuce, parmesan cheese, and cherry tomatoes.

Only two left!

No covered dish dinner is complete without a Veggie tray...

...or a fruit tray! That cream in the middle was so sweet and tasty! 

Don Frankso's "Come Video Your Horn"

Eugene and Buddy, my college buddies.

Jonathan Silverman and Jason Alexander in Broadway Bound in 1986. 

By JIM COOK Jr.

Buddy Baxter

Hi, my name is Jim Cook Jr. and I play the role of Buddy Baxter in the upcoming play “Come Blow Your Horn” at OBSP.

To give you a brief overview, my character (Buddy) leaves his parents house to live with in his brother’s bachelor’s pad in the heart of Manhattan. He is every bit of a second child. Buddy relentlessly tries to appease everyone, he is very sensitive, and from the minute he walks into the apartment he wants to leave (weather or not he wants to admit it).

Though our production takes place in 2010, it does not loose any bit of the craft of Neil Simon’s comedy. And let me say, Mr. Simon is a comedic genius. Come Blow Your Horn is his first play written in 1961, and it laid the groundwork for plays like The Odd Couple, Brighton Beach Memoirs, and Broadway Bound (which I think was his parent’s reaction to Come Blow Your Horn)

Having said that, I want to take you on my journey with Neil Simon and his tactful touch of semi-autobiography. Buddy, in a sense, is Neil Simon, and this play is Simon’s way of getting out his observations of the comedy within his family.

But that is not where I begin. My story with playing the legendary writer began in January 2007 when I was only a recent high school graduate, just finishing up my fall semester as a freshman in a local community college. I had hardly picked up a pen in my life and did not know the first thing about being a writer. So at the time, I really was an incarnation of Buddy Baxter.

However, in 2007, I wasn’t playing Buddy Baxter, I was playing Eugene Jerome in Broadway Bound (written in 1986). This play is deep look at Simon’s family, and a more honest look at the family. Eugene is a writer, or on the brink of becoming one with his brother, and they are dying to move out of the house. The character of Eugene required a lot of life experience to encapsulate, and not having been a writer, it was very new to me. Eugene, unlike Buddy, is a more realized version of Simon, whereas Buddy is a more fun version of Simon.

In Come Blow Your Horn, the mother and the father characters are larger than life and get in outrageous shouting matches that will leave the audience in stitches.  And Simon probably took these characters from his actual family, only altering them a little bit.

So can you imagine what his living room must have felt like after his parents saw a performance of “Come Blow Your Horn” and realizing how much Simon made fun of the family? The answer to that question, I believe, comes about three quarters through the second act of Broadway Bound where the two brothers, Eugene and Stanley, premier a radio show with the family listening, that is about a slightly comedic embarrassing version of his actual parents. After the program is over, Jack (the father) erupts with frustration, eventually leaving his wife and family in the end with only two letters explaining himself.

This may have been a loose version of what happened when the family saw Come Blow Your Horn.

I feel like, in 2007, I was ready to play Buddy, and I feel like now, in 2010, I understand Eugene much more than I did. But that’s the showbiz, and maybe a little bit of Neil Simon’s place in my life. When I play Eugene I had just graduated from high school. Now playing Buddy (as of opening night) I will have just graduated college. 

But now I’m playing Buddy, and it’s been a pleasure backtracking. I have the inside of the character fleshed out from my experience playing Eugene. So now I have to start over and think “Eugene was Neil Simon years later. Not Buddy.” So I’m taking think from a writer’s stand point and thinking, as a much younger writer, who is Neil Simon. Because that’s who Buddy is.

Just a thought. I’ll leave you with a line from Broadway Bound that I always LOVED saying every night, but never understood until I became an actual writer myself. It comes after the Eugene admits that his inspiration for the radio show was based on his actual parents:

“There’s part of my head that makes me this nice, likeable, funny kid . . .  and there’s the other part, the part that writes, that’s an angry, hostile, real son of a bitch.”