Small town Entertainment LLC’s

Who remembers the story of the Ohio teen that hitched a ride out of his small town to tour with a Dollyworld clogging troupe? Do you recall that he hung up his clogs to work behind the scenes and eventually found his way to DisneyWorld where he fell in love with a man in a Lumiere costume? The two got tired of paying Orlando rent and migrated back North to that small Ohio small town at the foot of the Appalachians on the Ohio River?

A better love story does not exist. I wrote a dozen+ essays on this Pomeroy, Ohio pair, not because I love a romcom that includes DollyWorld in its location docket—but because the love story is between the town and the theater. Or, rather, the “entertainment llc” and Ohioan Applachia.

That is the school in which the theater owner first learned to clog. If you were to look out that second floor window as he did 40 years ago, you would see a meandering river that hosts river boat cruises and pontoon boat parties, and then a West Virginia coast rising into more mountains. In his youth Pomeroy, OH was not kind to this man. He wrote about it in a memoir, Little Brucie, (available for purchase on the theater’s website…I purchased and read it…great research for the play about them that needs to be written). No better therapy than buying your now-defunct and derelict school as an adult and turning it into a haunted house—thus creating the awesomest theatrical/therapeutic device ever.

hmm…maybe his husband is the awesomest theatrical device ever, actually. Live wire. He is on the local news once a month or so, promoting characters at the local fairs, or the Queen of Hearts reading at storytime at the library. They do singing telegrams and host princess tea times. Their 10 minute shows are devised and rehearsed inside a week to meet the need: Wizard of Oz for the Wicked premiere, Superman scouted and fitted in time for the retirement parties, requests for driver’s license/sweet 16’s makes them think they need a crash-test dummy costumes- they’re on it.

The newscasters break formality every time to effusively thank him for making their lives five times more fun.

Last year they did Our Town, at the request of a regular who loved it in high school…50 years ago. I sent the local church soup kitchen staff who had also read it in high school…50 years ago. No satin or sequins … just a bunch of soggy kleenex in the side pocket of a pocketbood, the woman manning the kitchen I spoke to on the phone got all quavery when she thanked me … and the director! He cried every time, even dress rehearsal, even tech.

This spring they will do an original work… Can you guess?

Hint: I like to think great theater minds think theatrically alike. I aspire to their level of small-town-shifting genius…and we had the same thought about how to commemorate the first week of September 2026…

…I’m just adding another line so you can’t scroll down without thinking A little harder. Mediate on the legacy of a revolutionary being publicly discussed in exactly the way that she instructed us to — through live storytelling…in Ohio they are channeling the other revolutionary…

Wolfe Mountain Entertainment has been in business a decade and has already done 9 to 5 and Steel Magnolias twice. How to commemorate the woman who designed the set for their meet-cute? The woman who showed the way-out doesn’t need to mean never going back?

I believe this is an original work. Coming this spring. Time to turn the canoes around! Gloria tour followed by Dolly Partonfest in Pomeroy!

I am reminding us of that Ohio theater because I have happened upon a Montana theater filling that same fun-stuff niche for her small town. I want to tell it just as well, because she is just as good as these two. This post is long enough for a Friday. So, I am going to leave you with Pomeroy-plus-extras to get you through the weekend; until we meet again on Montana-Monday.

Maleficent: winner, winner, chicken dinner at the Meigs Cooperative Parish Kitchen next Tuesday. I buy … for $4.