What I learned while delivering the newspaper in Grover's Corners

That's me at the top of the spiral staircase backstage at the Virginia Museum Theatre in about 1957. The boy at the bottom is John Paul Jones (a memorable name), but I no longer recall the names of the two people in the middle. (VMT photo, courtesy VMFA archives)

My first experience with the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, where I later spent 32 years working as a writer, was just after the museum opened its new wing housing the Virginia Museum Theatre.

As a teenager, I was fascinated by the theater. I started successfully auditioning for plays at East End Junior High School and then at Hermitage High School. While I was still at Hermitage, I read a newspaper story about the Shakespeare Players -- run by the city's recreation and parks department. They produced works by the Bard and other authors at Dogwood Dell each summer. I managed to snag small parts in "Comedy of Errors" and "Taming of the Shrew" as well as a forgettable play about Daniel Boone in which I played Daniel's son, Israel. Once I got parts at Dogwood Dell, I also began to work with the city's annual pageant on Christmas Eve at the Carillon each year. For several years I played a Roman slave. By the time I was in high school, I had moved up to playing a Roman soldier.

I was at Hermitage High when I read about a casting call in the Times-Dispatch. The just-opened Virginia Museum Theatre was producing Thornton Wilder's "Our Town," and they needed several teenagers for minor parts. On the appointed evening, I auditioned. A few days later I got a call from the theater's managing director, who told me I'd be playing a Grover's Corners newspaper boy.

I think I had a mere two lines in the play, and I've forgotten both of them.

But the important thing was the people I met. Although VMT was still a community theater in its early days -- meaning nobody got paid -- it was still several steps up from anything I'd ever done before, especially in terms of professionalism and acting talent. This was serious theater, and it was heady stuff for a shy teenager.

I'd never before worked with people I found to be so sophisticated. I learned a great deal from watching them rehearse and perform. But I learned much more about life's possibilities when we were not on stage. The adults in the cast had been places and seen and done things that I'd only dreamt about. The level of their conversation, the way it sparkled and served as entertainment as well as merely a way to exchange information, introduced me to a level of elegance and polish that was far beyond anything I'd been privy to before. I soaked it all up like a sponge. I couldn't get enough of it.

I must have been marginally acceptable in "Our Town." VMT offered me minor parts in two other productions: George Bernard's "Major Barbara" and "Lute Song," the 1946 Broadway musical.

I was one of a handful of teenagers with small parts in the three VMT casts. The adult actors were incredibly kind to us, putting up with our backstage shenanigans and tolerating our missteps as we battled our way through teenage angst and silliness. I have the greatest respect for them, some of whom remained my friends for decades.

I never acted after high school. Other interests took priority. But I learned as much or more about how to be a fully developed personality from my experience at VMT than I did in any other endeavor I undertook.