Free If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B Movie Actor by Bruce Campbell

employed professionals, but I sent the application in anyway.
    After salting the butcher block at Walnut Lake Market (one of my stock boy duties), I called home to see if any letter had arrived. I had been tracking the household mail pretty intensely the last few weeks and that day, one showed up. I insisted that Mom read it to me on the spot.
    "Dear Bruce -- Congratulations! Your application has been accepted," Mom read, as happy as I was about the news.
    It wasn't until I got home that the ramifications began to sink in. With the exception of a three-week camp outing when I was ten, I had never been away from home for very long, and certainly not alone. This payless job required me to stay, at my own expense, for three months in Traverse City, Michigan -- cherry capital of the world. To be honest, I never once thought about the money -- I would have paid for the opportunity to work in real theater.
    Initially, I rented a room in a boardinghouse not far from downtown. Even in 1976 this was a Dickensian concept. Pretty quickly, I tired of tiptoeing around, but the price was right, and I was a free bird. I must explain that I was never the "I gotta get away from home" type since there was nothing about my teenage life that particularly compelled me to rebel. Still, it felt great to know that for the entire summer, I got to make my own decisions.
    I got a taste of this freedom walking to work the first morning. A light rain was coming down, so I wore a green plastic poncho. If Mom had been around, I would also be carrying an umbrella and wearing boots. The rain increased and my head and feet got soaked, but I was bent on savoring my independence, so instead of ducking under the elms along the street, I deliberately slowed down and walked in the open, tilting my head up toward the rain.
    A normal day for apprentices started at 9:00 A.M. Dave Bodenstedt, the apprentice coordinator, had a Zero Tolerance for tardiness. His policy, which I endorse, is that if you were supposed to be at work at 9:00, you were ready to work at 9:00. You didn't grab a cup of coffee and shoot the bull -- you hit the ground running.

    THE MOTLEY CREW
    It was an eclectic mix of apprentices to say the least. There were ten of us: a Coca-Cola addict, whose rotting teeth stood as testament to the habit; a movie star's son; past-their-prime hippies; sons and daughters of distinctly blue-collar parents; rich suburban kids; and me, Mr. Middle-of-the-Road. The apprentices were straight and gay, young and old, but we were the backbone of that theater.
    The technical staff was a combination of imported and home-grown talent. John and Patricia, director and stage manager respectively, were a husband and wife team from New York -- both were very seasoned hands at this demanding format.
    Louis, the technical director, was also a resourceful guy from the East Coast. One play required the sound of a teapot whistling, and as I passed by one day, he stopped me with, "Hey, Bruce, can you whistle?"
    "Heck yes," I said.
    "Good, come over here. You're gonna be a tea kettle." The final effect was a little on the cheesy side, but that's the way things were done in the fast and loose world of summer stock.
    The assistant technical director, Bill, was from Traverse City. I thought Bill was pretty darned cool, because he did voice-overs for local radio commercials. He drove a hand-me-down Mercedes, complete with a "car phone." In reality, it was a regular phone that would "ring" from vibration when Bill's car got up to forty-three miles-per-hour.
    "Works great on first dates," Bill proclaimed.
    I wondered how many of his first dates were also his last.
    WORKING STIFFS
    Look up the term "apprentice" in the dictionary, and you will see it defined as "schlub, whipping boy, and/or low man on the totem pole."
    We got an early whiff of the way things really were behind-the-scenes -- the first three days were spent folding 16,000 promotional flyers. My job was pasting a sticker of Doug