After two seasons at POG, I decided it would be best to take on a situation where I could carry larger roles, and a larger paycheck. This came in the form of a mellerdrammer theatre in beautiful Dubois, Wyoming nestled between the Absorcas badlands and the lush pine forests of the Wind River range, a mere ninety miles south of Yellowstone National Park. The producers were genuine angels, who bought an old bowling alley and converted it into a little bandbox of a theater where we staged three shows: Only An Orphan Girl; M'liss, or My Western Miss; and Love Rides the Rails, or Will the Mail Train Run Tonight.

I was hired as the villain even though I was the tender age of nineteen. I had sent the directors a composite picture that had me in a number of wigs one or two of which were black; they didn't know until I arrived that I was a callow towhead. But by then it was too late, and with the application of several bottles of hair dye, I became a raven haired villain.

Black hair aged me considerably, and I don't think anyone in town thought I was only nineteen. We were too busy most of the time for any of that to matter. The "leading lady" who was probably all of twenty was Van Heflin's daughter, Katie, a beautiful and talented redhead. My roommate in the scruffy little "hotel" where we were put up was Peter Rousmaniere, of Pl*yb*y Lampoon fame.

After each performance, we did about an hour's worth of olio acts, including my own rendition of "The Anatomical Tragedian" a send-up of Delsartian acting techniques, and "The Six Great Immortals" which was a take-off on Jack and Jill as it would have been composed by the likes of William Wordsworth, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Edgar Allen Poe. I hauled it out for years afterward. We sang and danced and had a ball.

After an astonishing opening night with a packed house, it became clear that we had exhausted the audience for the theatre on that one night. While there were two thousand tourists in Dubois on any given night, it turned out that most of them wanted to rest up for the ninety mile trip north to Yellowstone Park rather than go see a play. This resulted in the necessary step of going out every night before the show on a hay wagon to which we had attached an upright piano, and doing mini shows in the street to induce people to come into the theater. We had limited success. When I came back through Dubois several years later, the one time bowling alley-theater had become the Dubois Mercantile, thus snuffing out our dubious impact on the cultural life of that charming little community.