The Occasional Macanudo

Today was the monthly meeting of REPS, the Radio Enthusiasts of Puget Sound. And the feature was a performance of an original Shadow script by the REPS Radio Readers. This group reads scripts of old radio shows for fun and occasionally performs one for the club. This script was written some years back by two of our members. The script needed changes and one of the writers did not want a word changed. So it lay idle for about ten years. Now that writer has found religion and said she didn’t care any longer and is no longer a member of the club. But the fellow who had the original idea has been a longtime member of the club and wanted to hear it performed. Bob Herman is blind and the story revolves around the fact that the Shadow is not able to cloud the blind villain’s mind. The Occasional Macanudo is an expensive cigar which the blind cigar store owner and villain of the piece sells.

So the readers reworked the script a bit and practiced it several times. This sub-group meets at our house and I usually take myself off to the library close by. When it got close to performance time the fellow who was supposed to play the part of Commissioner Weston and also read the Blue Coal advertisements came down ill. Guess who got to fill in. I do OK but I’d rather not. Since I had a minor stroke a couple of years back I have to concentrate to not make any mistakes and I probably read a bit more slowly than I formerly did.

The club had a bit of a blowup about a year ago and some people left to form a new club. So we had new actors who had not performed previously. We’ve also lost a couple of actors who have gone on to stage acting. The person who was going to direct auditioned for a play and got a part so Anna, my wife, had to do the directing. For several actors, this was their first time in front of the mike. We even had bit parts for the blind author who read from his braille script. All in all the performance went very well. We won’t be playing for the Radio City Center in New York any time soon but the cast had fun and the audience seemed to enjoy the performance. Shades of the 1940s!