I inadvertently joined a cult... & it turned out to be an experience I wouldn't trade.
And so I don't know what that company looks like now, but I learned a lot. I learned how to interact in host homes, how to make eye contact, how to use my facial expressions, tone, pausing with so many different things of acting that you use specifically for the stage, but you can also use them in real life and really listening and observing. And those are skills that I still carry with me today
Tim Ereneta
@Tim · 1:25
Or comedies or musicals, or were you creating brand new shows, or were you doing plays that were part of this organization, part of the culture of this organization, and were they doing. I guess I'm curious to know if the plays you put on were strictly for entertainment or if they were entertainment as a way to introduce the organization to people and recruit more people, or if it was strictly, this is our message and this is how we're going to like
And it was minimum of five per night. And none of that was for a public audience. That was all for the people that were already members of the theater company. If you were not a part of putting the production on, you were in the audience, and it was mandatory that you would fill out affirmation, that you would write down affirmations. No criticism of any kind had to be affirmations. And you had to stand up at some point and verbally give an affirmation at some point, too
Glenn Mann
@GlennPriceMann · 1:26
Hello. This is such a great and interesting story, and seems like it make a great memoir or a novel really fascinating. And I can't say I'm not surprised, though, that theater would be such an allure and attraction to this type of thing, because I participated many years ago in this theater workshop residency, and it was so intense and it was
Gary Brown
@garyplaysbone · 3:36
The audience was only that one person when you were at the home base, full on performances, five of them a day. But then when you traveled, the prison members, the school members, the general public, is that what was going on, or was it all the time? There was never an audience except for this one. You're just traveling around the country performing just for that one person. That's a bit strange
I think that you take the strong bonding, human, very human experience of a theater company by itself, and then you mix it with faith and belief and these other various traits of a cult and so on, and you mix them all together, and you can have something really powerful, really powerful moving through society in ways that are not easily detected. Right. Anyway, thank you. I've heard that before about possibly writing a memoir or something. Thank you
Deborah Pardes
@DBPardes · 0:39
This is one of the most extraordinary memories that you've shared here on swell. This story feels like it should be one of those animated stories that happen when people have a great audio for something, and then someone else finds the audio and then they actually draw it. And I would love someone to draw this story in all its color and all its dimension. It is just extraordinary. Wow. That's all I have to say
I got out only because I had a car accident that made it impossible for me to stay. And I'll leave it at that. To clarify, with respect to performances, this was an international theater company. It was massive, with headquarters all around the world. World headquarters being in California. And he was only present for the California one. So it's not like the performances that were happening around the world. He was present for the training sessions
Gary Brown
@garyplaysbone · 2:07
So, yeah, that's one of the characteristics of a cult. It's the coercion, mind control, that kind of thing. Separating you from your family, separating you from your friends. A bit of a negative thing, I think. But anyway, it's interesting to hear the very positive. I mean, your whole point is the positive stories behind the experience, the bonds you made, the people you liked. Fascinating, isn't it? Thanks for telling the story
Gary Brown
@garyplaysbone · 1:05
Hello. Alright, for those of you who have been as interested in this story as me, this is a podcast on Spotify called the Cult of Theater Kids. Actually it's a cult. This sounds like a cult podcast. I haven't listened to this episode yet. This is an episode from April 2022. The link is there and the screen grab is there. I'm going to go listen to this in the next couple of days
Isoellen Writes
@Isoellen · 4:59
A church group, and they were very active in outreach programs, and they would do street theater as a way to generate interest and talk about Jesus. And you said some of the plays. Most of the plays were very overtly religious, but a lot of them weren't. There were just like positive themes, in a way, kind of circling back to some of the ancient plays and Shakespeare and all that stuff. They did these outdoor kind of positive
It doesn't ring a bell, per se, but I know that I came in contact with and have heard about many groups who used theater, movement, dance, music in these ways. I wouldn't be entirely surprised about the scripts. It was a very rigid of what we could and couldn't do with them. We couldn't photocopy them. We couldn't share them with anybody outside the group. Nobody else was allowed to perform them. Only we could perform them
So I think when I've seen greyhounds, like, when I looked at buses and things like that or whatever, like other ways of getting to California, whether it be by train, bus, it's like a two and a half, almost three day trip. I don't know if I could survive that. But you meeting the wiccan sounds so like you. You joining the cult sounds so like you
And it's also interesting of having gone from a strict upbringing into the cult that was in some ways even more strict, and then having those times, of course, when I was running barefoot through LA and singing to the moon, those moments of attempting to be more free while still within constraints of. Yeah. Anyway, please ask away. If I'm not comfortable, I'll tell you. Or if I want to