The first time I met Rick Barron, it was nearly the end of seventh grade. I had expressed interest to my parents in doing technical design work in theatre when I was about twelve. That’s when I decided that acting is just not my thing, and as a result I was dragged down on a boiling June day after school to the New England Youth Theatre. It was an introduction to the summer tech crew, which I was now a part of. I knew one of the kids there, but none of the other three. Soon, an older man with paint-splattered tennis shoes walked out from between the green metal doors that mark the entrance to the theatre. “Hello everyone! I’m Rick Barron!” he said, his voice touched with his trademark British accent. As we followed him into the building, I had no clue how influential he would become in my life.

I was not a loud child. I wasn’t super social, and I spent the vast majority of my time during previous summers hanging out at my house reading. My parents had me do soccer camps, and I loved those. Aside from that though, I didn’t do a whole lot. In sixth grade, I was in Green Street School’s production of Cinderella as the king, and thoroughly enjoyed the theatre energy, but I was so exposed on stage. Even before the shows had started, I decided I wanted to do lights and not act.

Fast forward one year, and I was walking into the theatre. We journeyed past the box office and kitchen, through the lobby, past the classrooms, and onto the stage. Rick was giving us all a tour, and showed us the set that he had built for the NEYT Alumni show, The Odd Couple. It was made up of around fifteen flat panels called flats, which were painted, set up with a working sink and plumbing, a number of doors, and a bed. I was blown away. I had seen sets before, such as the huge town Rick had built for Guys and Dolls, and they usually fascinated me. When I walked into the theatre to see that show, a few holiday seasons before my first show, I was shocked by the vivid lines and realistic buildings. The doors opened, and the windows closed. The water ran, and the phone rang. All of it was seen from the audience’s perspective, but this, finally backstage, was so complicated and detailed. Soon I couldn’t wait for school to end, so I could start helping build the sets on stage I had grown up watching.

Rick is fascinating man, who seems to know everything. From stories that he has told me, I’m know a fair bit about his past. He grew up in the jungles of Paraguay, where his parents were missionaries. He went to Hollywood for a couple years, and was in a couple of television shows as bit-part characters with the likes of Constance Bennett, Jayne Mansfield, and Dorothy Lamour. He travelled the world for a while, and finally settled in Vermont in 1982. He raised a family, introduced youth soccer to Brattleboro in the form of Brattleboro Storm, which is the soccer program I grew up in (I had no clue he founded it at that time.) His son, who coincidentally had the same name as me, used to work for my dad at the Riverview Cafe. As a result, Rick took a liking to me, and that made my first experience into New England Youth Theatre many orders of magnitude easier than it would have been otherwise .

Rick taught me how to design the set, using as much of the stage as possible. He taught me how to properly use a screw gun, hammer, belt sander, table saw, and numerous other tools that were a necessity on the job. His passion for theatre is only usurped by his passion for soccer. When he found out that I was playing in the program he had founded years before I was born, he was beside himself with excitement. From that day on, we would work and talk about soccer for hours. We’d discuss Storm, strategies, players, teams, leagues, and the World Cup. To this day we still discuss all of these things when we prep for shows! One quintessential example of our long discussions came during the preparations for Urinetown, the musical this past summer. It was a steaming July day, and I was helping Rick build scaffolding for the set. We had to finish it by the end of the day, which was only three hours away, and Rick asked me a question.

“Who is the best player ever?”

“Well, I think it could go many different ways. You have Pele, who was just mesmerizing, with his weaving runs and crazy shots. Then there’s Maradona, Beckenbauer, Messi, George Best, and Ruud Gullit. I could talk about all of them for a while,” I answered immediately. Asking me this type of question can keep me busy for hours.

“Oh, I remember Best. At the time, he was so different than anyone else playing. Growing up in the jungle, all the kids wanted to be Pele. I wanted to be George Best. He was a superstar,” Rick reminisced, as we headed on to the next set of scaffold.

“Personally, I also think that Andres Iniesta and Xavi Hernandez should be up there as well, along with Zinedine Zi- OW,” I barked as the scaffolding pinched my hand.

“I don’t think they should be. Are you alright?” Rick kept on talking about soccer.

“Yup! I totally disagree. They are three of the best midfielders of all time. You can’t deny that. Their passing vision completely transformed the game. Iniesta and Xavi were the engine of the Barcelona team that won the treble under Pep Guardiola.”

We talked about the best players who’ve ever played our favorite game for hours. Between the two of us, we would debate this on a regular basis, sometimes calling in a third party (usually my brother or his son) to settle the score. This one debate, however, went on for hours. In fact, by the time that we finally ran out of players and things to say, we had finished the entire project and were able to go home. Moments like that allowed me to bond with Rick in a way that I don’t think many other techies had in recent years.
I think that my favorite moment with Rick was painting on the set of Urinetown. I, along with two or three others depending on the day, had to paint the entire back wall to look like a sewer. I am by no means an artist. In fact, I just suck. I don’t paint very well, can barely draw a stick figure, and as a result I have little interest in doing such projects myself. Rick knows that, and frankly feels the same way about my artistic talent. The back wall project was a huge stretch for me, because we had to transform it all from a few sketches into a massive mural in three days. We had a limited amount of paint, a short amount of time, but plenty of fun. Everyone involved was cracking jokes, and fooling around. Anyway, Rick and I were on huge ladders, painting the pipes coming down from the ceiling. Cleo and Vince were starting the massive drains that seemed to empty out of the wall. Vince began to belt out songs from his favorite musical Les Miserables, which is one of Rick’s favorites as well. However, Vince isn’t much of a singer and, as a result, he butchered the show. It was not pretty, and Rick did not like it.

“Vince, please stop singing. You’d drive the sparrows from Capistrano with that voice,” bellowed Rick from up in the rafters. Vince took it in stride, but I almost fell off of my ladder. Rick’s normally polite and relaxed, but when someone fails to perform his favorite musicals well, he’ll make sure they stop quickly.

My current life is influenced by lessons I learned while at the theatre, people I’ve met, and shows I have helped put on. Whether it was Godspell and the lessons of the 1960s or Seussical the Musical’s zany and colorful characters, or even the ever classic Sound of Music, I have learned from them all. The biggest connection between all of them though was the directions of Rick, guiding me through my work in the shop and moving set pieces on the stage. He is what I associate with the lessons of the stage, even the ones I see in day to day life.

Eleven shows after my first introduction to Rick, I have begun to realize how much he has done for me. He has helped shape me as a student, a worker, a soccer fan, and maybe most importantly as a person. Because of him, I might consider going into technical theatre professionally. Out of many adults that I’ve worked with, he stands out, and I can’t wait to work with him more before he retires and I go off to college. And while I won’t be around to tech this June, I will miss his strict but playful accented voice calling “Come on, Owen!”