This past weekend at the Cincinnati Old Time Radio Convention, I was the very proud recipient of the Dave Warren Award. Given to "those who preserve Old Time Radio by bringing it alive through re-creations", this award means SO much to me - that is what this is all about: OTR and audio drama are ARTFORMS...granted, they can be entertaining, but how amazing is it that waves of compressed air can travel to your ears and create pictures, characters, intrigue, laughter, thrills?
I never got to meet Dave Warren, I wish I had. Evidently, in addition to his OTR re-creations from the '70's on, he was quite a good artist. If you had bought any of a number of
OTR cassette collections from Adventures In Cassettes, you had seen his work. And he did tons of black and white covers for the Old Time Radio Digest. And, of course, he was managing director for the Dave Warren Players, an OTR group that continues to this day.
I barely know what I said when I accepted the award. I know that I thanked my father, for introducing me to Old Time Radio in the 1970's.
Big HUGE thanks to all of the past and present members of the Theatre Of The Mindless group: no single person could get an award for re-creations without being surrounded and supported by enormously talented people...so THANK YOU Jason Clark, Heidi Feldkirchner, Shawn and Virginia Fitzgerald, Laura Jansen, Bob Jeunger, Mark Kettner, and Chris Wild! And to the two old guys, Hank and Jim, who are there for every one of our rehearsals and shows, sitting next to each other, enjoying the perfomances, proud that they passed the artform down to us, so that we can do the same for others...
And THANKS to all who have come to see our shows - hopefully, we have either re-lit an old sputtering flame (for you old-timers who remember OTR), or begun a fresh warm fire (for you newbies who were just born too late). This is all for you.
Thanks again.
