Tour the Gary Soren Smith Center for Fine and Performing Arts at Ohlone College in Fremont, California, USA. http://www.smithcenterpresents.com/

Produced: Undated (prior to 2007)

TRANSCRIPT:

CHRIS: This is Fred's office. This is the heart of the Scene Shop. Students like to hang-out here and talk to Fred and use the phone to make long distance calls and surf the Internet and do all kinds of fun things. And this is also where a lot of student activities begin. A lot of the planning goes on.

We have a really dynamic student club. It's called the Theatre and Dance and Music Alliance. We call it "TADAM," and every year we end with a big awards ceremony that we call the "DAMYS" and we hand out our DAM awards and it's a pretty fun time. We kind of run it like the TONY awards. We do it here in the Jackson Theatre. We have moving lights out front -- the search lights and the whole nine yards. Presenters in tuxedos, and it's really fun.

Like I said, we like to have a lot of fun with our productions and generally let people express their creativity and go as far as they want to go.

One of the things that we like to do is keep a piece of every show and put it on display. We've got a lot of pieces out here from various shows that we've done. This actually is the sign from the original drama studio that was on this site. It was one of the original buildings on campus from back in 1965 or '66 and it was torn-down a few years ago to make room for this building, but little mementos and pieces of it have survived and surfaced throughout the building.

What do we have here? We have a painting from the set of A Flea in Her Ear and we have posters and signs from our production of Grease! sort of all over. This is a mirror shield from Man of La Mancha. If you want to come out here, the Statue of Liberty is from our set from The Crucible.

The big balloon thing is from a Teddy Ruxbin commercial that was actually videotaped here many years ago. And we managed to work that into a show, actually.

If you look back here, we have our wall of fame. Don't trip on the stuff.

We have pieces of many sets from shows that we've done over the years, including the infamous Pussy-Cat-A-Go-Go sign. That sign lit-up, and at an appropriate moment, one of the characters shot it and it came swinging down, arcing and sparking and flying every which way.

So, when you work here, it's a pretty safe bet that you're going to leave some memento of your time and it's going to go up on the walls. So if you work on a show, you can come back 20 years later and say, "See that? I did that. That was my show."

Don't ask me what piece of Dracula is going to go up on the wall. I'm not sure. I'd like that one to get mounted, but it would be kind of hard to do that.

Anyway, we really like to showcase what our students do. We like to let them express themselves artistically and technically, and then we want the world to see it because we're proud of what our students do here. And we show it off as best we can.

And we show it off to the whole campus and to the community. A lot of people come here to see our shows that aren't related to the college in any way. And that's as it should be because we really are providing a lot of entertainment value to the community.