One member of the Schenectady Theater for Children will be leaving some big shoes to fill after her more than 30 years of volunteering for the community group.
“She is just going to be very, very difficult to replace,” Theater President Criss Macaione-Bilodeau said. “We are going to need multiple people to replace her.”
Dee Mulford joined the community theater group in 1980, shortly after the group became independently incorporated in 1976. The theater company had started in 1967.
Mulford’s move to Seattle will place her far from her East Coast theater. Her husband, Bob, received a job offer he couldn’t refuse, spurring the move from their Niskayuna home.
“If he didn’t take the job it would eat him alive for the rest of his life,” Mulford said. “I certainly can’t say to him, I have to stay due to my volunteer job.”
Thus began the imminent departure, which Bilodeau spoke about with a voice tinged with sincere regret and gratitude for Mulford’s commitment.
“She is an extremely talented woman. I can’t say enough about how sad we are to lose her and how difficult she will be to replace,” Bilodeau. “She has such a wonderful, positive outlook on life that things can be done and a real can do attitude.”
Bilodeau said what she’ll remember about Mulford is her excitement to the responses from children at performances.
“She herself becomes very childlike and very lit up and becomes so excited when children respond as positively as they do,” Bilodeau said. “She is a very enthusiastic person and I have seen her time and again get so excited about things.”
For Mulford, it is clear children played a strong role in her commitment to the company.
“It is wonderful to do a volunteer job that makes 10,000 kids laugh a year,” Mulford said. “(Children’s laughter) is like a bubble that comes up their tummy and just rolls out of them — it is different than adults. It is just pure delight and no holds barred … it is intoxicating.”
Mulford first joined the group after being asked to make a small prop for one of the shows, but that quickly spiraled into more responsibilities. She said she hasn’t regretted a day of it.
“The next year they asked me to do the set design and I did and then the year after that it was, can you produce it and do the set design? After that I just stayed with it,” she said.
Mulford said the company has grown “so big” from its early days when she first joined.
It started in the backroom of a school in Schenectady, allowing for a place to store items, with the group traveling from school to school in a station wagon filled to capacity.
Then the company upgraded to a “rusty truck,” she said. Some of the rust holes where rather large, so as a joke they put a sign over one of the holes reading “donate here.”
She said the plays performed for children always try to have some moral anchor, without being overly apparent.
“We want the kids to learn something about getting along with people,” she said. “We want our shows to have a moral in it, but we don’t want to beat them over the head with it.”
Bilodeau said Mulford’s painting abilities are “out of this world” and Mulford has designed many of the set pieces over the years. Also, how Mulford can fit all the set pieces and equipment into the company’s van is an impressive feat, she said.
Mulford is also thinking about trying to book The Great Minds Series, which she helped start, to the west coast after her move. The series involves a 45-minute long presentation by an actor portraying an historic individual who made a major impact in today’s world, such as Albert Einstein, Mother Jones and Galileo.
“Then the Schenectady Theater for Children would be an internationally touring company,” she said.
