Unexpected pleasures

Today, and thanks to my mom's inquisitiveness for everything historical (after all, she is a historian by training and profession), we stumbled upon the oldest opera house in America (according to the renovators), right smack in the middle of the town next to my small college on the hill.

The Woodward Opera House, which was founded in the 1850s and reached the zenith of its popularity in the 1880s, offered vaudeville performances to what must have been a pretty prosperous town in its time. A drive through the main street of this town regales the visitor (and resident) with beautiful Victorian-style houses that are still standing in its historic district.

The opera house was a surprise to me, who am a resident of this area, and a delight to both of us as we walked up its rickety stairs to the theater area where everything is mostly the way it was more than 100 years ago. Talk about time travel!

The picture below, one of the people involved in the renovations told us, replaced the woman with bare breasts in the picture at the right hand side of the stage. The more demure and fanciful woman below used to cover the bare-breasted lady but now both can be seen by visitors whenever the Woodward opens to gather support for renovation efforts, as happened today.

The goal of its renovators is to bring the Woodward back to life at some point in the future and to revive it as an actual theater in a fully revamped building that would be self-sustaining. As an early Americanist scholar who has dragged my poor husband through ancient opera houses in Vienna and Hungary, I think it would be totally cool to have a theater dating to the 1850s open back to the public here in this rather culturally limited area. Here's to hoping that history and actuality meet again!