Profile:
Class of 2011
Eight years on the road was
long enough for Kathleen Daly ’11, an Ada Comstock
Scholar graduating with a major in the study of women and gender, and a minor
in Afro-American studies.
 As a stage manager for a national
touring production of Phantom of the
Opera, Daly spent eight
years traveling about the country, packing up several times
a year and taking up temporary residence in city after city:
Denver, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston…
“The first seven and a half years were fabulous,” she said recently, relaxing
in the Campus Center. “We had a lot of fun. I was quite the carnival worker.”
But it was a burnout gig, Daly
says—work-hard-play-hard, long hours, a lot of
pressure and you’re never home. “It’s for the young kids,” she adds.
When her
touring days needed to end, she sought a clean break, a direction
away from show business and toward something more intellectually
inspiring. She packed her trunk one more time and moved from
Los Angeles to Northampton to enroll in the Ada Comstock
Scholars Program.
“I gave up show biz for the life of the mind,” recalls Daly about her decision
four years ago to enroll at Smith. “I had my fun, now it was time to have my
ass kicked. This was all about work.”
Daly’s intellectual inquiry and research at Smith have hovered around her interests
in education and its importance, especially for women, and more specifically
for women in later stages of life. She plans to pursue teaching to gain experience
in the classroom, and eventually contribute in some way to educational policy,
particularly regarding the education of older women.
Programs like those at Smith
and Mount Holyoke College that welcome women of non-traditional
college age to further their education are an invaluable
service to maximize the potential of society’s human capital, she said.
“It’s valuable to have life
experience under your belt and return to college,” says
Daly, who is 54. “I have things to teach people.”
Though she remembers her days
in the high-pressure theater world with fondness, she has
no plans to return to that way of life. “I’ll dip in every once in a
while, perhaps,” she says, as a stage manager with smaller, local productions,
but nothing that will take over her life as theater once did.
Coordinating and
running a $10 million production with a crew of more than
a hundred for thousands of fans made for an interesting life,
and the stories abound in her memory. Her job in those days
was primarily “calling the show,” that is, directing cues for
lights, sound effects, music, curtains and actors’ entrances at theaters such
as Boston’s Wang Center and equally reputable venues. “As a stage manager at
that level, you’re always staving off disasters.”
In fact, without an alert stage
manager, any production will quickly fall apart. Daly recalls
one incident at the Wang Center in which her attention drifted,
only momentarily, resulting in disaster. During a staged
curtain call, as part of the Phantom
of the Opera plot, she
gave the cue a split second too early, so that when the lavish,
10,000-pound velvet curtain came down, it did so right on
the backs of the bowing actors. “I sent at least two of them to the chiropractor
that day,” she admits. “But then, a thousand shows will go by without incident.”
Daly also misses the sense of
community in the theater, the way people from different backgrounds
come together around a single endeavor. But then, she sees
that community at Smith, too, especially among Adas.
“Adas are very different from one another, with different backgrounds,” she says. “But
we come together in these learning communities. And we bring all this experience.” |
