Setting: A comfortable looking living room in Westlock, Alberta, early 1990s. Enter (stage right) Dick and Bunnie Arth, Rotarians and long-time community-minded business people, discussing what they could do to raise funds to help build a new community hall.
Dick: I don’t know Bunnie, it’s an awful lot of money. We’ll have to do something pretty special to raise that much cash.
Bunnie: Hmmm, how about we put on a play? A local production, on a grand scale. No. A dinner theatre. We’ll draw thousands from around the region. We’ll offer them great food, great entertainment and a fun evening and we’ll have our new community hall before we know it.
The dialogue is entirely fictional, but we imagine it went something like that when the Arths decided to start the annual Westlock Rotary Dinner Theatre in 1991 with a production of Best Little Whorehouse in Texas to follow the next year.
What an idea it was.
More than $1 million has been raised for the hall, the Rotary Trail, the purchase of a new CT Scanner for the Westlock Healthcare Centre, sponsorship of the Rotary Spirit Centre and a girls’ school in Ethiopia.
And now, nearly three decades later, the pair are moving on to the next act in their lives and leaving Westlock. Saturday’s final performance of Hilda’s Yard will not be the final dinner theatre ever held, but it will be the last helmed by Dick and Bunnie.
If Westlock is but a stage and all the men and women merely players, two big players are leaving our community behind. They won’t be far away, but their absence will be felt, especially every fall around this time.
We hear the drama society will be picking up the dinner theatre tradition, which is fantastic news. And we know both would say they’ve only been a part of these productions as you don’t pull off shows like this without a lot of community support — from the actors, to the production crew and even the Rotarians who work the tables.
But it will be hard to find another pair with as much dedication to their causes who approach them with such vigour.
And for that they deserve our sincere thanks.
