Dinner With Dr Blood

Posted by Vulnadia on Aug 15, 2010 at 08:17 PM For my birthday week, one of the fun things that I was able to do, was have dinner with a Shreveport Icon, Dr. Blood himself. No, he wasn't in costume, in fact he looked about as mundane and normal as can be if you didn't know any better! (Which of course we do!) It was great because we were able to get many of our old "Family" back together in one place, at one table, which is something that doesn't happen very often. You see, Drew Hunter served as President of Gas Light Players and in 1975 he decided to do away with the State Fair Melodrama show that GLP used to do during the fair and replace it with something that had potential to make the theater a little more money and peak the interest of the fair-goers and Dr. Blood was born out of the ashes of the old and evolved into something...new! For years, the show drew area artists and theater folk together (no pun intended) to raise money for Gas Light Players which went to fund their theater season. Out of all of this, a sort of family evolved out of it. At first, it was the troupe's friends and family staffing the show. Eventually, area high school kids waited for the day when they were old enough to join the show and help out, too. There, we made life-long friends that still meet til this very day, quite literaly, which brings us to this past Tuesday, when we all got together for old times sake! Drew brought us the original Dr. Blood scripts to play with and pictures from, the old days including the promo pics of Dr. Blood's wedding which took place at the revel as a performance piece complete with flower ghouls and a bride chained inside a coffin. We talked about the old days, and then on to the here and how and how the show as a whole has evolved into Gentleman Death's Shocktale out at the fairgrounds once again. We talked about the movies some of us worked on (how Chuck's sister became a cult icon on her own due to Mountaintop Motel Massacre though not on purpose!) Drew told us stories of the Wax Museum from his time spent working there and living in Dallas. We literally stayed until they turned out the lights enjoying stories from back in the day. Best of all, we made plans to meet Friday the 13th in Dallas and check out a friend's haunt in Arlington.