Living in 1985 Jackson, Wyoming, the lore and legend of the Wort Hotel and its legendary Silver Dollar Bar were inscribed in my head both by direct experience of local and touring acts in the Showroom (as the Greenback Lounge was inevitably called by the locals) and vicariously through a local author’s library book titled The Cocktail Hour in Jackson Hole. That 1956 book is described on the back cover (and on a current Amazon listing) thusly:
“In Jackson Hole, Wyoming, the cocktail hour is not from 5:00 to 7:00, as it is in bigger and fancier places, but from mid-September to Thanksgiving (allowing, of course, for patients with chronic salty stomachs who carry on “until March, or until jail, whichever comes first”). After the dudes have gone, the Eastern girls leaving broken hearts behind them, the permanent personnel of the Hole settles down for the off-season. Cowboy, rancher, dude wrangler, ranger, bartender, and marooned shill, they live it out to the friendly mood music of the tinkle of indoor ice, the whisper of poker-hands dealt, and the low guttural cry of the ruby-throated crap shooter. It is a community of kindred souls and wonderful. The seasons move on autumn with its wonderous cocktail hour; winter with its snow up to 15 feet and cold down to 63 below, its mad elk, and the horrors of cabin fever; and finally the first thaw. And there is Mr. Hough himself, gingerly and with a certain elegance winding his way through it all, determined to live until spring, a time when the melting snow discloses the staggering crop of winter’s empties in the back yard, and when staid citizens sneak out at midnight to throw their bottles into the yards of their neighbors – an exchange that always comes out even. Mr. Hough has been a willing Boswell – on a participating basis – to an engaging world. His account of this small community, high in the backbone of the Rockies, makes an enormously readable, gay and true winter’s tale. — from book’s back cover”
The characters I met in the hole in the mid-1980s seemed ripe for a similar treatment, especially when, in the same time period, the locals in Savannah, Georgia were so grippingly portrayed In the Garden of Good and Evil. Perhaps that story will still be told for all of the characters I met circa 1984-1992, including Captain Bob, Frank Ewing, Breck O’Neill, Steve Fontanini, “Weird” Ed Bachtel, “Marvelous” Marv Wendl, Holly Danner, and Deb Choupin. For now, though, the last three on this list are among the six characters in a real-time tale about how a ragtag troupe of amateur improv comedians took over the Wort Hotel’s Silver Dollar Showroom for 8 weeks during the summer of 1988. That was the year of the Yellowstone fires.
Immortalized as a 59-minute sung-through opera set to the music from Ferdinando Paer’s 1804 Leonora, Parker & Paer’s A Roadkill Opera had its world premiere performances in January 2016 at the Mead Theatre Lab at Flashpoint in Washington DC and was subsequently performed in October 2016 by the Symphony Orchestra of Northern Virginia at the James Lee Community Theater in Falls Church, Virginia.
Building on the advice given by Stephen Schwartz at the February 2018 ASCAP Musical Theatre Workshop in Los Angeles, the story is being expanded and reshaped into a musical with the working title Hungry Men Don’t Swerve. Discussions are underway for a possible premiere in Jackson Hole. Stay tuned!
