Dale Sheldon
About
When I was a kid I fell in love with the theater. At age 6 my parents put my in an acting class called Kids on Camera with Judy Berlin in San Francisco. They did it because I was painfully shy and rarely spoke to anyone apart from my immediate family. I was hooked, pretty quickly. I went on to train with Maestro Golfredo Corradetti, a kind man who called me "mio Angelo", a conductor for the San Francisco Opera; and I later studied piano with Anton Irek in Tarzana; and dance with Patsy Metzger at Debbie Reynolds Studio in North Hollywood. I've done a lot of theater off and on over the years, mostly in community theaters here and there. Some Shakespeare, a lot of musicals, and a smattering of American farce comedies. You can see them in my StageArchive listing, although I still have quite a few to add. Around the same time that I started at Kids on Camera, I would often sit down with my grandmother to look through old family photos going back a century. She would tell me who the people were, where they were taken, how they were related, and their stories. It was our thing that we often did together. And again, I was hooked, pretty quickly. When her mother, my great-grandmother, passed away in 1990 she left behind several additional family photos that were even older. On the back she wrote their surname and how they were related to her. "My grandmother Robinson; My great-grandfather Guerraz" etc. It piqued my interest. I knew that it was just enough information for me to figure out who these people were and reclaim their identieis. I was 12 years old and I got to work. I had managed to identify them all by the time I was 15. I've never lost my passion for either theater or genealogy. StageArchive is the result of that lifetime interest. I want to combine these passions and share them with everyone else. More than that, I want to create a place where everyone else can share them as well. StageArchive isn't just about recording what we've done in the past, or what others have done. It's also about creating and exploring theater for the future. Collaborating together, no matter where a person is from or how little they might have. Anyone should be able to stand up in front of some other people and put on a show. This is meant to be a place to share those performances, every performance, and record it.