Director's Note

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   Our production concept for You Can’t Take It With You is a family photo album.  Not some digital slideshow you will see at graduation parties, but an old style album with black paper pages and photos turned a light chocolate color with age held to the paper with glue.  I looked back through a collection of my own family photos and found my mother, my aunt, and my grandparents outside the shack that was their home looking for all the world like some neighbor of the Joads.  I found a picture of my father-in-law (a wonderful man who I love dearly) at Mrs. Myatt’s and my wedding in his cowboy-style tux.  I also found a picture of Crazy Aunt Ruth.  She wasn’t really crazy and she was really my Great-Aunt.  Everyone has that one relative (or two) in his or her family who marches to the beat of a different drummer.  When I graduated from high school in 1979, Crazy Aunt Ruth and her red hair must have been around seventy years old.  Like any good graduate, I was tired of the family at my party and took three friends up a ladder into the attic of my A-frame garage to escape.  After twenty minutes or so of hiding out, I mean hanging out, with my friends, we heard someone else climbing the ladder.  Up pops the red hair of my seventy-year-old Crazy Aunt Ruth.  She starts chatting with us and all of a sudden grabs one of the rafters supporting the roof of the A-frame structure and starts doing chin-ups.  She was indeed happy being her own person.  I think she would have like the Vanderhof/Sycamore family and they would have liked her.  We hope you like them too and, perhaps, can find a way to march to your own drummer.