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STATE STREET SCRIBE by Jeff Wing
Jeff is a journalist, raconteur, autodidact, and polysyllable enthusiast. A long-time resident of SB, he takes great delight in chronicling the lesser known facets of this gaudy jewel by the sea. Jeff can be reached at jeffwingg@gmail.com
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shocked by the ethereal presence, never felt threatened; in the absence of any responsible (if dead) adult rushing in to claim the kid, Lathim eventually named him Hector.
The Big Yellow House
This defining event occurred in the former wine cellar of a well-known local
landmark long rumored to be a swarm with translucent former tenants. The Big Yellow House, in Summerland, was known to be “haunted,” or as those who have passed might describe it, a nice place to chill. Lathim would soon enough write a popular history of the place, but was, at the time of his revelatory sighting, a newly minted
ninth grader at Santa Barbara High School, already exhibiting the restless mojo that would be the hallmark of his creatively nomadic adulthood. The spiritual awakening occurred in the midst of an early business opportunity. “My family had been going there a couple time a month to eat when it was the original Big Yellow House in the early ‘70s. I’d always loved the wine cellar there, and we would always walk through it on the way out. One night we were getting ready to go and told Don, the manager, that we were going to walk through the wine cellar. He says, ‘Oh, we had to close the wine cellar.’”
Rod Lathim, Dillon Yuhasz, Ann Dusenberry, Katie Thatcher, Laurel Lyle, and Luke Mullen behind the scenes of Unfinished Business (photo by TC Reiner)
In an early example of the full frontal opportunity-seizing that would later typify Lathim’s style, the hairy-headed freshman let fly. “Oh, you could do so many cool things with that cellar!” he loudly lamented to the assembled grown-ups. One imagines Pater and Mater Lathim exchanging knowing glances at Rod’s outburst. The manager walked straight into the trap by calling young Lathim’s bluff. “Like what?” he wanted to know. To which Lathim responded with a loud array of ideas. The manager, taken aback, was hooked. “Well,” he said, “Why don’t you manage it?” “Really?!” The future artist/polymorph then looked beseechingly at his folks and asked them the one question whose answer would make or break this watershed opportunity. “Can you guys drive me here?” “I didn’t even have a driver’s license,” Lathim laughs. The precocious 15-yearold set up shop and the Big Yellow House’s former wine cellar-turned gift shop became a growing concern,
successful enough that the young hotshot’s earnings there partly funded his later college education. Soon enough, in walked Fate. “He was this little kid,” Lathim recalls, “just walking around in the cellar. If someone had asked me before if I believed in ghosts I would’ve said, ‘No!’”
A Force of Nature
Fast-forward 35 years. Today, Lathim is a much-beloved giant in the regional theater scene, and a much sought-after consultant in the nonprofit realm, Lathim is a force unto himself and has been since before he was old enough to sip a beer. His indefatigable decadeslong run as both humanitarian and civic superman are well documented, but two of his accomplishments are jewels in the crown that bear mentioning here. At the tender age of 19, Lathim founded Access Theater, under whose glowing proscenium a generation of socalled “disabled” theater greats seized an opportunity and stunned “abled” audiences in their tens of thousands, simply by being given the forum to open themselves and shine. Who knew? Rod knew. And when, in 2003, the timeworn Santa Barbara Junior High auditorium emerged from its chrysalis as a gorgeous, state-of-the-art performance space called the Marjorie Luke Theatre, the ringing success of the $4,000,000 restoration had much to do with Lathim’s Luke Theatre Board presidency and role as project manager. From playwriting and producing, to documentary filmmaking (Citizen McCaw), to museum exhibits of his art, Lathim’s story is one of a human dynamo who throws himself at life with the excitement of a kid trying caffeine for the first time. Now he’s ready to tackle death. So to speak.
Taking Care of Business
On January 22, Lathim’s play Unfinished Business opens at the Lobero. An expansion of a glowingly reviewed one-act that debuted at the same theater in 2013, “Unfinished Business” is a two-act play inspired by actual events surrounding the passing of Lathim’s mother and the colorfully fractious crowd, mortal and otherwise, that gathered to see her off. Structurally, the play takes a page from the breakout Japanese movie classic Rashomon, wherein the same captured event is viewed from several different perspectives, each adding a layer of revealed truth to the one that preceded it. When the pieces suddenly ...continued p.30