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Life is a Stage for Beach Vickers

Beach Vickers, a 1972 W&L graduate, told the Charleston Gazette recently that he used to stage plays for neighborhood kids on his grandmother’s back porch in nearby Montgomery, W.Va. Admission was 5 cents, and the cast almost always included a couple of dogs.

Beach, a journalism major and former newspaperman, is now living in Los Angeles, where he works for Universal Studios Digital Services at NBC Universal Studios. He still acts and directs, though, and he was back in West Virginia recently to direct the Kanawha Players’ production of “Lil’ Abner,” where he had some dogs and a pig back on stage for old times’ sake.

In the years since W&L, Beach’s career has taken lots of twists and turns, as he illustrates on his website. Theater has been a big part of his life ever since those makeshift performances on his grandmother’s porch. One of his W&L memories is performing “Alfred” in the Theater Department’s production of “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” which had a brief run off-off-off Broadway in New York.

Beach is now working on a proposed travel series for public television, “The Mountaineer Traveler,” which promotes West Virginia tourism.

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