With a theater education that dates back to at least the 1950s, Marcia Thomas has learned much about music and the dramatic arts and she's not done yet.
Thomas, who grew up in Jefferson, lived for years in nearby Marshall, and even enjoyed a couple of theater-rich teen years in England. She helms the Jefferson Opera House Theatre Players as their president.
The group has been bringing the arts to Northeast Texas for more than three decades, and it gives Marcia a chance to pool the talents of area performers.
"I've been involved with it since the very beginning," Marcia said about the Opera House Theatre crew, having moved back to Jefferson with her husband right at the end of the 1970s. She helped start the theater company.
"I had been in theater most of my life, or some form of entertainment," she said. "Coming back over here was a little bit of a unique situation."
Her mother, who had moved back with her husband to retire and lived in "the old home place," persistently encouraged Marcia to join them in Jefferson, and finally Marcia gave in. At the time, there wasn't much in the way of local theater.
"I grew up quick over there. You just grew. You get in a different culture."
She remembers seeing bombed-out places from WWII.
"I decided I had to stay over there, which was a wonderful situation."
She traveled around western Europe while she was waiting to restart her education.
"It was a great introduction to life and the world," Marcia said. She took private lessons, studying theater, singing and dance. "English are very big on the arts, and they always have been. Every little community has a little theater and they have maybe several dance studios."
Her vocal coach had also worked with Betty Hutton, an American actress who appeared in such films as "Annie Get Your Gun" and "The Miracle of Morgan's Creek" during the 1940s and '50s.
Marcia recalls attending an audition along with several hundred people in an old, grimy theater in London. It was like a cattle call, she remembered.
After she sang, she was asked - by someone in the dark audience - her name and where she was from.
"Here's where I made my mistake. I said, 'I'm from Texas,'" Marcia recalled, mimicking a dramatic East Texas drawl. "They said, 'What?'"
They thought she was Canadian. She didn't have a work permit, which ultimately proved to be a problem.
Her family returned to the States - in the summer. "It was hotter than Hades here in July, I remember that because I had been living in the colder climate of England and I had to get accustomed to it," she said.
Her girlfriends took her on a drive around town. While cruising she ran into her old boyfriend. They saw a movie that night. By September, she was married.
"That pretty well took care of my career at that point," she said.
While married and raising children, Marcia did theater when the time and situation allowed. Combining child rearing and theater was tough.
"I tried to do mostly around the Shreveport area because there was nothing in East Texas, I mean there was nothing here," she said.
"Eventually that all kind of evolved into just being a singer."
She joined a combo group that played gigs at venues like the Officers Club at Barksdale Air Force Base in Bossier City - standard, contemporary songs and a bit of jazz.
"Really, my voice is more suited to musical comedy. I'm a lyric soprano," Marcia said. They played dances. She enjoyed doing it, and then had an opportunity to perform the lead in a musical in Dallas.
Returning to Marshall, she kept singing and organized a small theater, doing plays and musicals, going from venue to venue.
"That kind of satisfied me to a degree," she said. "I knew I wasn't going to go anywhere by sticking around East Texas. You just can't make it that way. I learned to enjoy what I had right then."
She stayed in Marshall for roughly two-and-a-half decades before her mother's entreaties lured her back to Jefferson, where she ultimately lived in a building - two stories, a wrought iron balcony in a New Orleans style - that had been in their family since the 1920s.
"I just needed to do it at some point," Marcia said. "I just thought, 'Why don't I do my own theater right here?' I turned my downstairs living room into my living room theater. And I opened with 'The Belle of Amherst.'"
That play is based on Emily Dickinson's life as a monologue that includes Dickinson poems. A local ladies' club was invited to attend the opening night to gauge interest, but four inches of snow fell.
"All the ladies called me at the house and they said, 'Are you still going to have your show tonight?' I said, 'Yes, ma'am, I certainly am and my husband will come get you.' So he did," Marcia said.
By the late 1980s, she was asked to organize a community theater, and Marcia the first show in July 1989, "Hello, Dolly." Thus, Jefferson's Opera House Theatre Players was born.
"Our little group has done practically all of the great big musical classics," she said. "We've done them all really.
"If you can do a production of 'Showboat,' you know you must have something. You're doing something right."
Marcia said she has enjoyed bringing theater to Jefferson. And she intends to keep on doing it.
"The whole thing is rewarding to me," she said. "It's rewarding to me personally because I love it. It gives me an opportunity to introduce other people to theater, and I honestly believe that young people, especially, need this in their lives. They need the arts in their lives. There's so much realism and so much stress, and it's been getting worse and worse the last 40 years or more."
Nothing beats a good theater performance, she said. "It transports the mind to another place. It opens up so many things in your psyche. A lifelong learning education is what it is. It's been a great opportunity to me."