How I Got My Equity Card

The moment I received my Equity Card, I felt like I was finally a professional stage manager. That’s not to say I hadn’t worked on well over a hundred productions previously in various capacities, but once I was given the opportunity to join the union I knew that it was a very special validation that could not be taken away. At that point in my career, joining the union was the right decision for me, and I was thrilled to do so on a TYA contract. The show had numerous challenges including a double cast of children, animals, magic tricks and up to 15 shows a week, but it was worth it to achieve my dream of joining Actors’ Equity.

I got my precious Equity card in 1954 in Sandhog, a folk-opera, which played a theatre at 12th Street and Second Avenue (now a multiplex) in New York City. It was five blocks away from Manhattan General (now a condominium: The Rutherford) where I was born. A "Red-by-Association" ("Commie Show Opens at Phoenix!"), I joined an extraordinary multi-ethnic interracial cast and became a member of Equity.

My grandfather Bruno Stello was a coal miner before there was a union. He worked on his hands and knees 14 hours a day, seven days a week for $12

My first job ever was in 1960, a $16 week (non-union local jobber) in Song of Norway, which was at a small professional theatre in Milwaukee called The Fred Miller Theatre [now the Miramar Theatre].

An Equity card was worth its weight in gold to an actor in the early 1960s, as it still is today.

I was about 21 years old and was appearing as Kim Carter on the television series Here’s Lucy.

I got my Equity card in March 2011, by booking a production of Forever Plaid at the Arrow Rock Lyceum Theatre in Arrow Rock, Missouri.

The year I graduated high school I apprenticed in summer stock at Guy Little, Jr.’s, Little Theatre on the Square in Sullivan, Illinois. I acted, painted floors, sang, built scenery, danced and cleaned toilets.

I got my Equity card in a “Six-Degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon” way.

I was a Polish kid who grew up in the back of our family tavern, Airway Liquors, on the southwest side of Chicago. I played a lot of baseball and hung out with the guys in the neighborhood. I was attending an all-boys high school, St. Laurence, when a few of my friends told me that guys were needed for a production of Carousel at Lourdes, the all-girls high school.