I was sitting in history class and this cute girl said, “Hey Mark, you should join theater.” I said, “Nah, I’m all right.” My history teacher was also the drama director. She overheard and said, “Yeah, Mark, you should join theater.”
So I drug my best friend along to the read-through that night. The show was Damn Yankees. I remember thinking, definitely not for me. With my dyslexia I couldn’t read the script very well, and memorizing was hard. I said, “I’m out.”
She overheard that too. “Mark, we don’t have anybody who knows how to run that soundboard. I’ll check you out of class for a week if you’ll go figure it out.”
“You’ll check me out for a week?”
“Yeah.”
“Sweet, sign me up.”
I played with all the knobs and did things I shouldn’t have done. I wish I’d had a fraction of what I know now. But I mixed Damn Yankees, and I fell in love with sound.
I’d run a few small shows at the junior high around 1997 with cassette tapes, but that week is how I really got started.
The Night I Ran Sound and Played the Preacher
Another year we did Twelfth Night, set in a 70s shopping mall. My director had to kick someone out of the play. She came to me and said, “Mark, you know the play better than anyone else. You’re going to play the preacher.”
I said, “How am I supposed to do that and still run sound?”
She said, “You’re smart. You’ll figure it out.”
So I played him like the priest in The Princess Bride. I found a flask and hid it in my pocket. When my lines were done I started sipping from it, snuck out through the women’s lingerie department, and ran back to the board to keep running the show.
My teacher was so upset with me. She said, “I told you to get off stage, not steal the show.”
Where It Went From There
After high school I mixed the Lehi City orchestras, symphonies and choirs, and ran Arts in the Park for Lehi for many years until I moved away. I registered SwissMixx Audio in 2005 and made it my full-time job in 2017.
I still do school and community theater. If your show needs body mics and someone at the board who knows the play as well as the cast does, that’s still me.
