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Today's Featured Biography
Joseph Wilkins
Before logging onto this class website, my years at BHS were just a faintly glowing ember at the very back of my memory. I don’t believe I could have identified our school mascot if pressed. I would have guessed either a Minuteman or a meatball sub. Anyway, perusing the photos and bios caused a torrent of memories to come rushing back into my aging cranium…not all good, but all distant enough to be amusing. After graduating from BHS, I went to U. Mass, Amherst where I majored in something-or-other and graduated in 1971. It’s amazing that I was able to graduate at all, since I spent all my time in the theatre rehearsing and performing plays. I was often in competition for roles with Richare Gere who was there the same time I was. I didn’t bother with grad school because I wanted to pursue an acting career, and I thought there was no time like the present. I moved to Boston where I immediately got cast in a play at The Theatre Company of Boston starring Al Pacino and some of his Actors’ Studio cronies. I thought, man, this is going to be easy! After that production closed, I hooked up with a young repertory company called The Boston Repertory Theatre. Our mainstay production was a stage version of The Little Prince which we kept in our repertoire until the company finally disbanded seven years later. I also, did a couple of shows with the Charles Playhouse Company, and did the usual commercials and the like. I was in the original cast of Shear Madness, which is still running twenty-seven years later at the Charles Playhouse Cabaret. Armed with my union cards, I moved to New York in 1979 vowing to give the Apple a shot for a couple of years. That couple of years became almost a decade, when I finally decided that the light at the end of the tunnel wasn’t getting any closer, and I was getting rather tired of living like a student. My (then) wife, (now ex) and I actually went city shopping, and since one of our unalterable criteria for our next place to live was warmer weather than New York or Boston, we settled on Atlanta. Man, was I surprised to find that Atlanta had a booming film and television industry that was thirsty for experienced actors! For the first few years we lived here, I worked in all of the TV series that came into town and many of the films and commercials. I even won a speaking part in a film that ultimately won an academy award. Ironically, I found myself auditioning in Atlanta for the same casting directors who wouldn’t spit on me in New York. As luck would have it, economic factors caused the film and TV business to leave Atlanta for cheaper locations like Canada and North Carolina. By that time, however, I was pretty content with living in the South and started selling real estate, a profession that allowed me to have flexible enough hours to pursue my acting work as well. I have just recently retired from the real estate business after almost twenty years with the same small company whose office is within walking distance of my house. My significant other, Candace, is the chair of the French Department at Emory University, and I have never met anybody with whom I am so compatible. We were born three weeks apart, and she was class of 1967 in Panama City, Florida. We actually attended her 40th reunion this summer (2007)and were shocked to find all of these old people masquerading as her former classmates! We lived in Paris for a year when she was the head of a study abroad program, and through an almost superhuman effort, I managed to hammer the French language into my fifty-something gray cells. Now, I am in the habit of reading the French newspapers every morning on the internet.
Yes, that is me playing the lawyer in the Coke Zero commercial. How else is somebody who doesn't sing a note going to get on American Idol?
Candy just learned (2009) that she has the job with the study abroad program in Paris again, so I guess I lied when I told people that living in Paris with someone you love was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I guess it's at least a twice-in-a-lifetime opportunity! We are currently in the process of finding an apartment in Paris and taking care of the mountain of details involved in going abroad for an extended period of time. It can be quite stressful getting ready for a move like this, but ultimately it's worth the hassel....and I can't think of a better way to ride out at least one year of this ghastly recession.
3/12/09 Quick update. We found an apartment in Paris through a friend who has duel citizenship and who is currently living in France. Her cousin has been trying to sell the apartment, but they are having a real estate slowdown in Paris also, so she decided to rent it to us for a year in hopes that the market will rebound. It is on la rue des Blancs-Manteaux right in the heart of le Marais within easy walking distance of le Centre Pompidou in one direction and l'ile de la Cite in the other. There's even a song about this little street called (what else) "Sur la rue des Blancs-Manteaux". You can find it online by doing a quick Google search. The song is even referenced in the Play No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre. It has a catchy tune but, if you delve into the lyrics, you will find that it is far from a love song.
It has been a long time since I have visited this site. Our year in Paris was not exactly what we expected. My dear Candy was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer in December of 2009. We were surprised to say the least, since she was a non-smoker, a dedicated fitness athlete and followed an extremely healthy diet. She decided to remain in France with the study-abroad program and receive treatment in the excellent French Universal Health Care System. It makes the non-system we have in the US look positively laughable. Since Candy was being paid by her US university, she was not covered under the French system, but even so, the many, many treatments she had to undergo while in France averaged between a third and a tent of what the same treatments cost in the US. That is, of course, because in the US, providers have to adjust for all of the uninsured individuals. How conservatives have managed to make health care into a moral issue is beyond me. Anyway, they managed her cancer quite well for the rest of our year in France, and although no one ever hinted that her disease was curable, there was no sign that it had spread. Between sessions of chemotherapy, we traveled as much as we could to many exotic locations--Rome, Naples, Pompeii, Herculaneum, Prague, and many regions of France including Burgundy, the Loire Valley, and the Bergerac Region.
Upon our return, Candy continued her treatment at the Winship Cancer Center of Emory University Hospital and we continued to travel whenever possible. We went to Montreal and Las Vegas, and took many shorter trips to the nearby mountains and shores. We took a very short trip down to the Decatur, Georgia City Hall to get married on the 14th of October. But as these things go, there came a time when Candy's cancer began to elude the most sophisticate treatments, and man, did it spread fast! She died on October 31, 2011 at the age of 61. She had competed in a 5K open water swim in a nearby reservoir three months earlier. She died just as she had wished, at home in her house on Merry Lane in Atlanta surrounded by family and friends, and with her two beautiful cats, Helena and Tiny curled at her feet. She was quite simply the best thing that ever happened to me.
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