Marin Women's Hall of Fame

Margie Belrose






 by Marilyn L.Geary,
In conjunction with the Writer's Center of Marin
Based on autobiographical writings by Margie Belrose

    Fortune frowned on Margie Belrose’s childhood.  Without parents able to care for her, she was shunted in and out of orphanages and foster homes.  Despite her chaotic childhood, Margie grew up to share a steady stream of joy in dance and the theatre with thousands of people in the Marin community.  Through persistence, determination, energy and talent, Margie overcame a troubled childhood, the sudden death of her partner and husband, and staggering financial struggles to make her childhood dreams a reality. 

    Even as a very small child, Margie had always known she would be a dancer.  In fact, Margie dances in one of her earliest memories.  “I must have been very small, and I was on a little hill,” Margie recalls, “and I remember twirling around and around, singing, ‘I’m going to be a dancer.’  ” Margie doesn’t know where she got this idea.  She doesn’t even remember where she first heard the word ‘dancer,’ but she held on tight to this dream throughout her stormy childhood. 

    Margie was born in New Jersey to a couple that was much too young to have children.  She barely knew her parents.  She lived with her mother for a total of about three months out of her life. She spent about one and a half years with her father in various times throughout her childhood.  In sudden spurts, he charged in and out, mostly out, of her life.

    When Margie was one year old, her mother abandoned her and her sister.  The little girls were put in an orphanage in Detroit for a few years, and then lived another several years in an orphanage in Saginaw, Michigan.  When Margie was about ten years old, her father unexpectedly appeared one day at the orphanage to pick up his daughters.  Then for the first time in their lives, Margie and her sister lived with their father.  This living arrangement, in Huntington, West Virginia, lasted a few brief months.

    The girls were then taken to their father’s sister in Elizabeth, New Jersey.  The two girls lived there with their Aunt Mary, a kindly, little Greek lady, for about a year.  One day Margie and her sister were told that their mother was not dead, as they had thought, but that she was actually alive.  Margie’s sister went to live with their mother, while Margie stayed with their aunt.  Soon Margie’s mother could not handle Margie’s sister and sent the girl back to their aunt and then immediately to their father.

     Margie’s stay with her aunt’s family brought her closer to her goals of becoming a dancer.  Margie’s cousin had a dance school in Elizabeth, and Margie began to take dance classes there.  She loved to dance, to twirl and sway to the rhythms of all kinds of music.  When she was ten or eleven years old, Margie performed at her first dance recital. She recalls being all dressed up in a colorful conga costume for the recital.  Suddenly her father appeared from out of nowhere and began to slap her silly.  Surprised and shocked, Margie didn’t know why her father was hurting her.  She didn’t understand that as a Greek Orthdox priest from the Old Country, her father thought that it was sinful for a girl to dance.  He thought that if a young girl danced, it meant that she wanted to be in a boy’s arms.  Despite this jolt of pain and confusion, Margie let nothing discourage her. She knew she would always dance.  As quickly as he had appeared, her father vanished, as he always did. Margie went on with the recital and continued with her dancing lessons.

    Suddenly one day Margie’s father, her sister in tow, appeared again at her aunt’s house and simply took her away.  Margie recalls that it was almost like a kidnapping.  She found it hard to understand why her father came for her, because he never wanted to take care of them.  Nevertheless, he showed up unexpectedly from time to time during their childhood and took the girls away, without explanation, from whatever stability they had managed to find in their makeshift foster homes.

    This time, the girls and their father ended up in Johnstown, New York for a few months.  Then their father took them to Ely, Nevada.  Margie recalls that they were in Nevada for at least a school year, because she graduated from eighth grade there.  Then once again, their father suddenly packed them up and loaded them onto a Greyhound Bus headed for Sacramento.  Tired and bedraggled, they arrived late at night in Lodi, California.  For some reason their father had them stay put in Lodi instead of going on to Sacramento. Margie and her sister started school, and Margie resumed dance lessons with whatever money she could get.  Back then, dance lessons cost about 50¢ a lesson.

    Sometime into Margie’s freshman year in high school, her father announced that he would be going away and that he would be back in a few weeks.  As the days passed, the girls’ patience turned to fear and wonder.  Their father never did come back.  Finally, Margie and her sister realized that they’d been abandoned in a rooming house in Lodi with no money and no grownups to care for them. Margie’s memory reveals only dim fragments of this dilemma.  She is not sure to this day where they ate.  They had a few friends, and she thinks that these friends must have taken care of them.

    Margie’s father was an ordained priest from a family of Greek Orthodox priests who had ministered to their villagers in Greece for over five hundred years.  Her father was also a chef, a writer, a brilliant man, a neurotic, an alcoholic, and a Greek teacher.  He was a very frustrated and unhappy man. He was never a father.  After he left Lodi, Margie saw her father only two more times in her life, and these visits lasted just ten or fifteen minutes each.  Her father eventually returned to his native Greece, where he died, far from his family in America.

   Despite harsh treatment, Margie never became hardened or bitter about life.  She ended up in many frightening places, in orphanages and in foster homes, where she didn’t know the rules and where she was dependent on strangers for her well being.  She was very vulnerable, and she was often scared.  She learned to observe others carefully, to watch, to look, and then to make judgments.  To ease her fears, she constantly told herself, “This is going to be OK.  What can I do to make it OK?”

   “I figured out early in life that if I sat up very straight and did a lot of smiling, nobody was going to hurt me.  That wasn’t always true, but it held in good stead for me,” Margie recalls.  This kind of positive thinking and behavior helped Margie get by in scary, strange situations.  Margie also figures that her small size helped her, since people tended not to bother with a fragile, little girl.  She was never beaten severely, and her heart did not toughen.  Yet she was nearly always scared, never knowing what the next day would bring.

    Margie’s smiles, her optimism and her determination to see things through helped her survive the chaos of her childhood.  As an adult, Margie realized that she was actually fortunate that her parents did not raise her.  They didn’t know how to be good parents.  The orphanages were not good substitutes for loving parents, but Margie met a few people along the way that gave her a bit of love and encouragement.

    Surrounded by discouraging circumstances, Margie found strength and kindness where she could.  The first real affection she experienced was from a nun, whose encouragement sustained Margie for many years. The nun simply patted Margie on the head and let her lead the rhythm band.  That tiny bit of acknowledgement brightened Margie’s heart and kept her spirits strong. Margie’s Aunt Mary gave her care and affection for the brief year Margie lived with her.  Margie recalls with warmth the love she felt when her aunt took her in her arms and hugged her close to her short, buxom body.  Margie’s foster mother, Marcene, was another positive influence in Margie’s life.

    After the girls’ father abandoned them in Lodi, Margie’s sister moved in with a family to work.  She took care of the children, cooked, and cleaned house while going to school.  She was miserable, and she eventually quit high school to work in a restaurant.  Then she got a job at the phone company.  She married very early, several times, and had two children, both boys.

   Margie also went to work to earn her living and to pay the back rent.  She packed grapes, plums, peaches and culled almonds from the fertile orchards of the San Joaquin Valley.  Then she too went to work for a family.  The kids in this family were very active in dance, which boosted Margie’s goal to become a dancer.  She was able to take dance classes every week.

   After a while, another family took Margie in. Although Margie was not adopted in a legal sense, she felt she finally had something like a real family.  For the first time, she had a mother, father, sisters, brothers, and a grandmother.  She was very grateful to have people she could call 'my folks.’  Her foster mother, Marcene showed her love and encouragement.  While working for this family, Margie made enough money as a waitress in the summer to pay for dance classes and costumes.

   Throughout high school, dance was the only thing that mattered to Margie.  It was her sole focus, and she was very serious about her goal.  She kept scrapbooks on dancers and read every book she could about dance.  At the movie theatre, she savored every MGM musical ever made, and she lived for the next one to arrive at the theatre.  As she watched Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers glide smoothly across the screen, she told herself, “I can do that.”  She was convinced she would be up there on stage and screen herself one day.  She held that dream, that wish, that possibility, in her heart from her earliest memory.

   Margie didn’t let her high school friends draw her into the usual teenage activities.  She kept her focus on dance and sped right from school to dance practice.  In her high school yearbook, Margie’s schoolmates predicted that she would become a burlesque dancer in some far-flung foreign cabaret. It was clear to all that Margie had set her sights far beyond a little cottage with a white picket fence.

    After graduating from high school, Margie drove from the Santa Cruz area to San Francisco every week for a private dancing lesson.  Marcene encouraged Margie to move to San Francisco to seriously pursue a dance career.  When Margie moved to San Francisco, she set herself a goal. She gave herself four years to become a dance teacher.

    Margie decided to be a teacher because she often had been told that she was too short to be a performer.  She now knows this was terrible advice and not always true, but she took it to her young heart at the time.  Every night and all day Saturday for four years, Margie studied ballet at the San Francisco Ballet, tap and jazz at the Mason-Kahn Dance Studio and ballroom at the Greg Moore Studio.

    Margie worked as a secretary to pay for her lessons. As always, she put dance first.  She frequently ate crackers and jam for lunch to stay within her tight budget and pinched pennies when the Muni raised the bus fare by a nickel. Independent and resourceful, Margie learned to juggle priorities to keep her dream of dance alive.  While she was studying ballroom dance, Margie met David Belrose, who became her private dancing teacher.  He was also a San Francisco State psychology student.  A few years after falling in love, Margie and David married.

    Romance and marriage did not divert Margie from her goal.  In 1954, when her four years of training and preparation were up, Margie was ready.  She announced to David that it was time for them to open a dance school.  She only wanted a little place, with enough pupils to earn a living.  The question was where should she build this little place of her dreams?

    Although Margie and David had been living in San Francisco, they didn’t want to stay there.  Since David also came from an orphaned background, neither of them had real roots.  They decided they could move anywhere.  After doing a lot of research in the yellow pages and newspapers on suitable places for their new business, they took a drive as far south as Monterey, looking for the perfect place for a dance studio.  No luck.  They decided to search across the Golden Gate Bridge and traveled as far north as Santa Rosa, then turned back and drove down Fourth Street into Fairfax.  No luck.  Then they turned around again and stopped in San Rafael, which back then was a small, quiet town.  They both loved the feel of the town and agreed, “This is it!”

    Neither of them had any practical experience in running a business, but they saw a small room in the Pierce Building for rent.  When Mr. Pierce told them that the rent was $140 a month, Margie told Mr. Pierce that they could handle that, but that they had no other money for a security deposit and the last month’s rent.  Mr. Pierce liked them, and he gave the eager, young couple a chance.  But he warned them, “If there’s any complaints about noise, you’re out!”

   So warned, Margie and David rented the place for their business. There in the Pierce Building, they founded the Belrose Dance Studio, now known as the Belrose Performing Arts Center.  Margie went around to all the neighbors to make sure they weren’t bothered by the music.  One neighbor said she didn’t mind the music, but she couldn’t stand the incessant banging of the cane on the floor.  At that time, most dance teachers used a cane to keep rhythm and emphasize movements.  On hearing the neighbor’s complaint, Margie gave up the cane at that very moment and never used one again.  Freed from clutching a cane during lessons, Margie found that her teaching actually improved without it.

     Margie and David gave classes in the Pierce Building for three years.  Their son Davy was born while they were there.  In 1958, they moved to a place on G Street.  It was very small, but it worked for that year, because their daughter Dea was born.  In the Fifties, it wasn’t usual for mothers to have businesses.  Margie was a pioneer, and like many young mothers of today, she found creative ways to nurture her young children while keeping her fledgling enterprise going.

    At this time, David considered returning to school, where he had been a psychology major, but his heart really wasn't in it.  He and Margie focused on making the studio work.  They rented a place on the Miracle Mile, the site of today’s Macdonald’s Hamburgers.  The young couple lived there with their two children and taught classes there too.  Business was good and in six months, they outgrew the place.  Since they had a three-year lease, they had to stay and make the best of their cramped quarters.

    In 1962, they decided they needed a place with a stage so they could teach drama and produce plays.  David saw an ad in the Marin Independent Journal which read something like: warehouse for rent in the Bret Harte area, $119 a month.  David found it curious that the rent was for the odd amount of $119 and not an even $120 or $115.  To satisfy his curiosity, he called George Steinert, the real estate agent who had placed the ad, to make an appointment for him and Margie to see the place.  It really was a big warehouse, and they could not convert it to a theatre with their limited funds. The couple resolved to continue their search.

    Weeks prior, Margie had noticed that a stucco church building on Fifth Avenue, the Trinity Lutheran Church, was being vacated.  She had mentioned it to David, but he wasn’t much interested in an old church building.  Still, Margie couldn't get the place out of her mind.

   The day after showing David and Margie the warehouse, Mr. Steinert called and said he knew of the perfect place for their studio.  As they drove through the alley toward the stucco building, Margie asked, “You don't mean this old church?”  Sure enough, he did.  When they walked in, they saw that all the pews, the altar and the pulpit were still there.  Margie thought she had died and gone to heaven.  When Mr. Steinert showed them the apartment in the back, Margie was sure life was getting too good.  Then he showed them the downstairs area.  Margie was swept away by the potential and the possibilities of this wonderful space.

    On their tour of the church with Mr. Steinert, Margie left a side door unlocked. She wanted to come back later and really get the feel of the place.  That night she called a lawyer friend named Sol Abrams, whose children she and David had taught for years.  Although it was nine o’clock at night, Margie asked Sol to come right away.  Sol lived in Ross, but he came quickly anyway.  Margie brought him to the church and walked him through the building.  All the while, she talked excitedly, non-stop.  This vacant church building was the place of her dreams.

    Sol met Margie and David for lunch the next day. Margie looked Sol right in the eyes and said “Sol, that building belongs to The Belrose.  It is right for us.  You have to help us get it.”

    Sol said, “Well if I have to, I guess I will,” and he lent them the down payment.

     Margie will never forget Sol’s generosity.  “If it wasn't for Sol and his generous spirit and belief in the two of us,” Margie comments, “well, life certainly would have been different.  I will forever be grateful to him for seeing beyond the reality of us at the time.”

    Margie and David purchased the church building for $37,000.  They had to make many changes to meet the building codes, so the actual mortgage price came to $55,000.  They had a $500 a month payment, and in 1962 that seemed like a fortune.  Their children were three and five years of age. They had a family to support, and making a living in the performing arts was not easy.  But Margie was very practical. While David sometimes found it difficult to zero in on what he wanted to do in life, Margie had always been clear on her goals.  She was determined by everything in her to make the theatrical school work and to keep her family together no matter what.

    The move to the church building marked the beginning of the heyday at the Belrose.  Students of all ages, from three-year-olds to 70 year olds, took tap dance, ballet, jazz and acting lessons.  Every day, Margie taught in the mornings and then from half past two in the afternoon to nine o’clock at night.  The classes reflected Margie’s energy and determination.  David wrote an original show each year, and Margie encouraged performers from the community to participate in all facets of the theatrical productions. Margie’s dream was becoming real.

    Then on October 15, 1971, in the middle of the night, without warning, David suffered a massive heart attack.  His death was shockingly sudden.  He was forty-five years old.  Margie was left with two small children to raise and a business to run on her own.  Since she and David had been total partners, Margie never asked the question 'What do I do now?' about the business.  She knew where to find the important business documents, the bank statements, the insurance policies and the invoices.

    But David’s death left a big empty hole in the family’s personal lives.  Margie’s children were young.  Dea was eleven years old, and David was thirteen years old.  They had all been cuddling under the cozy blanket of a close-knit family. Now there was no David.  What would happen?  Could they survive on their own?  Margie called a family meeting.  She and her children decided to keep on with the Belrose.  No matter what the setbacks, they resolved to make it a go.

    David’s death devastated the family, but it was also an enormous loss for the school and theatre.  Without a writer like David, Margie wondered how she could succeed.  In place of original works, she decided to do 'royalty plays,’ plays written by other playwrights.  The first was Peter Pan. Later came Oliver, The Wizard of Oz, The Miracle Worker and many others. Writing wasn’t the only gap Margie had to fill.  She had always been the director's assistant to David.  Now she had to do it all.  Margie was forced to broaden her horizons.  She was forced into going 'beyond herself' in countless ways.  “I often wonder what I, personally, would have turned out like if David were still here,” Margie comments.  “I don't think I would have found the ‘me’ that I have and am still finding.”

     Margie often tells her students that it takes being in the right place, at the right time, with the right people, along with talent to achieve success in the theatre. When Rodney Sheriff came into Margie’s life in 1975, it was the right time and place for both these very talented people.  A comedian and actor, Rodney Sheriff had performed at the Punch Line, the Holy City Zoo, the Other Cafe, and had been a member, (along with Robin Williams), of Papaya Juice, an improv comedy group.  One day Rodney came to see the play Peter Pan at a Sunday matinee.  He returned the very next day to learn more about the Belrose. Rodney has been an essential contributor to the Belrose ever since, as set designer, set builder, lighting director, actor, technical director, teacher, writer and artistic director.  Margie credits Rodney for his enormous contributions, saying, “Whatever we have done here production-wise could not have been possible without the talents of Rodney.”

     At first Rodney lived in an apartment Margie had available in the building.  When the apartment was taken over by the costume shop expansion, Margie created two rooms for Rodney in another part of the building.  They shared kitchen and bath.  More importantly, they shared a passion for theatre and the determination to make the Belrose a continuing success.

    Margie’s son Davy and daughter Dea had a very difficult time adjusting to David's death.  It took them both over a decade to reconcile with it.  When Davy said he wanted to open a shop for the theatre, Margie wanted to somehow compensate Davy for his loss, so she arranged to buy him a house and inventory for the shop.  She had just paid off the ex-church building in full.

    After a while, David discovered that the dream shop he had in mind just would not make it in Marin, at least in his location, so he moved the shop to the ground floor of the Belrose Theatre.  Then one day he announced that what he 'really' wanted to do was to open a comedy club.  He had a partner whom he had known for a long time, and they found a location for their comedy club in the Flatiron Building on Second and B Streets.  It seemed perfect. Margie took out three mortgages to finance the whole thing. Margie put in over $150,000.  The other partner put in $25,000.

    For the first year, the club seemed to be a success. But through an unfortunate set of circumstances and bad timing, business fell off, and the Flatiron eventually went under.  Now Margie was faced with three mortgage payments a month.  The Belrose Theatre simply could not handle such an enormous amount of debt.

     Ever the optimist, Margie scrambled for ways to make things work.  It wasn’t long before she figured, “Well, my nights are free.”  She got a job at Zim’s Coffee Shop, waitressing from 10 o’clock at night to 3 o’clock in the morning.  At the same time, she got a job at the Marin Golf and Country Club, banquet waitressing on Saturdays and Sundays.  She juggled her schedule to work two waitress jobs at night while keeping her school going during the day.  The work hours were very hard on her, particularly since she was teaching during the day at the Belrose.  But even with working all these hours, Margie couldn't quite make the mortgage payments.

    By a twist of fate, by knowing the right people, and by being in the right place, Margie purchased a house cleaning business.  Rodney joined her, as he too needed to earn a living.  At the same time, Margie also got a job cleaning banks and offices at night.  Margie’s daily schedule went something like this: she cleaned houses (sometimes as many as four a day) at half past seven in the morning to maybe two o’clock in the afternoon; then she rushed back to the studio, cleaned up, and taught dance from 3 o’clock in the afternoon to six o’clock in the evening; then she cleaned banks until ten or eleven o’clock at night, charged back home, ate, soaked in the tub, and fell into bed to start the same thing over the next day.  Margie trudged incessantly on this treadmill of a schedule five days a week.  Some of the offices she even cleaned seven days a week.

     Over a six-year period, Margie paid back all the money, a sum well over $200,000.  The costume shop, the productions, and the school all contributed to this mammoth payoff.  Margie’s son and daughter did their part too.  David worked in the costume shop.  Margie’s daughter came home from Los Angeles where she had graduated from UCLA with a Theatre Arts major, and she worked for over a year to contribute to the family business.  Through total personal sacrifice, Margie got herself out of debt while keeping her Belrose Performing Arts Center operating.

    Margie’s hard work has paid off, both for her family and for the Marin community. The Belrose is a community theater with open auditions available to everyone. Most of the Belrose actors are community members.  Throughout the years, the Belrose has produced a wide assortment of quality productions, including Oliver, The Wizard of Oz, Peter Pan, and The Lion in Winter.  It has presented many original productions as well, including An Evening in Casablanca and Miss Sally’s Barbary Coast Review. In 1986-87, its production Hello Marin, Hello, which spoofed Marin’s past, ran a record-breaking thirteen months. Margie played the ghost of Sally Stanford, the ex-madam who became Sausalito’s colorful mayor.  This hit was followed by A Marin Summer Night’s Dream, which continued the saga of yuppies Muffie and Brad in present-day upscale Marin.

    With the huge success of her productions, Margie’s friends urged her to take her plays to larger venues like the Marin Center, where larger audiences could see them.  The Belrose Theatre comfortably fits relatively small audiences of seventy-two people.  But Margie prefers her little theatre, saying, “I’m not interested in bigness.  I love the intimacy of this place. I love the fact that we can do the same show over and over, and learn something new every time.  I used to perform at halftime at basketball games at the Cow Palace.  It was no fun at all. You couldn’t see the faces.  You never came close.”

    Over the decades, the Belrose Center for the Performing Arts has grown and changed with the times.  In 1978, the Belrose Theatre was designated a historical building, and every summer since 1978, Margie has held the Belrose Musical Summer Camp.  Under her direction, the Belrose Jr. Players, a group of children 8 to 15 years old, have acted in numerous productions throughout the years.  Margie’s goal has been to teach the performing arts while slipping in values that could serve her students well throughout life.  “We make a real effort to make things comfortable.  We teach the students that there’s nothing to be afraid of, here, on stage, or out in the world.  We help them handle their anxieties,” Margie explains, “and we teach them respect.”

    Margie warmly recalls a particular day in the costume shop, when a young lady was about to leave after picking out a rental costume.  The girl hesitated at the door, turned around and told Margie, “You don’t remember me, but I took lessons at the Belrose when I was a little kid.  I want to thank you.  Because of those experiences, I have confidence now, and I’m not afraid to try new things sometimes.”  Astounded, Margie felt tears well up in her eyes in a rush of gratitude.  She thanked the young lady for expressing her appreciation.  Her experience embodied Margie’s life-long goals as a performing arts teacher: to develop talent, to provide encouragement, and to foster confidence through the performing arts.

    In 1981, Margie transformed her business into a non-profit organization.  Over the years, the Belrose Performing Arts Center has offered hundreds of scholarships to aspiring students.  Margie provides these scholarships to anyone financially challenged who has a passion to learn and a desire to perform.

    Since 1977 when the Belrose Costume Shop was started, it has grown into the most complete costume rental shop in Northern California.  It stocks over three thousand unique costumes and provides Renaissance costume rentals for the patrons of the Renaissance Faires in Northern California, Arizona, Colorado and Texas.  Locally it is the place everyone goes for costume needs, for schools, churches, community groups, parties and holidays.

         In the early Nineties, at the insistence of a life-long friend, Davida Wills, Margie began writing her life story as a musical.  Davida had studied with Margie from the age of nine through her college years, and she now heads the performing arts department of a major school in Santa Monica.  It took Margie five years to write her story, a one-woman play called Stuff Happens and Then ...  It was produced once in 1997 and again in February 2000, each for relatively long runs.  It is a play of tears, laughter, song, dance and inspiration.

         In Stuff Happens and Then ..., Margie relives her life on stage, playing the abandoned child, wistful teenage dance student, devastated widow, loving mother, and struggling performing artist and teacher.  Margie found the experience emotionally wrenching as well as cathartic.  At the start of rehearsals, Margie wondered if she could really go through with the performance without totally falling apart.  Into the third rehearsal, she was able to put it all into perspective.  “After all, I am an actress,” she reminded herself, “So of course I can do it, and I will.”  And she went on to play herself in performance after performance to critical acclaim.

         In 1996, Margie was inducted into the Marin Women’s Hall of Fame as an Honoree in the Arts.  Speaking to a large audience of admirers at the awards ceremony, Margie told the group, ”I have asked myself have I done anything so special that any one of you has not done, and that is to have goals, sacrifice, never give up, be honest, know that most difficulties will pass in time, and, as corny as it sounds, follow The Golden Rule.”