Excerpts from….
A warm welcome: Ushering people into the Garde for two decades
August 31, 2024 3:47 pm • Last Updated: September 02, 2024 1:11 am
By Kristina Dorsey, Features Editor
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When she was a teen, Ellie Engdall — who grew up in Hartford but spent summers with her family in Waterford — and a friend used to grab a bus ride into New London to catch a film at the Garde movie palace.
That was her introduction to the spot that, decades later, would become the Garde Arts Center, hosting a wide range of performances.
Engdall, 86, has become much more familiar with the Garde over the past two decades — as one of the venue’s dedicated ushers.
She is one of the cadre of volunteer ushers who cheerfully greet Garde patrons as they trundle into the auditorium and who guide theatergoers to their seats.
If people sit in the orchestra left section, they know Engdall. That’s her section.
Engdall, a Waterford resident, said ushering is work, but it’s also personally rewarding.
“I’m a people person, and people come back. We see them and we talk to them. … The fun thing is to be with people and see people happy,” she said.
The ushers chat with patrons who might otherwise not have a lot of folks to talk to, she said. They help people who, say, are in a wheelchair or need help getting to the bathroom.
“That’s our job ― not only just seating them; it’s more or less loving them,” Engdall said.
She sees a lot of the same people return over time.
“It’s like going to church ― you sit in the same seats, if you can get the same seats. And then (as an usher) you go, ‘Oh, how are you? How are you doing?’” she said.
While she “always had a love for the Garde” going back to those teen years, Engdall began ushering there after she heard a friend was doing it, and Engdall thought she’d give it a try.
Engdall said, “The shows are wonderful. People don’t realize what we have here.”
Jennifer Zembruski, the Garde’s managing director, said Engdall and other volunteers are invaluable for institutions like the Garde.
And it’s not out of the ordinary for people to have volunteered at the Garde for as long as Engdall has.
“It’s wonderful, and I think it’s generational,” Zembruski said. “When we’re running between 80 and 100 shows (a year), that’s a lot of volunteer hours,” she said, noting that that total doesn’t include the movie series, Summer on Stage, and community rentals.
The Garde asks the volunteers to arrive an hour and a half before the show starts so they can scan tickets, help people to their seats, and so on, and also asks them to stay to the end, so they can thank people for coming and help make sure theatergoers have all their items with them when they leave.
Engdall and her husband, Bill, moved to their Waterford home 50 years ago. He was in the Navy for 22 years and was part of the first crew of the Nautilus, the world’s first nuclear-powered submarine. They have five grown children.
Engdall returned to ushering at the Garde as quickly as she could after she “crushed” bones in her hip last autumn. Her doctors said it was like a puzzle they had to put together.
Engdall was gardening in her yard and was pushing a post into the ground, not realizing there was a sheet of heavy plastic underneath. The rebound sent her falling onto the driveway. She thought she just had a minor injury, but 51 days later, she fell “out of the blue” in her kitchen. That’s when she learned from doctors the extent of her earlier injury.
Engdall is not someone who sits still or stays home, though. By the spring, she was back at the Garde.
Zembruski spoke about Engdall’s enthusiastic return to the Garde after her injury.
“Her strength and resilience, her dedication to the institution and the community is second nature to her,” Zembruski said. “There’s no hiccup. She just keeps on going, and she perseveres. She is the essence of, I think, this New London community pride.”