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11/15/2017 07:30 AMIf Christmas is coming, so are the elves: Santa’s elves, the Elf on the Shelf, and the tiny crew at the Ivoryton Illuminations elf hunt. Illuminations opens on Saturday, Dec. 2 and runs nightly through Friday, Jan. 5 from 5 to 8 p.m.
Last year at the elf hunt, there was even one small elf figurine hanging from the ceiling of a participating store. And there’s no predicting where children might find a 10-inch elf this year. Not even Donna Lee Gennaro, who organizes the elf hunt for the Ivoryton Illuminations, knows exactly where the tiny figures will be. She writes rhymed clues to direct children to the shops and other venues where elves are hidden but she leaves it up to the individual merchants to conceal them.
The eighth annual Illuminations, one of the major projects of the Ivoryton Alliance, features 400,000 colored lights flashing in sequence to Christmas music. During the first night of festivities, local shops and restaurants will be open; there will be a petting zoo, carol singing, and at 6 p.m., Santa Claus will arrive. He glides gently down from the sky in a sled that some people suspect gets airborne not by the legendary reindeers but by an aerial platform lift courtesy of a local construction company.
This is the second time Donna Lee has organized the elf hunt. It debuted last year as a way to keep youngsters and their families occupied until the arrival of the rotund gentleman in red. For each elf they discover, the children get a sticker to fill up a card. When they complete the card, elf hunters go to iCRV radio where they are greeted by a full-size elf, who reaches into a magic box to give each successful child a certificate from Santa himself.
Donna Lee has only lived in Ivoryton for two years, but she is no stranger to local activities.
“I like to do things involved in community building; things that are fun and don’t cost a lot of money,” she says.
With Cotty Barlow she helped to organize Ivoryton’s annual Fourth of July Parade, and at the Ivoryton Pumpkin Festival in October, Donna Lee led a group of 16 (15 women and one man), dressed as witches in a Halloween frolic that she choreographed. Like a coven of witches, they danced in a circle, with the spooky effect heightened by blocks of dry ice smoking in the center.
The Pumpkin Festival gave Donna Lee the opportunity to use her varied talents: she is the daughter of a professional dancer and was a dancer herself; she has also had experience staging special events, most notably at Rhode Island’s WaterFire, an art installation where more than 80 flaming braziers line the Providence River in an outdoor spectacular staged several times a year.
Still, fire along the river is only one of the spectaculars of Donna Lee’s career; she has been a professional stilt dancer for the now-defunct Redmoon Theater in Chicago, a roller-skating disco dancer, a member of a roller derby squad, and an organizer of Get Gored for Good, a fundraiser for the homeless in Providence Rhode Island. At Get Gored For Good, roller derby skaters with horns on their helmets, pursue runners in a takeoff on the famous running of the bulls in Pamplona.
The stilt dancing started in the 70s when she took her young son Brendan to a theater-based puppet workshop. A stilt dancer did not show up.
“Someone said ‘you’re a dancer; you can walk on stilts.’ I was just sitting around writing Christmas cards,” she recalls.
She started out on tiny stilts that got bigger every week. Though her stilt dancing days are long over, she has a pair of titanium stilts that her husband Michael gave her.
The roller derby skating was equally happenstance. Donna Lee and Michael, who is now the executive director of Goodspeed Musicals, went to a roller derby meet in Providence. Because when she studied dance, she had cut one session a week to take a roller skating class, Donna Lee thought she might give roller derby a try. “I said to Michael ‘I can do that,’” she recalls. “He said ‘no.’”
Still, Donna Lee learned when the tryouts were, practiced on her own and somewhat to her surprise, made the cut. She skated for some six years using the name Hellcat Lucy. Michael also got involved as a referee. Her goal was to be the oldest roller derby skater in the country but a bad ankle injury effectively ended her career in her mid-50s.
In every city where Michael was working, Donna Lee also worked in theater. “But we were never at the same theater,” she says. When he was at the Paper Mill Playhouse in New Jersey, she was at Playwrights Theatre; when he was at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, she was at the Round House Theatre; when he was at Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago, she was at Redmoon.
Donna Lee’s mother, Dee Erickson worked as the principal assistant to Michael’s father, Peter Gennaro, an award-winning theater and television choreographer. Donna Lee recalls meeting Michael briefly when she has nine years old; he was already in college and what she really she remembers his red MGB convertible with the Notre Dame sticker on it.
Much later on, when their parents had come out of retirement to choreograph an Oscar show, someone suggested the two might have a date. It was a good idea. Three weeks later they got engaged.
“Very few people understand what it is like to have parents in a show, on television, but Michael and I did,” she explains of their attraction. “After school if my mother was rehearsing, I would go and sit in the audience. Not many kids growing up in Westchester County had that experience.”
When it came to drawing up a wedding guest list, Donna Lee says it was simple. “We all had the same friends,” she recalls.
Last year Donna Lee had 100 elf hunt cards made up, but the activity proved more popular than she had anticipated and the cards ran out. This year Donna Lee is prepared: she will have 200 clue cards ready to go.
Ivoryton Illuminations is on the Ivoryton Green from Saturday, Dec. 2 from 5 to 8 p.m. The light show is on every night through Friday, Jan. 5, 2018. There is free parking at the Ivoryton Congregational Church, 57 Main Street, and The Copper Beech Inn, 46 Main Street, with a shuttle bus service to the village.