2024 PAGEANT
On behalf of the whole team at VetRep, I’m thrilled to produce and direct this year’s 4th of July Pageant. It’s a real honor - especially considering the rich history of Cornwall and the Hudson Valley as well as the robust pageant traditions that have preceded us in Cornwall.
Anthropologist Clifford Geertz famously said that culture is the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. In that case, what stories we choose to tell and how we choose to tell them are central to who we are. As veterans, we love this country and we love celebrating July 4th. And as theater folk, we love telling stories. So the opportunity to help tell local history in a compelling way is a real pleasure for us.
What can you expect from this year’s pageant? If you’ve seen the pageant before, you’ll probably notice a few changes. Shorter? Definitely. Rather than trying to cover a lot of historical ground, we’re going to focus on one specific story this year. A lot of people have asked us, as a professional theater, if we would ever do any community theater. The answer is yes - this is it! Just click on the link below and let us know how you’d like to help. We can’t wait to laugh, learn and light up the 4th with you!
Christopher Paul Meyer, Artistic Director/Founder, Veterans Repertory Theater"
2022 Pageant Photos
Pageant History
Our annual Cornwall Independence Day celebration started at a Cornwall Parent Teacher Association meeting in April 1950, when the first male PTA president, Dr. David L. Dorfman, called on his wife Dolce, who, at the urging of her mother, Carrie Ettlinger Stern, made a motion to start a Fourth of July celebration in town, to teach children and other residents about their inspiring heritage, partly in response to the McCarthy-Communism concerns of the day, partly for a fun day with a parade and fireworks, which many Cornwallites had never seen before. You can hear them describe the challenges of launching this celebration on an oral history interview from November 9, 1976, through the Cornwall Public Library’s Local History Digital Archieves at https://cdm16694.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/cornpl/id/202/rec/1. The first historic pageant was produced in 1952, with parade floats pulling up to the stage for different scenes at Mayor Donahue's Windon Farm in Cornwall-on-Hudson, and annual revisions up to the Bicentennial Celebration in 1976. When the location moved to Town Hall Park the following year, the pageant got lost in the shuffle, but was revived in 2000 after Sally Faith Dorfman Sirota found an old script compiled by her mother and called Ruthanne Schempf, whose mother Marjorie had the historically-accurate music that she and Dolce Dorfman had selected for each scene. Ruthanne and Sally Faith got things started again, and many, many others have helped to sustain this exciting living history lesson year after year, passing this great Cornwall tradition on from generation to generation.
