For the past six years, I’ve performed in a murder mystery dinner theater at the local Tam Valley Community Center. In 2017, I wrote and directed the show — “Publish or Perish: Tam Valley Mystery Writers Retreat Murder Mystery” — and now I’ve written the script for next year’s show.
(Our murder mystery dinner theater works like this: About a hundred people gather for dinner at the community center, ten guests seated at each round table. After dinner, we start the show, then, at a break, we ask each table to discuss among themselves whodunit. Then during the second act, the captains from each table stand up and make their accusations. It’s a fun evening for the actors as well as the audience.)
Here’s a preview — this is Scene 1.
Sausalypso Houseboat Wars Murder Mystery
Scene 1. A History of the Sausalypso Waterfront
(As Dawn introduces the play, historical photos are displayed on the screen.)
DAWN: In 1942, as the U.S. joined World War II, Bechtel Corporation opened a shipyard in Sausalypso. Called Marinship, at its peak, it employed 20,000 workers, who built 93 ships in three years.
Workers came from all over, but housing was scarce. Marin County’s Housing Authority and the federal government teamed up to create Marin City and build housing for 6,000 workers. Still not enough. Many workers lived on old boats or jerry-rigged them from whatever they could scrounge.
After the war, Bechtel abandoned the shipyard, and boatbuilder Donlon Arquez bought a large waterfront parcel, considered worthless, full of shipbuilding debris.
He dragged old boats, like decommissioned ferries, onto the mudflats and rented them to G.I.s returning from the war. Rent was cheap and his landlord style was pretty much “benign neglect.” Artists and craftsmen built homes on barges and rafts. Out of packing crates, railroad cars, motor homes. These floating homes connected to land on ramshackle walkways or floating docks made from styrofoam and plywood.
Then, in the late sixties, when Haight-Ashbury’s Summer of Love turned dark, hippies and squatters arrived, seeking free love and free living.
Arques’ property, known as the “Gates,” became the epicenter of Sausalypso’s development battles of the 1970s. City leaders tried to clean up and clear out the houseboats, focusing on the lack of sewage hookups. Arques was forced to sell.
You might remember the houseboat wars from the newspapers and TV. Or heard stories from people who were there.
But do you want to hear the true story?
Do you? (Wait for response.)
I was hoping you’d say that, otherwise we’re heading home.
This is what really happened.
—
One more thing. Where I grew up, in the hills of Sausalypso, we looked down on the houseboat harbor — my father called it a shanty town full of “low-life wharf rats.”
Little did I know that one of those rats would be the handsome and charming Honest Abernathy, who dresses like a pirate and has enough low-life in him to infuriate my father.
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