One of my earliest memories starts with an explosion in the wings of the old Asolo Theater. Almost immediately, my father races onstage—disheveled, wearing a toga and covered in soot. You Can’t Take It With You, 1984. I’m five years old, sitting in the front row and endlessly entertained.

When I was born in 1979, my parents, Brad and Marian Wallace, had already been with the Asolo Theatre Company for more than a decade. They’ve always been anomalies in the world of theater: steadily employed, staying put and raising three daughters in “relative normalcy,” as Mom likes to say—as if my older twin sisters and I were sure to be marred by our parents’ bohemian careers. Whatever the damage, we never knew any better. My father, taking a long-awaited sabbatical this season, has acted in more than 165 Asolo productions, playing everyone from Shylock to Lenin; my mother, a box office employee before becoming stage manager in 1968, is now in her 41st straight season with the Asolo.

They met in the ’60s while attending Ohio University. Dad, an Alabama boy with a pre-law degree and a powder-blue VW Beetle, was finishing his master’s in theater direction and had already spent four summers in Sarasota as an actor with the nascent Asolo Theatre Comedy Festival. Mom, a nice Catholic gal from outside of Toledo, was an undergraduate stagehand. She soon found herself laughing her way through their courtship. The consummate character actor even then, Dad used to pick her bouquets of violets—and then eat them.

They married and came to Sarasota in 1967, taking spots at the Asolo as it expanded from summer festival to a year-round performance schedule. Far from entertaining any grand plans for lives of high culture, they were 20-somethings, newlyweds and happy to live near the beach and work in their fields.

By the time I was born, the Asolo had become the state theater of Florida, and in our household, stage life was a well-worn routine.

As stage manager, my mother spent her time hidden in the wings, overseeing action both on and off the stage, like a guardian angel dressed in black, script and stopwatch at the ready. In a recording that predates my 10th birthday, hers is the soothing, disembodied voice heard moments before Asolo performances, telling everyone how to find assistance and where to go “in the unlikely event of an emergency”—essentially her role at home, too.

Dad’s job, so far as I could see, was to play dress-up. For having made such a thing his profession, he earned my undying admiration.

But I had trouble, at first, reconciling their careers with the rest of the world. When my kindergarten teacher at Abel Elementary asked students what their fathers did for a living, I answered hesitantly, “I think my daddy is an actress.” Daddy wore makeup, that I knew. I also knew that plays were performed in the “theatre”—until Mom visited my class and hurriedly changed my spelling to “theater” on the chalkboard. Though raised in the theatre, the Wallace children were not to have affectations.

For my part, I wanted people to think I came from a wonderfully eccentric family, both strange and revered, like circus freaks with graduate degrees. To my parents’ chagrin, it was easy to perpetuate this attitude.

For his very first role at the Asolo in 1961, Dad’s Southern accent had been deemed unintelligible, and he was asked to play his character, a stutterer in the script, as a mute instead. But by the time I was born, the dignified man my friends encountered at our house greeted them with such practiced pronunciation that they often asked if he were British. “Nope,” I’d grin. “He’s from Alabama.” My father would be mildly indignant at their mistake. “I have a standard American accent,” he’s always insisted, enunciating the R’s and A’s with superhuman clarity.

My parents walked a careful line, alternately encouraging their children to pursue the arts while discouraging us from grandstanding and elitism. Stereotypes be damned, Dad has always seemed most at home sipping a can of beer and serving his home-cooked barbecue while explaining in great detail why the Asolo’s 1967 touring production of Henry IV Part I was Shakespeare at its purest and best. As proud as they were to know the history, literature and inner workings of the theater, my parents never considered those topics matters for special attention. Culture and intellectualism were for everyday use, to be mixed in with mowing the lawn and trips to the beach.

Mostly, they wanted us to recognize the hard work that lay behind the theater’s mystique. Neither of them headed off to a 10-hour Sunday technical rehearsal singing the glories of show business.