My Acting Class-1979-80

My acting teachers from The Tri-State Media School in 1979. Hal Bennett (aka Hal Bernstein), at left, ran the school with his wife and the other gentleman was our main teacher…Doug…something… I think. Mr. Bennet was, at the time, a popular local radio voiceover artist and the "voice" of Northern Kentucky's Florence Mall on TV and radio. It was a fun 12 week class. We started out with about a dozen students and lost all but 5--myself included--over the course of the classes. One of the young ladies was a local beauty queen, another was an actress with a (very) small role in Jon Voight's THE CHAMP. It was supposed to be 13 weeks but when we students showed up for the last night, the offices were dark, locked and clearly empty of any furniture. I ran into one of my fellow students a few years later and she said she'd heard the Mob was after Hal and he had to leave quickly. Hmmm…seems like he wouldn't have taken the time to move out all the furniture if that were the case. The other teacher, whose name I'm blanking on, was the head of a local teachers union! I'd seen him on the news. Neither of them ever attempted to contact the students. We received no final grade, no promised leads on getting into local theater troupes or unions and we didn't even get copies of the professional 8 X 10 glossy head shots we all had had taken in class the week before.