An Evening with Richard Skipper: The Magic of Believing, 42 years in NYC. 8/5/21

For Video Edition, Please Click and Subscribe Here: https://youtu.be/4_frdQxcOvE

An Evening with Richard Skipper: The Magic of Believing tells the story of a precocious 13-year-old South Carolina-an who decided on August 5th, 1974 that he would move to New York in five years, to the day, and try his hand at show business. Sure enough, come August 5th, 1979, equipped with a one-way plane ticket and five hundred dollars, 18 year-old Ricky Skipper kept that promise to himself, and forty years later he is still nurturing, daily, his unquenchable thirst for the business of show: “The show business bug did not bite me, I bit it – and I bit it hard. I wanted to be in show business before I even knew what show business was.” The Magic of Believing: An Excerpt from Broadway World, by Stephen Mosher Aug. 6, 2019 The musical autobiography that Mr. Skipper presented was a true celebration of a gifted entertainer and a resilient human being – and it was an absolute delight. The standing-room-only audience was a veritable who’s who of cabaret luminaries, all on hand to hear Skipper’s tale, and it did not disappoint. The over-forty crowd was so captivated by Skipper that only one person was seen tiptoeing out for a restroom break, an unheard-of feat in a two hour evening of theatre. Skipper’s ability to paint a picture with words brought to life characters one might easily find in the writings of Willa Cather or Armistead Maupin, and it didn’t matter that the characters weren’t famous enough to give the audience a frame of reference because the true star of the night was the story being told. It would be impossible for Mr. Skipper to speak about his life without some delicious name-dropping, but it wasn’t essential, except in the case of Carol Channing, for obvious reasons.