From the theater to the dance floor and into a bank, Sonia Blake knows all the world is a stage, and all the men and women merely players. She’s had many exits and entrances and played many parts. From growing up in the outskirts of Baltimore to moving to Lewes, Blake has found humor and song in each of her stages.
“When I was 13, my parents went to buy patio furniture, and in the store there was a poster for “Oliver” auditions. I still have the paper that I wrote the information on with a pencil,” she said.
Blake auditioned for the show and got accepted in the chorus. At rehearsals, she met a girl who attended summer camp at Baltimore Actors Theater. Blake brought information home to her parents and begged to go.
Months later, Blake was 14 years old and busing tables at the Blue Bell Seafood House. “I had forgotten all about summer camp by then. I was rich for a kid, and I didn’t save a penny. I bought satin racing shorts, visors and went to the movies,” she said. She thinks that’s absurd now, after a long career in banking, but at the time, she was stage bound.
Her mom picked her up from work one day and told her she was going to camp the next day. “I got there and I was scared and really wanted to go home,” she said.
After a month at camp, Blake changed her mind. “They couldn’t drag me out. I never went back,” she said. The company started a conservatory for students in September, when summer camp was over. Four years later, she was the only graduate from the Conservatory for Performing Arts for the Baltimore Actors Theater.
That’s when she met Oprah Winfrey, who gave a commencement address. Blake also gave a speech during the ceremony. At age 17, she sat in a green room across the table from Winfrey practicing her speech before the ceremony began. “She’s an introvert disguising herself as an extrovert,” Blake said, “She never said a word to me and I never said a word to her. She was already a semi-star.”
While she was still in school she also embraced a hobby that she still loves today. “When I was 16, I had a teacher who told me about astrology,” she said. Blake shyly admitted the actor and teacher was her first crush, which made her eager to impress and to memorize the signs.
Today, when Blake meets anyone new, she automatically asks their birthday and calculates their Zodiac sign. “It’s just fascinating. I’d constantly put it down, and then I’d pick it back up again.
“I’ve met so many people and had relationships go one way or the other with them. Then I would meet someone else who reminded me of that person, and sure enough, they had a similar birthday,” Blake said.
She can ramble off characteristics of any of the signs, and Blake often explains her friends’ behavior based on birthdays. “Oh, she’s an Aries,” she says about an outgoing person. Or she’ll say, “She’s a Taurus, so she should have a more constant behavior and not waver so much, but then maybe she has a different moon sign.”
While not studying star charts in her youth, Blake was singing and dancing in musicals for traveling shows, in camps and in countless venues. “We also did the Florida condo circuit in the winter,” she said, performing musical reviews with the best songs from top shows like “Fiddler,” “Annie” and “The Sound of Music.” She left the company after 12 years of dancing her way across the country and singing in front of a blur of audiences, young and old, to move back home to Bel Air, Md.
She joined a ballroom dance company and taught classes for several years before hurting her back. “Then I realized I was a professional dancer with a back-up plan of theatre,” she said with a laugh.
“You’re always trying to be someone’s vision of something. You’re always thinking, ‘Am I too old for this part? Can I dance well enough for this part? Do I look too young for that?’” Blake decided to give up performing arts, go back to school and get what she calls a safer job. “I wanted to be able to plan my life and not live in suitcases. I wanted to move out of my parents’ house,” she said.
At 25, Blake went to the University of Delaware for a degree in consumer economics. After graduation, she spent 10 years working in different positions for Chase Bank in Newark, but her heart was always in Lewes.
“I fell in love with this area years ago. I started coming right away, as soon as friends told me about it. Then I came weekends, then weeks, and I was always scheming about how not to have to leave,” Blake said. She built a home outside Lewes in 2004 and started coming to the beach every weekend.
This year, Blake quit her 10-year banking career and moved to Lewes. She’s quick to say she was never a banker. She worked in the returns department and specialized in customer relations for people who returned items on their cards, but did not receive credit. “We always got a lot of laughs from that. It’s funny what people will write in a letter to a bank,” she said. Blake was never a suit-wearing, briefcase-wielding money type, she said.
Now she works part-time at her favorite restaurant and at a fitness center, where she’s thinking of teaching ballroom dancing, a role she played almost 20 years ago.
After fleeting, weekend roles in Lewes, Blake has exited the corporate world to make an entrance into the slower-paced life of the Cape Region. She’s ready to take on a new stage, whatever that may be, and to keep dancing and laughing her way through it.
Contact Molly Albertson at mollyalbertson@gmail.com
