Top Patron of the Arts

If Orange County is looking for 1988’s leading patron of the arts, we have a name we are proud to put in nomination. She is Sylvia M. Salenius, a single mother who lives on a modest income in downtown Santa Ana and works as an environmental planner in Orange.

Salenius, mindful of the financial problems facing the Grove Shakespeare Festival, walked up to the Gem Theatre box office in Garden Grove and wrote a personal check for $500.

Salenius, who used to live in Garden Grove and has been a steady patron of the Grove Theatre Company, was angry at Garden Grove city councilmen who were withholding city support of the Shakespeare Festival. As far as Salenius is concerned, they have something that no other city in the county has, and, instead of being proud of it, they don’t appreciate it. So, her $500 check was her way of helping make sure that Shakespeare and the company stayed in Garden Grove.

The large corporate donors and individual wealthy patrons who helped build and sustain the Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa and are seemingly interested in supporting culture and the arts in the county haven’t rallied to save Shakespeare and the Grove season.

Perhaps it is fitting that help is coming instead from the working class, with whom Shakespeare was so popular in his day. The $500 donation from Salenius was a dramatic and proportionately major contribution that the Bard himself might have acknowledged with his lines from “All’s Well That Ends Well”:

Thou thought’st to help me; and

such thanks I give

As one near death to those that wish

him live.