Women in Leadership: The many stages of Jaime Love

'Some days I feel like Gloria Steinem, and some days I feel like Lucy Ricardo,' laughs theater-advocate Jaime Love, Executive Artistic Director of Sonoma Arts Live.

Over the last few years, Love has guided the organization - which presents an array of plays and musicals at the Sonoma Community Center - as it has evolved from an ambitious alliance of small companies working as a collective, into one large producing entity that, in just a few short years, has become the single most prolific theater company in the Sonoma Valley.

'Running a theater is a lot like those two masks we've all seen a million times,' she says. 'Part of each day is a little bit of a comedy, and the other part is about trying to stop some tragedy from happening. You go from having a meeting about marketing to running out for a pair of nylons to use as part of the set, from negotiating with artists to reading scripts to sitting and imagining new ways to do old things better. Every day is so extremely varied, I have to laugh sometimes at all the things I've somehow managed to squeeze in.'

Love was raised in Plymouth, Michigan, where she became interested in theater and performance at an early age. After dabbling in voice-overs and radio, she met her husband, Rick Love.

'We were both working at WMJX in Boston,' she recalls. 'He was the assistant music director, and I was promotional marketing director. He taught me how to edit audiotape. That was back in the old days when there was actual tape.'

After getting married and, in Love's words, 'bounding around the country for a while,' working at various radio and television stations, the couple ended up in Sonoma when Rick landed a job at Creative Audience Research.

'When we got here—after years of living in big cities—I thought, 'I could live here for a year,'' laughs Love. 'Sonoma seemed so, 'Wow! I don't know about this!' It's so cute.'

That was twenty years ago. At the time, she recalls, the one thing the town lacked was a theater company that produced a full series of shows all year long.

'I was working on a theater project in Novato, and I kept thinking, 'Why is there any dedicated theater in Sonoma?' I kept waiting and waiting for some magical person to pop up and start some sort of regular theater company, or maybe a theater alliance, in Sonoma. Finally, a little voice said, 'Why are you waiting for someone else to do this? What if that person is you?''

That was 2009.

With Love working alongside other interested local theater artists and supporters, the Sonoma Theater Collective was born. Today, after various incarnations, Sonoma Arts Live – as it was dubbed in 2015 - is now in its second full second of shows.

Says Love, 'My daughter always says, 'My mom made up her job,' which is true, in a way - because I had this idea that there could be a thriving theater company in the town that I've come to love and have raised my kids in.

'Like so many things,' she laughs, 'it just took a while to turn it from a dream into a reality.'