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Ronnie Francois James Bell (born 4 December 1948) is an American musician, actor, director, and teacher. Ronnie continues to write music, dabbles heavily in photography and participates in Democratic politics in Onondaga County. He is currently concocting a stand-up comedy routine to spring on the unsuspecting public when he hits 75.

Early life
Ronnie grew up in the Briarwood section of Jamaica, NY in the borough of Queens. He attended all local public schools from PS 117 in Briarwood to JHS 217 across the street to Jamaica HS, a one mile walk away.

Ronnie was an active member of Grace Episcopal Church from the age of eight. He sang in the boys’ choir, participated in annual choir shows such as Gilbert and Sullivan’s Trial by Jury and acted/assisted in plays directed by his mother, Aimee Thienpont Bell. In his first on-stage theatrical appearance he played Scrubby in Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit, a role his mother transformed from an old man to a young steward. He wrote his first song at 9 years old Heartbeat) and has gone on to write hundreds of songs since that time. He performed in his first musical group at 12 years old, Ronnie and the Rendezvous, and played at school dances, friends’ parties and occasional gigs at the Victoria Congregational Church in Jamaica, Queens, where he attended and sometimes participated in services with his high school friends.

College
Because he skipped 8th grade in Junior High School, Ronnie entered Queens College in September 1965, three months shy of his 17th birthday. For the 1966/67 academic year he went to Queens College at night while still maintaining a twelve-credit course load and working at Queens General Hospital, as an x-ray assistant, during the day. He raised his average enough to be re-admitted to a full-time day program the next year. He pledged a fraternity, Sigma Alpha Mu, in Spring 1966. The only area he excelled in, in college, was the theatre department where he majored in Theatre/Communications and earned his B.A. degree in Feb 1971. In the last two semesters, when he took 19 credits for each, he raised his overall cume to a respectable level by graduation.

Ronnie would not excel in college up to his potential until graduate school at Syracuse University twenty years later where he missed straight A’s by two A- and one B over five semesters including three summer sessions and wound up with his Master of Science in Special Education and a 3.833 graduate cume.

Marriages
Ronnie married Agnes Varadi in March 1975 and moved from their E. 17th Street Manhattan apartment to Astoria, Queens in 1978 and then to Starrett City, Brooklyn in 1979. They had their first child, Ronald John Rudolph Bell on July 31, 1980 and divorced in 1985.

Ronnie married Melinda Donovan in July 1985 and they lived in Greenpoint, Brooklyn until August 1989 when they moved to Syracuse, NY. Melinda and Ronnie had their first child, Nicholas Thomas Donovan Bell, on December 21, 1986.

In 1989, Melinda and Ronnie decided to move to Syracuse, NY where they had both been offered teaching positions. Leaving tenured jobs in NYC they took a chance to be able to afford a house, to be equidistant from two sets of aging and infirm parents and to have a better environment to educate their children. Their last child, Susannah Aimée Olsen Bell, was born on June 2, 1990.

Early Jobs
Ronnie delivered newspapers for the Long Island Press at 7 ½ years old, helping his oldest brother, Rudy, with his paper route until he got his own route at 10 years old, two years before he could get working papers to do so. He went on to become the station master of the local L.I.P. office managed by George Koch. Delivering the paper in those days was a 7 days-a-week job in addition to collecting from customers once a week and getting up at 3:30 a.m. on Sundays to deliver the largest paper of the week by 6 or 7 a.m. As station master, Ronnie was responsible for inserting many advance sections of the paper into each of thousands of papers that were printed in advance so each carrier could insert the advance sections into the sports/main page on Sunday morning.

Because of his ability to sell subscriptions to new customers, he qualified to write an essay for a national contest run by the Newspaper Enterprise Association about what he enjoyed about being a paperboy. He was one of two NYS carriers selected by the NEA to enjoy a five-day trip to Washington, DC along with 98 other winning carriers from 49 other States in July of 1962.

Music
Ronnie formed and was the keyboard player and lead singer for the musical groups The Lyres and The Tapestry during his undergraduate career. In 1967, The Tapestry was signed to a five-year recording contract with Compass Records (a division of Kapp Records) because they were able to match the sound of a British hit record, Carnaby Street, written and performed by their producers, Alan Bernstein, David Hess and Vic Millrose. Andy Goldstein (guitar), Dale Munz (bass) and Joel Shaw (drums) made up the rest of the group who auditioned live for the producers and got the gig on the spot in February 1967. Shortly thereafter, they released a follow up single on the Compass label, Miss Julie’s Private School, that was a pick hit in Record World and Billboard and exploded in several western markets in the US before the president of Compass Records decided to pull the plug on the single after having a fight with our managers and producers.

From the time he wrote his first song in 1957, he continued to write music on his keyboard and in his head. Most of his compositions which usually included music and lyrics, were crudely recorded on home equipment until he opened his own recording studio in the basement of his Syracuse home in 1996 where it is still going today.

His next musical highlight after his college success was writing the theme song for the Food Stamp Re-Education Campaign in 1978 with the chosen D.C. advertising firm, Porter, Novelli and Assoc. The jingle, Food Stamps Can Help You Make Ends Meet, was the centerpiece of the public service campaign that ran alongside the $450,000 paid campaign in 1978 and 1979. With that jingle, Ronnie became a member of ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers.)

Ronnie taught himself the electric bass guitar in Sept. 2018 and formed the Beatles cover band, The Silver Beats, in August 2019. The other Beats are Peter Allen, rhythm and lead guitar, Bob Reid, keyboards and Steve Orlando, drums.

Theater
Ronnie appeared in and directed many shows during his Queens College career including featured roles (First Knight, Second Tempter) in TS Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral as a lower freshman, lighting design and board operation for a main stage show, Sean O’Casey’s, Plough and the Stars, at the 300 seat QC Theatre, and a starring role as the Tai Chi Teacher in Joel Zwick’s (best known for directing television series Perfect Strangers, Full House, and Family Matters, and films My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Second Sight, and Fat Albert) Japanese style production of Caligula.

Andy (from The Tapestry) and Ronnie wrote a Broadway-style musical, Cash for Trash, in 1970, mounted a backers’ showcase performance but were unable to secure adequate funding to mount the show in NYC.

Subsequently, in 1970 and 1971, Ronnie and Andy and Hali Hammer formed the group Love’s Labor’s Lost backed by a band led by Paul Feuerstein on lead guitar. The group recorded a demo at Decca Records of four different songs, Fun, Home Away from Home, After and It Ain’t So, music by Andy Goldstein, lyrics by Ronnie, with Eddie Simon (Paul’s brother) helming the session. After Hali moved to California, Ronnie and Andy worked as a duo, Prince and Pauper, at many clubs around NYC including The Improvisation through 1974.

In 1993 Ronnie wrote, produced and directed the musical kids' video show, The Tumblebunnies, that was produced on cable TV in two different Syracuse markets in 1993 but did not get picked up by any of the local networks.

While teaching at Dr Weeks Elementary, Ronnie also produced shows at Levy MS (where his son Nick attended) and Fayetteville-Manlius High School (where his wife Melinda taught English and founded the Broadcast Journalism program). At Levy, he mounted Twelve Angry Men (Jurors), Our Town and The Crucible.

Syracuse Sharkespeare-In-The-Park
In 2002, Ronnie founded, along with wife Melinda and Tom and Mary Holmes, the Syracuse Shakespeare Festival, now called Syracuse Shakespeare-In-The-Park (SSITP). They formed the non-profit in November 2002 and presented their first show, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, during the second weekend of August 2003. The inaugural production was attended by 2,000 people over three days. Ronnie has maintained the title of artistic director, producing artistic director and his current executive director position for the past 18 seasons through the 2020-2021 season.

Since August 2003, SSITP has presented seventeen shows, 102 performances for more than 31,000 people at Thornden Park’s beautiful Amphitheatre. Many people feel it is a more beautiful space than its inspiration in NYC. In addition to the outdoor summer shows, SSITP has presented 30 productions and 143 performances indoors at various theatres around Syracuse including the Empire Theatre at the NYS Fairgrounds and SU’s Cantor Warehouse Theatre for 4,500 people. SSITP has created a touring company that has been to more than 100 CNY schools and businesses and performed for 15,000 students, teachers and businesspeople. Their Kids Doing Shakespeare program has run for 15 consecutive years, always drawing a diverse student body from the City, suburbs, home school and private schools without regard to the ability to pay the modest tuition.

Ronnie has directed many SSITP shows including A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Twelfth Night, Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, The Taming of the Shrew, Abridged Romeo and Juliet, Abridged Julius Caesar, Romeo and Juliet, and Julius Caesar. He has produced all of SSITP’s more than 160 shows. He also wrote and directed Love vs. Time and wrote Scrooge Meets Shakespeare’s Ghosts, both musicals.

In his Strathmore neighborhood, he has conceived, directed and produced two seasons of ESCAPE, Educating Strathmore Children Arts Performance Experience, in 2015 and 2016 and produced the last three seasons in 2017-2019. The program is designed to introduce neighborhood kids to theatre arts at a very modest cost for children in grades K-7.

Teaching
In Sept. 1986, he began his next career as a 5th-grade teacher at PS 274 in Bushwick, Brooklyn and finally realized a life-long dream of teaching.

In his first year as a 5th-grade teacher at Percy Hughes School, he organized and directed 175 kids from K through 6th grade in a stage production of The Wizard of Oz. He was let go due to budget cuts at the end of June 1990. He soon secured a job in special education for the next six years at Seymour Elementary School. During his tenure at Seymour, he directed Oliver with 200 students in the show and produced and directed very unusual and diverse after school shows: Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss in English and Spanish simultaneously; The Medicine Wheel, adapted from Native American folk tales and A Thousand Cranes, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Hiroshima bomb and the courage of Sadako Sasaki that inspired her country and the world to make 1,000 paper cranes for her before she died from radiation poisoning.

In the 1996-97 school year, Ronnie was selected to teach theatre arts to gifted and talented students from grades 2-6 at the Center for Inquiry, where students from around the Syracuse public school system were sent, one grade per day, to be taught by nine different teachers who were teaching in their area of passion. They did at least one show per grade each semester as well as after school shows including a school-wide Talent Show and an adaptation of Addy the American Girl, the story of an African-American girl in Civil War-era 1860s. The program was closed due to budget cuts in June 1998.

He finished out his twenty-four-year teaching career at Dr. Weeks Elementary School as a special education/theatre teacher while maintaining his after school producing and directing duties. During his tenure at Dr. Weeks he mounted many musicals using royalty shows such as The Wizard of Oz, Fiddler on the Roof and Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory and adaptations of books such as Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People’s Ears and Stories from the Netsilik Indians. Ronnie worked as a 5th-grade teacher, a 3rd-grade teacher and a Kindergarten teacher at Dr. Weeks.

Other Jobs
During his post college years, from 1972 through 1978, Ronnie worked with the NYC Dept. Of Social Services as an income maintenance specialist, a unit supervisor, a face-to-face recertification specialist, a Central Office procedures writer and a caseworker for the Division of Location and Support in Brooklyn. He moved on to the NYS Dept. of Social Services in 1978 and worked as Senior Social Services Program Specialist and Director of the Food Stamp Re-Education Campaign until 1980 on the 31st floor of the World Trade Center, South Tower.

During his between jobs time from 1971-72 and from 1980-81 he drove a New York City taxicab in Manhattan full time. In Feb 1981, he was hired as the Membership Director of the West Side YMCA and added Marketing Director to his job in 1983. He stayed with the YMCA for six years until August 1986.