Joan Dorsey is combining her television broadcasting experience and storytelling passion to help highlight the lives of unique women in Tellico Village.
After moving into the Village in 2005, Dorsey acquainted herself with the Tellico Community Players and directed the hit show, “Ladies of Broadway,” in 2015. From there, she developed an idea to create a television show, “Ladies of Tellico Village,” to air on Tellico Village Broadcasting.
“We raised a lot more money with that (show), and with that one, several women and I picked three Broadway stars that did that original show,” Dorsey said. “We wore very basic outfits and had a rack on stage with a shall and a hat and sat on stools on stage. There were seven or eight of us and we did three actresses, three shows. I called it the ‘Ladies of Broadway,’ so we decided to call this show the ‘Ladies of Tellico Village’.”
Dorsey graduated from Kent State University and Lake Erie College, where she earned a degree in theater arts and education. She boasts an impressive acting/broadcasting career, including appearances on numerous shows and commercials.
Dorsey has worked in productions along with Hulk Hogan, John Walsh and Dick Clark. She was also heavily involved in television productions with Walt Disney World and Universal Studios while living in Orlando, Fla.
Bill Whitehouse, TVB volunteer editor/producer, said Dorsey’s experience adds an exciting element to the station.
“She spends a lot of time on it and she takes it very seriously,” he said. “Her background in theater and television, I think it gives her a presence on the stage, which I think is pretty good. We’re a volunteer organization of retired people so it’s going to have its limitations, but she’s very good. She brings it to a different level. It’s just a great program, interesting and quite different.”
With a breadth of knowledge in television production, Dorsey felt she had a gift that could be utilized in the Village. She eventually reached out to TVB and presented her idea for a new show that interviews women in the community with extraordinary life experiences or hobbies in a “living room” setting.
“I saw that they were looking for suggestions to upgrade their people viewing, but they were also looking to go some different routes,” Dorsey said. “Something they did very little of was roving reporters, going out with a camera. They have a camera that’s called a handy cam, so I said, ‘That would be good. There’s so many things that we can do that’s not just totally utilitarian.’ It’s always about the pool at the Wellness Center, it’s about redoing the words, it’s about the woodworkers ... and those are all good things, but I called and said, ‘I saw the article about wanting to go further and add some new things’.”
Dorsey’s idea was initially met with uncertainty, but the show has since taken off and become one of the most popular programs on TVB.
“I didn’t make this easy on her because I said, ‘It sounds like a wonderful series but if you’re going to do this, you’re going to have to be the producer on it’,” Whitehouse said. “She just rose to that like a fish to bait, I mean she was all over it and has been. By the time that I meet the person that’s doing the interview, she’s already interviewed them. It was all Joan’s idea the way we were going to stage it. I didn’t expect it to work, I didn’t expect it to last, but I would say now that it is one of our best shows on the station.”
The show’s inaugural episodes have included interviews with retired military nurse Karen Sue Keith, world traveler Mary Cushman and former Broadway clothing artist Marion Elrod.
“They’ll watch this show because it’s somebody’s life story that has a beginning, a middle and an end,” Dorsey said. “Who’s going to start at the beginning and then find out that somebody got drafted at 48 years old for Desert Storm, so they’re going to wait and hear about it and ask, ‘Well, how did she get to Tellico Village after all that?’ It’s done quite well, so that’s kind of how we came up with this. Bill kind of took a chance with this. I sat down with him and told him what I had in mind and that I wanted to use women from the Village.”
Dorsey hopes to expand the show and could potentially create a similar program for men. The next episode will feature a one-on-one interview with Teresa Barnard, wife of the Rev. Charlie Barnard, pastor of First Baptist Church in Tellico Village.
Episodes can be viewed on the TVB Vimeo page at https://vimeo.com/user6448027.
“I would like to see it expand so that we could go not just to Tugaloo Beach to see the circle of the vintage cars, but I would possibly love to have another type show where we can do some of it at the studio and then actually have gone to these peoples’ houses,” Dorsey said. “It’s stuff like going to Marion’s house and showing us her sewing machine or whatever. There’s also people that have wonderful hobbies, so there’s got to be people out there that have wonderful collections that they could tell about.”
For more information about the show, contact Dorsey at jhilibili@ charter.net or 865-408-1071.
