Before teaching drama at M-A, Danette Bathauer was a teenager in Fresno who spent her junior and senior years couch surfing, rehearsing, and holding on to school as the one place she could count on.
“School was a haven for me,” Bathauer said. “I just have always known I would be here.”
During her junior and senior years, school became incredibly important, as she did not live with her parents and instead stayed with friends. “I didn’t have a great home life,” Bathauer said. “I ran away from home. That sounds crazy now, but I didn’t live in my home with my parents my junior and senior years. I just kind of couch surfed, staying with different friends.”
Despite instability at home, Bathauer persisted and stayed focused on school. “I knew that if I were messing up in school, someone was going to be calling my parents. And so I knew, ‘You better keep it on the up, and up, you better keep your grades up. You better keep going.’ And so that was my motivation. I mean, that was a really crappy situation, but you just have to keep going and get it done,” she said.
Bathauer attended Clovis High School, where she found community in her school’s drama and choir programs.
“I was the theater nerd and drama geek,” she said. “I couldn’t really party or anything, and I was probably a little bit embarrassed by that at the time, but I found that if I could be in choir, or if I could do a play, that was this social outlet that I had.”
During junior year, Bathauer auditioned for her first play, Oklahoma!. She exceeded her expectations by securing the lead. “It was fun the next day,” she said. “Everyone was like, ‘Hey, I saw the show.’ It was really good just feeling seen.”
There were two high schools in the Clovis Unified School District, and drama students from each attended the other’s plays and sent opening night gifts. “It was a nice little rivalry, but also […] family,” she said.
Along with her love of drama, Bathauer also became devoted to choir. She took summer school courses to fit more choir classes into her schedule. One summer, she got sick, yet she still went to school so she would not lose her spot.
“You could only miss three days, or you’d be kicked out,” Bathauer said. “There was a teacher there that let me come to school. I was so sick. My head was pounding, and I had a fever, and he let me come to school and sit on a couch, and I just got a wet wash rag on my head because I was just burning up, and I just sat there like a lump so that I could take the class,” she said.
When she wasn’t at school or rehearsal, Bathauer enjoyed simple hangouts with her friends.
“The best afternoon I could think of would be a Dr. Pepper and Doritos, and sitting on the side of my pool. Fresno was really hot,” she said. “That, to me, is the best, in smelling that wet cement smell, when the water hits it, and just hanging out and laughing with friends.”
Outside of easygoing afternoons with her friends, Bathauer was challenged with figuring out college on her own.
“I didn’t have counselors to tell you, ‘This is how you apply for college.’ I almost didn’t go to college because I didn’t know what to do. And I remember just feeling embarrassed to ask because I was a good student. I was a straight-A kid. So that made it more embarrassing for me to say, ‘I have no idea how to register for a college class,’” she said.
Without anyone to guide her, Bathauer figured out the application process herself. “We had to register on the phone back then. It’s ridiculous. But I figured it out, and I did some of it wrong, but I got through,” she said.
Bathauer enrolled at Fresno State, where she majored in linguistics. Despite initially being required to have an English degree to teach drama, Bathauer took an alternate path.
“I loved sentence diagramming,” she said. “They had to kind of make it make sense to be an English degree. But the joke is on me because now I’m directing theater.”
Her degree was one of many unexpected turns in her path to becoming a drama teacher. “I’ve never taken the straight path of anything. Everything has just kind of been like, ‘Whoops, well, that didn’t work out. Where am I? What do I do now?’” she said.
Years later, her own experience navigating challenges independently helped shape her approach to teaching. “Teaching was always going to be for me, a through line for being a resource to kids who need it,” Bathauer said.
