In 1994, when Heidi Waxlax first left Germany with her family to live in Vero Beach, she quickly found herself in unfamiliar terrain. Her children knew no English, and her own was heavily accented. The public schools, unlike in Germany, demanded parental involvement.
And on weekends, she found herself in a most unpleasant role: the football widow. Lorne Waxlax, her Minnesota-born husband with whom she had lived in Germany for 18 years, turned out to love the sport.
“I wasn’t aware that my husband was such a football fan. The season started and I was utterly bored,” she recalls.
So she bundled up the children, then 8 and 12, and took them to Sunday matinee of Riverside Theatre’s “Peter Pan.”
“Not that I had great expectations, since it was the first show I ever saw there. But it was love,” she says. “It was really good.”
The next season the family went to “Hello, Dolly.” And ever since, the theater has served as their mainstay of entertainment.
Today, Heidi Waxlax is starting her fourth term as president of the board of the theater, infinitely curious about the workings of the theater, dropping in backstage to watch the evolution of each show, preparing herself for the inevitable questions from audience members.
With her husband, the retired executive vice president of Gillette, they helped fund the Waxlax, a black box theater adjacent to the Main Stage. The Waxlax can hold 250 people and is the permanent home of the theater’s Second Stage plays. It also is home to the hugely popular Comedy Zone shows, and can be reconfigured for cabaret fund-raisers or lectures.
“The first thing we did was buy a 10-year membership (at the theater),” Lorne Waxlax says.
“Then before our 10 years were up, they came to us with a drawing of the new theater, and the name Waxlax was on the top of it.”
The Waxlax was part of a $22 million renovation in 2008 that transformed the theater into one of the best in the state. At the same, the Waxlaxes joined an initial 15 couples who became “patron producers,” donating $10,000 each to help fund the bigger-budget Broadway musicals they loved, beginning with the spectacular “42nd Street.”
Eight seasons later, the theater’s budget has swelled to $8 million, and the ranks of patron producers has grown to more than 60.
Heidi Waxlax leads a board of 45.
“I am the head cheerleader,” says Waxlax, who first joined the board in 2002, after the late Dick Stark, having invited the couple to dinner, asked Lorne first. He refused, citing his heavy schedule of corporate board meetings, and Stark wasted no time hearing his excuses. He turned to Heidi.
“How about you?” he asked. And just as quickly, she said, “OK, you talked me into it!”
Waxlax laughs with zeal at the fact that she can’t act, sing or dance. “I have absolutely no talent,” she says. “I’m athletic, that’s all.”
In Germany, seeing serious plays at the local theater earned you extra credit in school. In addition, Heidi Waxlax is an avid reader. On her coffee table is activist Gloria Steinem’s latest book, “My Life on the Road.” She’s three-quarters of the way through it, reaching for it as respite after an hour or two with a new book on Lenin, and before that, one on Stalin. Waxlax, a history “freak” according to Lorne, is in thrall over recent developments that have opened the archives of the former Soviet Union.
For a time, she taught history in school in Germany, but soon tired of dealing with kids. “I’m an only child and my parents were only children so I have no cousins,” she explains. “I was a little late in understanding that teaching includes children and it was not quite my thing.”
Instead, she began teaching German to foreigners, particularly business executives. One of her pupils in 1976 was Lorne Waxlax, who had just finished a five-year stint in Barcelona, becoming fluent in business Spanish, and now was assigned to Germany where he would run the Braun division worldwide.
“I really struggled to learn how to run a company in German,” he recalls.
“Lorne is not a linguist,” says Heidi. That struggle proved fortuitous when it brought the two together for tutoring. They have been together 40 years.
Lorne was raised in northern Minnesota, where his family ran a rustic lakeside resort across the street from his grandfather’s farm. Lorne’s earliest entrepreneurship involved digging earthworms to sell to the guests for bait. And at 14, he was advising his parents to let a carload of kids in for only 50 cents, banking on their appetites after a day of swimming to sell more “pop” and sandwiches.
At 60, he retired and was looking to move back to the states and continuing earning a salary by joining corporate boards. Florida was high on his list. After a board meeting in Boca Raton, he visited Gillette associates in Stuart, then in Vero, where he made an offer on a condo in the Victoria on the ocean. Soon after he and his family arrived, they bought a house on the ocean in the Moorings where they live today, year-round residents.
The Waxlax children are grown now; daughter Christina, 29, has started a family in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where she works in marketing for Haines. Son Robert, 33, is in Connecticut, working in mergers and acquisitions with Louis Dreyfus Commodities.
“They’re Floridians,” their mother says. “They both come back to Florida at every opportunity.”
Committed to public schools to expose their children to America’s diversity, the Waxlaxes became disillusioned because kids tended not to socialize outside of their ilk. “I wanted them to meet all kinds of Americans, white kids, black kids, rednecks. But in the cafeteria, they all stayed together.”
Both graduated from St. Edward’s, in a space that bore their name. The Waxlax Center for the Performing Arts, part of a new wing funded with Waxlax donation when the school was undergoing a massive expansion plan in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
It was a plan so ambitious that Lorne Waxlax, who was on the school’s finance committee (and the boards of eight U.S. companies) tried to persuade the school to tackle only half the plan. “Then we realized that this is going to fall apart unless people step forward,” he says. “It was the biggest thing we could sponsor and it would make the biggest statement to people who weren’t really committed yet to giving.”
Waxlax believed the 800-seat theater would be a money-maker for the school. “Our vision was that a lot of performances would take place, so we insisted that the acoustics be terrific.”
While the theater did not generate the level of income Waxlax hoped for, the space was adopted by the Atlantic Classical Orchestra as its new Vero home; it continues to play there today, in addition to the Lyric Theatre in Stuart and the Eissey Campus Theater at Palm Beach State College in Palm Beach Gardens.
And for the family, the theater had particular importance. It was finished just in time for Robert’s graduation. “They all kept saying, ‘We don’t want the graduation in this old gym,’” Heidi Waxlax recalls.
As parents, they had made sure that the donation – and naming rights to the building – was OK with their kids. It was, though Christina had to come up with a quick comeback one day when she was wearing her softball jersey with her last name on the back. Seated on the sidewalk in front of the performing arts center, she overheard two girls pointing at her shirt and giggling, then pointing at the signage on the wall of the Waxlax. “Yeah, I know,” said Christina. “My parents named me after this building.”
Their generosity to St. Ed’s didn’t stop with the Waxlax Center. While Lorne Waxlax, along with Ron Edwards and others, continued to play a critical role in getting the school out of a major financial jam, he and his wife made another key donation to the so-called Pirate Fund and in turn, asked to name a building for the head of the upper school, Bruce Wachter, and his wife Joanie.
Yet another space bears the Waxlax name, this one associated with a different kind of theater, the operating theater at Indian River Medical Center. The Waxlax Recovery Room, in the same wing as the new Sheridan Intensive Care Unit, is the result of the couple’s $1 million commitment in 2010. It expanded the capacity of the recovery room from 9 beds to 27.
Heidi Waxlax says she picked the recovery room because “it’s a positive place. They wake up and open their eyes and they see something pleasant.”
