PROFILE: Gordon Allen
High tech meets high drama. And it’s all happening in a quiet neighborhood in the elegant town of Boca Grande.
This is not the plot of a new play, but the real-life story of one of the newest actors joining the ranks of the Royal Palm Players.
Gordon Allen took a couple of acting classes when he lived in Santa Barbara, California some 20 years ago. He was not actually looking to perform on stage, though. He was hoping to improve his skills as a salesman.
“It was more just for fun. I’m in sales, so I spend a lot of time in front of people,” he explained. “I was talking to lots of senior-level executives, tech executives, things like that. So taking an acting class was a help in getting better at just talking … talking on my feet and thinking on my feet.”
That changed recently, however.
“My wife Jackie is the managing director of the Royal Palm Players,” he said. “So she convinced me to put my name in the hat. And here we are. It will be fun. I think it’s a good experience. So, we’ll see where it goes.”
He continued. “So far I enjoy it. It’s just a different challenge. It pulls on a different part of the brain that I’m not used to. I usually rely on phones, computers, thinking about tech things, and it is very much like focusing on one side of the brain. You have to be creative, but it is very much like business, and very linear in its approach. So, this kind of helps me use some different pathways in the brain.”
He admits he has not done much acting yet. He plays two different characters in the upcoming first play of the RPP season, in mid-November, “The Dining Room on Boca Grande.” There has been some preliminary work becoming familiar with the play and the cast and crew, but real rehearsals begin in early November.
“It is kind of intimidating,” he noted, “especially memorizing all that information and reciting it in a manner that’s believable in front of however many people. That takes a real skill. Some people have it. I don’t know if I do or not. I don’t know. We’ll see. I’d like to try it, though.”
He is grateful for the fact that this play is presented as a “table reading,” in which the actors have their scripts in front of them, but still need to maintain the characters they are playing.
“There’s a lot of responsibility there, having to cover two characters and make them believable … with no acting history.”
This season, “The Dining Room” will be his only performance.
Gordon is more comfortable around computers and other high-tech equipment than he is on stage.
“I have been in the tech-hardware space since 2004,” he said. “Essentially, I’m a salesperson, more or less, but account management, account executive … basically managing customers from all walks of life, all over the place.”
He works for OSI Global, headquartered in Santa Barbara, with locations all over the world. He travels a good deal, and when he is not globetrotting, he works from his home.
“The company is a bunch of guys I have worked with for 20 years, and we have locations all over the world, so we can service customers in any logical place,” he said. “There’s really no specific vehicle or application, but basically, our customers could be anybody who has an IT network. They could use Cisco, Juniper … name your server storage. It could be ethernet networks, traffic, hardware, OEM providers. And then, I provide that equipment and also help with maintenance and service … everything surrounding that.”
Gordon’s customers are wide-ranging. Some are with schools or libraries, all the way up to Fortune 500 companies, governmental agencies, casinos … clients from all walks of life.
“Everybody uses IT equipment and everyone has a different need,” he said. “But, more or less, it’s based upon ethernet, traffic and also cloud co-location, data center, server storage and power cooling. Then everything needs to be connected. So my customers range from network architect servers, network engineers, IT directors … all the way up to chief technical officers, chief information officers, chief information security officers of corporations.”
All this focus on the high-tech world is balanced in Gordon’s life by his home life and his drive to be healthy and fit.
Gordon and Jackie are the parents of 8-year-old twins, Oliver and Penelope (Penny). The twins are in the third grade at The Island School. The whole family is into sports, cooking, travel, and giving and getting affection from their 13-year-old diva dog, Mariah (named after Mariah Carey).
Mariah was a rescue, found as a puppy in the rough streets of East L.A. She was housebroken and trained, but somehow abandoned on the streets. Today she lives in the lap of luxury, a California girl who loves lying in the sun.
Gordon enjoys going to the gym and fitness centers. With the kids, it is often ocean-based fun, like body surfing, boogie boarding or fishing. Gordon also enjoys watching European soccer.
“When I was living in California,” he said, “it was lots of mountain biking, tons of surfing, tons of snowboarding. That’s what I did a lot of – and yoga, tons of yoga. In Florida there are not many mountains, so we go to the ocean a bunch, and then do the fitness things and hang out with my kids, watch soccer.”
In college, Gordon was a pretty formidable soccer and lacrosse player. In lacrosse he set university and area records, earning lots of honors, including being inducted into the University of Vermont’s Athletic Hall of Fame. It was not all sport, though. He was also named to the America East Academic Honor Roll in both his junior and senior years. But getting back to sports ….
“I love European soccer ,” he said. “I used to play a lot. I grew up playing lacrosse, then when I was in the professional world, I started playing pick-up soccer with people I worked with. That morphed into pretty serious play … and then I blew out my ankle.”
It was just about the time when his twins were born, so cutting back on the sport was not a huge issue. He still watches his favorite sports, but he does not play them much.
“I love to cook,” he said, moving on to a more pleasant topic. “My wife is very much like a chef. She learned how to cook very well from her father; and her mom’s Italian, so that means she really knows what she’s doing in the kitchen. Then we also really focus on our health. We are always very concerned about what we put in our bodies. It’s very much part of our lives.“
Gordon’s mom and dad were great influences in Gordon’s and Jackie’s decision to locate permanently in Boca Grande. Gordon had come for short vacations in his youth and even more recently, since the senior Allens, Dick and Nelleke (Petronella), became full-time residents. Health issues forced the senior Allens to move off the island, and Gordon and family came to help them get settled into their new place in Fort Myers.
“That was during the pandemic,” Gordon recalled. “Because things were pretty much shut down everywhere else, we decided to stay. We were able to get the twins into the kindergarten at The Island School, and we were able to have a mostly normal life down here. So we stayed … and it’s been great.”
While the population of Boca Grande tends to be a bit older than Gordon and Jackie, they have found they fit in well. “There are a lot of young people on the island,” Gordon said. “You just have to find them.”
He said being part of The Island School has helped them do that. He observed that they are actually some of the older parents in that group, but age has not been a big factor in their enjoyment of the island.
“Older people can be young, too,” he quipped. “And young people can be old. You find your tribe. It doesn’t matter, really, how old they are. You learn to talk to people and ask questions. And they’ve done things and know things.”
Right now the family is still getting settled in. The kids have made friends, as have Gordon and Jackie.
“There’s a lot to do, a lot of places to experience, so that’s been cool,” he said. “We’re always active, doing something. They want to do things, like gymnastics or play soccer, so you have to leave the island to do those things. Spending time in the car is something to get used to, but you make the most of it.”
Gordon has another skill not everybody knows about – he speaks fluent Dutch. His mother is Dutch, in fact, and he and his brothers grew up speaking it. He and the kids have Dutch citizenship, too. The family traveled to Holland frequently when Gordon was growing up.
“My mom used to take me there; every year we used to spend several weeks there,” he said. “She is one of 15 children, so there is a big family over there. We try to stay connected with them. My wife and I got engaged in Amsterdam. I love it there.”
He also has done a lot of “surf travel” over the years. Surfing has brought him to Mexico, Costa Rica, El Salvadore, Nicaragua, Hawaii and other lands. When he lived in California, he surfed up and down the California coast and has also surfed up and down the country’s East Coast. He has driven back and forth across the country half a dozen times, doing snowboarding and the like.
Gordon said while Oliver loves to paint and create things, his daughter is more into sports. Gordon’s dad was an inventor and created a trunk-mounted bicycle rack for cars – the Allen bike rack.
“So, that sense of creativity is there, in the genes.” Gordon said.
