Marta Becket was a classically trained ballerina who danced on Broadway and at Radio City Music Hall.

Then in 1967 everything changed during a camping trip with her husband in the Mojave Desert. A flat tire forced them to find a garage in Death Valley Junction, a former mining town near the Nevada border.

Becket wandered over to an abandoned social hall and looked inside.

There, in the middle of nowhere, she later wrote, “I had the distinct feeling that I was looking at the other half of myself. The building seemed to be saying, ‘Take me, do something with me, I offer you life.’”

Becket rented the hall for $45 a month, fixed it up, and named it the Amargosa Opera House. It was on this week 50 years ago that she performed her first one-woman show on what became her lifelong stage.

Marta Becket at the Amargosa Opera House. (Amargosa Opera House)

At first, the audiences were sparse.

Then National Geographic, Life, and People magazines visited. News crews stopped by to investigate what kind of person swaps New York City for the salt flats of California. A documentary was made.

“Am I eccentric?” Becket asked in a 1999 interview with the New York Times. “Is it eccentric to love your work so much that you would go anywhere in the world to do it?”

In time, shows sold out at the 120-seat Amargosa, though Becket would perform no matter if the house was full or empty, as if thousands were watching.

After four decades, her knees and hips gave out. She began doing sit-down shows with singing but no dancing. Last year, she died at 92.

The theater is now operated by a nonprofit group. An anniversary program is planned this Saturday. There will be music and dancing. Then a gathering of those Becket inspired will raise glasses of champagne in honor of the dancer in the desert.

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