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NOTED PSYCHOLOGIST LEADS DOUBLE LIFE AS PACKER PLAYWRIGHT
Passengers flying this fall from San Francisco to Green Bay, Wisconsin may find themselves sitting next to a guy with two names and two lives.
In California he's known as Dr. Frederick Heide. He lives in Berkeley and for two decades has taught at the California School of Professional Psychology, America's largest graduate psychology training program.
 But in Wisconsin, he's known to thousands of fans as Doc Heide. There he acts, sings and writes shows for American Folklore Theatre (AFT), an acclaimed professional troupe he co-founded.
Normally Heide keeps these two lives relatively separate. He teaches psychology during the academic year, then drives to Wisconsin to perform during the summer.
But this fall, the two lives will intertwine. Heide will teach on Tuesdays in the San Francisco Bay Area. Then he'll fly 5000 miles a week back and forth to his hometown of Green Bay to perform in a show he co-authored about his hometown football team.
The show, "Packer Fans From Outer Space", will run for three weeks in the newly restored 985-seat Meyer Theatre in downtown Green Bay.
Written with AFT colleague Lee Becker, the show has already been seen by over 25,000 fans at AFT's summer theatre in Door County, where it has won rave reviews from local critics and the Packers themselves.
Writing a Packer musical is a far cry from Heide's writing in psychology, which has been published in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, Psychophysiology, Psychology Today, and elsewhere.
"Both types of writing require you to consider what makes people tick," said Heide. But he's found it more fun to write for the stage. "Professional psychology journals rarely publish articles about green-and-gold spacemen or talking footballs," he says.
In "Packer Fans From Outer Space", Heide plays the pivotal role of Harvey Kiester, Earth's biggest Packer fan. When Packer-loving aliens beg him to save their planet from marauding Space Bears, Harvey runs the risk of being hospitalized by his wife who thinks he's lost his mind.
Heide, 51, suspects his acting experience has made him a better professor. "Acting demands that you be interesting at every moment," he says, "whereas normally I'm only interesting a few times a month". At his school, he has won both the Master Teacher and Teacher of the Year Awards.
Heide and colleague Lee Becker have bridged the worlds of acting and psychology by teaching improvisation to psychotherapists through the Medical College of Wisconsin. “The great therapists were all improvisers,” Heide maintains.
This year marks Heide’s 30th anniversary onstage in Door County.
How did a psychology professor wind up performing professionally for tens of thousands of people each year?
As a college sophomore at UW-Green Bay, Heide joined a new university-sponsored folksinging and acting troupe called the Heritage Ensemble.
Though he'd never studied theatre, Heide was hired by the group because, he says, "they wanted to do folksongs and I was the only guy in the group who owned a guitar."
He wrote his first show for the troupe as a senior honors project before graduating summa cum laude in 1974.
While pursuing a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Pennsylvania State University, Heide returned home to Wisconsin in the summers to perform with the Heritage Ensemble in Door County's Peninsula State Park.
He loved the combination of history and folk music so much that, when offered a psychology professorship in Berkeley, he insisted that he have summers free to be onstage in Wisconsin.
The Heritage Ensemble eventually evolved into AFT in 1990. As co-founder, Heide was part of an artistic team that helped build the obscure troupe into one described recently by Money Magazine as among the best regional theatres in the country.
Heide credits fellow co-founder Fred Alley for much of the troupe's success.
"Fred worked so hard he made Hercules look like a slacker," Heide commented. In 2001 Alley won the Richard Rodgers Award for Best American Musical for his Off-Broadway hit, "The Spitfire Grill." He died that year from an undiagnosed heart ailment at age 38.
“Packer Fans” director Jeff Herbst has also been a huge influence on Heide. “He taught me to listen onstage and to honor the story,” the actor/playwright says.
With Alley and others, Heide has authored or co-authored at least 15 musicals. Among them is the long-running hit “Belgians In Heaven,” a show Heide describes as “a metaphysical cheese curd musical.”
But "Packer Fans From Outer Space" has been the show that has brought him closest to his roots in Green Bay.
Raised in central Wisconsin, Heide moved to Green Bay with his family in 1966, at the peak of the Packer's glory years under Vince Lombardi.
More inclined toward academics than football, Heide was valedictorian at Green Bay's East High. He loved playing saxophone in the East High marching band, unaware that he was trodding the same field the Packers had used for their home games until 1957.
Heide can hardly believe he will be given the opportunity to perform for almost a thousand people a night in his hometown this fall.
He expects that commuting to his West Coast psychology job will be stressful.
"But if I have a nervous breakdown," he says, "at least I'm professionally qualified to shrink my own head."
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