STORY AND PHOTO BY KAREN BOSSICK

Kathy Wygle and her sister Patsy Wygle have been named the Grand Marshals for the 2019 Wagon Days Parade.

The grand dames of theater in Ketchum, the two were mainstays at the nexStage Theatre before it gave way to the Argyros Performing Arts Center, which opened in November 2018.

Kathy Wygle first made her mark on the culture of Ketchum at the long-gone Creekside Restaurant in Warm Springs where she welcomed many a traveling troubadour to the valley.

In 1977 she founded Laughing Stock Theatre, which paraded a variety of classics ranging from “Oliver” to Agatha Christie’s “Ten Little Indians” across the stage way before Company of Fools and The Spot had hung their shingles.

Eventually, Kathy was asked to manage the nexStage Theater and she worked hard to provide the community with a venue for plays, dance performances, film festivals, lectures, fashion shows and other fundraisers and even quinceanera celebrations and dances put on by the Latino community.

It was she who talked Tim and Mary Mott into pledging a million dollars to buy the theater when it risked being sold to developers in the late 1990s.

Patsy Wygle, another one of the four Wygle sisters who lives in the valley, is a professional actress who returned to Sun Valley from New York with her husband Keith Moore to help produce plays and cabarets nearly 20 years ago.

She taught the Laughingstock Theater summer camps, along with Kathy, and also served a stint at Sun Valley Community School, where she directed young thespians there.

The two also have been involved with the nexStage play reading series.

The Wagon Days Parade, also known as The Big Hitch, will be held Aug. 31.