CHUCK KING / PVT Marta, above, discusses her opera work with friend Lois Aden. CHUCK KING / PVT Marta, above, discusses her opera work with friend Lois Aden. CHUCK KING / PVT Marta, above, discusses her opera work with friend Lois Aden. CHUCK KING / PVT Tom "Wiglet" Willet stayed by Marta's side. Advertisement

It was 1941. World War II had just begun, and Marta Becket's mother decides to pull her from high school so she could earn a living dancing to support them both. Marta is 16.

The decision is fine with Marta, she's already decided to devote her life to dancing.

She began her career performing in small nightclubs in New York, Brooklyn and the Bronx on the old and almost dead vaudeville circuit and eventually she auditioned for and was accepted by the corps de ballet at Radio City Music Hall.

Marta has a number of memorable performances to her credit. Among them, the revival of the Rogers and Hammerstein musical, "Showboat," in 1946 and in 1951, and George Abbot and Herb Ross' "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" with Shirley Booth.

With the closing of that show, Marta created her own repertoire of choreography consisting of Oriental fairy tales and fables. She longed to take her own show on the road and hoped to someday have the chance. However, to pay the bills, she performed on television and used her talent as an artist to illustrate two books on dance.

Wanting to leave the ups and downs of Broadway, Marta signed a three-year contract to perform her own choreography of Oriental fairy tales and fables.

She was not only establishing herself as a dancer, she was making herself known as an artist as well.

Two large, successful galleries had attempted to set up one-woman shows of her work. It wasn't meant to be.

In 1963, the Waverly Gallery of Washington Square enthusiastically prepared a showing of her art. The date for the grand opening was Nov. 23, 1963, and the death of President Kennedy silenced any such endeavor.

In 1965, Marta was prepared for another grand opening of her portfolio at the Carnegie Hall Gallery. While putting the finishing touches on her hanging, the gallery was thrown into the great New York City Blackout of Nov. 10. That show never happened either.

In 1959, she met and married Tom Williams. With an advertising background, she felt he would be an asset to her career and he seemed genuinely interested in promoting her. For seven years they toured America. By January of 1967, Williams had been able to book a meager 21 concerts that would take them West.

Before they left, a friend hosted a send-off party at the home of a psychic, who read Marta's future.

The fortune teller said this would be Marta's last tour, that she would be leaving New York City and moving to a very distant rural setting. She said the letter "A" was meaningful and that she would accomplish the most important work of her life.

Marta was confused. The only work she could see herself doing in a rural setting was farming and why on earth would she stop dancing to take up farming?

But the fortune teller wasn't wrong.

This tour would in fact, be her last, and as Easter week approached, Marta and Tom camped at Death Valley. It was a good opportunity, they thought, to do their taxes. Death Valley Junction was the closest inhabited place and while her husband had a tire fixed, Marta explored the old town.

Coming to what appeared to be the only unused building in town, Marta discovered the next phase of her life.

"Hypnotically I was drawn to this structure," she said. "By now I'd forgotten all about the flat tire, and I had completely forgotten where we were going next. I walked over to this building, afraid to take my eyes off of it lest it should disappear."

She peered through cracks in a door and in an epiphany she saw the rest of her life.

What Marta was looking at was Corkhill Hall, the social center of Death Valley Junction, built in 1925 by Pacific Coast Borax. The building had been abandoned in 1948.

On Feb. 10, 1968, Marta Becket performed for the first time to an audience of 12 local people.

After that auspicious opening, the audience dwindled, but Marta persevered, often performing to an empty theater.

In the fall of 1969, she was halfway through one such performance when the door opened to a writer and photographer for National Geographic. They had come to do a story on Death Valley Monument and Marta became a large part of that story in the January 1970 edition.

Trials and tribulations always happen for a reason, and during a flood clean-up Marta looked at the blank walls of the theater and envisioned an audience. That moment inspired her to devote four years to paint the walls and another four years to paint the ceiling, all in 16th century Spanish.

In 1983 the structures were listed on the National Register of Historic Places by the United States Department of the Interior.

For almost 40 years Marta has been performing at the Amargosa Opera House, and for most of those years the shows played three times a week. She performed in spite of bad weather, power outages, personal problems, through illness and regardless of the size of her audience.

She performed alone for the first 14 years, playing all the characters herself until she was joined by Tom "Wiglet" Willet, who was by her side until his unexpected death in April 2004.

She continued performing "en pointe" until she was 81.

Today Marta is 83 and she sits on the stage, sings songs from past performances, all a cappella, talks about the murals and talks about her life.

She has been the focus of newspaper and magazine articles in almost every country in the world, and she has been filmed countless times, including a documentary produced in 1999 about her life. "Amargosa" by Tripple Play Productions was nominated for an Oscar in 2000. It did win an Emmy Award.

The autobiography, "To Dance on Sands," was published by Stephens Media and is in its second printing.

Every Saturday evening from October to mid-May, the house is packed and reservations are recommended for the performances.

The 40-year anniversary of Marta Becket's Amargosa Opera House performances will be celebrated Saturday, Feb. 9.

Tickets are $15 per person, $12 per child ages five to 12, and tickets should be picked-up at the hotel desk by 7:30 p.m.

The doors open at 7:45 p.m. for photos before the performance begins promptly at 8:15 p.m.

Call 760-852-4441 for more information and reservations.