Educating Rita Lashana Lynch as Frank and Rita. Educating Rita Educating Rita is a stage comedy by British playwright Willy Russell. It is a play for two actors set entirely in the office of an Open University lecturer. Commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company, "Educating Rita" premièred at The Warehouse, London, in June 1980 starring Julie Walters and Mark Kingston. The play was directed by Mike Ockrent. The plays follows the relationship between a 26-year-old Liverpudlian working class hairdresser and Frank, a middle-aged university lecturer, during the course of a year. In the play Frank has no surname, but when the film
Ted Valentine took a class. He began refereeing at kids games, later moving up to junior high and high school games. In 1981, he attended a refereeing camp in Bristol, Connecticut run by NBA Hall of Fame member Dallas Shirley. While there, he poured out a cooler of ice water from a window onto sunbathers below the window. Shirley threw Valentine out of the camp for the stunt. A few months later, Shirley offered him a job as a referee. Valentine worked his first NCAA Division I basketball game in 1981 at the former Baptist College, now Charleston Southern University. He was