Ashley Boling
By Matthew Beaudin

How about we meet at 5:30 for dinner. Cocina?” I email to Ashley Boling, whom I was to write about and didn’t know well.

His response: “Good Matt, 5:30 p.m. at La Cocina it is. I’ll be the one in the metallic-gold, low-rise, mesh thong. See you tomorrow, Ashley.”

He walks in fully clothed, showing not even a smidgen of skin. “Where’s the thong?” I ask. “I’m wearing it,” he says, deadpan. Maybe he is: The word on the street is that Boling is game for most anything, and his repertoire ranges from burlesque for bachelorette parties to making fake snow in the middle of the night for TV commercials.

Wherever Boling is, there’s bound to be action. Local thespian and general comedic personality Jeb Berrier recalls an evening in which he, Boling and others were on tour, doing children’s theater. They were in Lake City, Colorado, staying in a room at a church. They found some Cremora—non-dairy, powdered coffee creamer—and somehow determined that Cremora is flammable when sprinkled over an open flame. “The flames were literally five feet high. It was kind of like when you take a can of WD-40 and hold a lighter to it.” Berrier recalls.

Call Boling funny. Call him a performer. Or just call him what he is: “I’m a ham,” he says. “I like having an audience…I guess I’ve been acting my whole life. Or acting out.”

Boling’s audience is never far. Over his years in Telluride, he’s acted as Mountainfilm On Tour’s director, worked for the Ah Haa School and spent summers as a Telluride Academy instructor. For the last six years, he and Berrier have taken the stage to emcee the Telluride Blues and Brews Festival in September, and Boling has performed in over 50 local shows, including every Shakespeare production the Telluride Repertory Theatre Company has performed since 1991. Currently, he is the executive director at the Telluride Institute, a non-profit organization that works with communities, businesses, and the public sector to map a progressive future. In this role, Boling aims to “promote a more sustainable community” and educate Telluriders about the regional watershed.

This Renaissance man also fills a KOTO DJ slot, “The Nocturnal Emission,” which began years ago as an all-nighter when the radio station lacked an autopilot system—meaning when the last DJ crawled into bed, so did the music. But Boling, a can-do kind of guy, saddled himself with the task of emitting music into what was normally dead air, every Monday night from midnight to 6 a.m. These days, his show plays every other Saturday at 9 p.m. He says he plays “both kinds of music,” implying country and western. “I’m kidding, of course,” he says. “I’m not wild about gangster rap, and I’m not wild about country.” Listeners know that his true affinity is reviving the beat of the ’80s.

From the Institute to the Ah Haa, he likes all his work. “I do a bunch of different stuff,” he says. “It’s been an education and an evolution for me.” Seventeen years in Telluride has given him plenty of time to “evolve.” Boling didn’t know he was moving here when he drove from Alexandria, Virginia, in 1990. “I thought I might spend a month,” he says. He slept at some friends’ parents’ condo. They left to go back to grad school. He didn’t follow. “And they’re both intensely jealous that I stayed,” he says.

He and his wife, Suzan Beraza—one of Telluride Repertory Theatre’s three founders—have a four-year-old son, Lochlan. The boy seems to take after his parents with a flair for the dramatic: He began to enter the world when Boling was rehearsing for his role as the prince in Romeo and Juliet. “Our son was born at 3:52 the next morning,” Boling says. Lochlan, then only seven days old, made the fourth night of his father’s performance. “I think he slept through the whole thing,” Boling admits.

Boling didn’t discover the stage until 1991 when he heard a call for auditions for Sweeny Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street on KOTO radio. His high school had no drama department, and not knowing what he was missing, he hit the books and lettered in track and basketball. Later, at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, he studied history.

With a penchant for the past, Boling operates Historic Tours of Telluride. Donning a cowboy hat and kerchief, his guided walk explores the historic neighborhoods and characters of the town’s boom and bust past, including bank robberies, mine strikes and the illicit affairs of the working girls in the red-light district.

Boling has toyed with the idea of leaving Telluride: Purportedly, he and Beraza were close once to fleeing the country “when Bush was reelected,” he claims, but aside from political embarrassment, there’s never been any reason to move. It’s the friendships and the culture that keep him here. “I hate to say ‘never,’ but I feel like we’ve got a taproot here in Telluride,” he says. “I’ll be here for a while, unless something better comes along.”

He likes that town is full of “real people who can be themselves and feel good about being themselves and not care about what they wear because they’ve got substance.” “People can let their freak flag fly,” he says of Telluride. “I’m turned on by that. I love to see freaks.”