Performer Bill Jenkins

Though it’s pretty typical for an up-and-coming actor to wait tables on the side, Bill Jenkins is no starving artist. The seasoned performer picked up a job at Dixie House in the early 1980s, when he came to Dallas to begin his acting career. “I like it because people come there for the food, not to be seen or entertained. I do that in another aspect of my life,” he says. Jenkins has acted on the small and large screen and performed in various plays, including the Dallas Children’s Theater production of To Kill a Mockingbird and a one-man-show as Davy Crockett at the Texas State Fair. You also may have seen him as Director of Milk Operations in Borden’s ongoing television commercials, or waving at you from the back of a Macaroni Grill delivery truck. “I get paid to be happy or sorrowful, or lost or confused,” he says of his various on-stage appearances and advertising stints. However, Jenkins most enjoys performing for a live audience. “It’s more my art than it is anybody else’s. When I’m finished with it, it’s pretty much my little baby,” he says. Catch Jenkins between auditions at Dixie House in Lakewood Shopping Center or watch him in the Bath House Cultural Center’s “The Play about the Baby” opening in late October.