I was going through old pictures this morning to delete ones and I deleted this picture, then I undeleted it.

It doesn’t look like much because it is a screen shot from a digitization of an old VCR tape. Holy pixel degradation Batman! However, this picture is a record (fuzzy as it is) of one of my proudest achievements. In university I was blessed with many brilliant friends. One of them was studying computer science and music. Chatting one day I said: “Hey, we should write a musical”. He said: “YES!!!!” (like actually with that much enthusiasm). We compared schedules, picked one afternoon we both had free and committed to meet each week.

I had a couple of tunes banging around in my head and a rough story idea. The summer before I had been tree planting. In order to help battle the mind numbing boredom of that job (don’t get me wrong, I actually loved tree planting, mind numbing boredom is ripe ground for creativity) I had written some tree planting showtunes. Included in that ‘show’ was “On the Other Side of the Great Divide”, written on the side of a washed out back road as we were realizing that the recent rain was going to play havoc with our only day off. Showtunes tell a story (something I have always loved to do) and really the music is secondary (apologies to Sondheim et al.)

I can read music and carry a tune and have sung in choirs so I know what songs feel like. My friend could actually play/write music, transcribe and orchestrate; we were a dynamic duo. The show (around 30 minutes, just right for small student theater festivals) was finished, cast by an eager band of first and second year students and we went to production. No budget at all but tons of enthusiasm. And… what fun we had.

This musical is grounded in another fundamental turning point of my life, maybe that is partly why it still holds such an important placeholder in my own personal history. My father took his life just three weeks before opening night. Remarkably, the timing is one of the reasons why his suicide hasn’t marked my life with trauma. Why? He was looking forward to coming to see the production, he had been talking with my mom about this in the days just before. I know that his moment of decision was not grounded in despair because he was actively planning for this future event. He just didn’t quite make it. (Context: Suicide runs in our family, we’ve had three generations of practice dealing and processing. Lots of practice. There is sadness. I usually can’t tell the story without crying, I’m crying right now, but it is loving, joyful, memory filled crying, not traumatic or despairing. Make sense? It’s complicated and I’m happy to talk about it anytime but this post isn’t really about that story.)

This post is about Gotta’ Get Knocked Up. This post is about growing up in a small town, taking risks, being creative, and spending time with amazing people. If you have 30 minutes to spare and a very small screen (really there aren’t enough pixels here for more than about a 7 inch screen) I recommend it. But then I’m biased.

Part 2

Just before the pandemic in the first week of March 2020 I was helping with my school’s musical. At the end of a big production of Chicago I was chatting with some students about the next musical. I said: “Hey, we should write a musical.” And they said: “Yes!!!”, again, lots of enthusiasm. Sound familiar? History repeating itself? COVID hit, we all went home, I didn’t see those kids again. I sort of thought that comment had been drowned in the wave of world chaos until I got an email at the end of the summer. A small group of students had been meeting online all summer and had a full story outline, characters developed, and a potential song list. We met on the grass outside of the school, carefully spaced out by 2 meters, and they pitched it. Frankly, I was pretty nervous. They had put a lot of work into this already with no teacher eyes on it. The potential for disaster was high. Good news?! It was brilliant.

Over the next school year we met once a week online and continued to develop the script. The original idea had been to use already produced songs and string a story between them. I contacted my friend David Hein (half of the famous duo behind Come From Away) to ask what the legalities would be and he encouraged us to write our own songs. The kids were nervous at first but decided to give it a shot. The script came together, we wrote some songs, the year ended. That was June 2021. This school year was almost more chaotic with changing regulations and expectations and little progress was made but next year we have a date – in November – to preview Secrets! The Origional Musical. Hope to see you all there 🙂

…try new things, fix stuff, get your hands dirty, read about everything and live life the most that you possibly can while still being as kind as possible – to people and to the world around you.