A long time ago in a galaxy not so far away…
It’s just before 2pm on a summer Sunday in 1994 at a turn-of-the-last-Century movie theater deep in the Colorado Rocky Mountains. Standing offstage left, there’s a nervous guy in a tuxedo: me. The carbon-arc projectors here aren’t burning this afternoon, and a much-the-worse-for-wear red velvet curtain covers the genuine silver screen with its thousands of slightly-larger-than-pinholes that let sound pass through from the ancient speaker array, long fallen into disrepair, that lurks behind the movie screen.
There’s a dry, dusty mustiness to this backstage and, unlike so many other backstages in my life up to then, this one felt electrified by the ghosts of thousands of movies and plays and musicians from the past. I couldn’t know it then, but George Winston would soon come here to perform, practice, and rehearse - not his New Age famous compositions which were so in vogue back in the 1990s, but his New Orleans first loves.
Standing alone on the stage is a baby grand piano, hauled from more than 100 miles away in a trailer and set up here for the weekend run of my new show: For the Love of Music. The piano mover, who is also a piano tuner, has wrested the most equal temperament he can from the rusty strings and creaky pins of this living, breathing antique, and, in a few moments, someone is going to bring the house lights down and crank up the 50-year-old stage lights, which hopefully won’t heat up the piano too much and warp it out of tune before the show is over.
Even though this matinee is a premiere performance, it is also a moment of truth in the journey of my lifetime that began some thirty years ago as I write this mid-2023, and it will give form and purpose to everything that will happen over the next thirty years.
It’s what I can now call “my Musimorphic journey.”
Your invitation
You’re welcome to follow along…or not. It’s nice to be able to write this finally, and more excellent still if you want to read it. Please consider this a polite invitation to be in the audience, heckle the performer if you like, follow the story, laugh and cry along with me and the music…or not.
I hope you’ll join me and For the Love of Music as we journey together through what brought me to that theater that afternoon and what has carried me beyond it and up to the present day.
PS: Why Substack?
I’ve given the way I communicate much thought over the years. From stuffing and mailing envelopes to blog posts to long-form articles, video essays, podcasts, and other modern media, nothing really communicates like the written word. Substack is one of the best ways writers can make that process easy for readers, so here I am. Along with you. Let’s journey together.