Announcing the 2014-2015 Williamston Theatre Season!

Posted on by

I’m really excited about our lineup for next season! Comedy, drama, murders, World Premiers, Michigan Premiers, it’s going to be terrific!

The Gravedigger: A Frankenstein Story

A World Premiere by Joseph Zettelmaier
September 25 – November 2, 2014
Directed by John Lepard
Set in the late 1700s, in one of Bavaria’s forgotten cemeteries, a lone gravedigger finds a hideously scarred man hiding in a freshly dug grave. Thus begins a journey of discovery and friendship, leading to a crossroads where both men face their shared past. From the writer of Ebenezer, And The Creek Don’t Rise, and It Came From Mars, comes a seasonally haunting tale of pursuing the monster within.

Miracle on South Division Street

by Tom Dudzik
November 28 – December 28, 2014
Directed by Rob Roznowski
Meet the Nowaks of Buffalo, NY. Clara and her three grown kids have always known they were special, ever since the miraculous night in 1942 when the Blessed Mother appeared to Grandpa in his barbershop. Since then, Clara and her three children have kept the faith and tended to Grandpa’s sidewalk shrine, which has been a beacon of hope to the neighbors and given prestige to the family. The entire family’s faith is shaken to the very core when a deathbed confession causes the local legend to unravel. This charming tale of family, legacy and tolerance will bring warmth to your heart this holiday season.

The Best Brothers

by Daniel MacIvor
January 29 – March 1, 2015
Directed by Lynn Lammers
After losing their free-spirited mother in a freak accident, brothers Kyle and Hamilton Best have to find a way to work together to make the final arrangements. In the bustle of obituary-writing, eulogy-giving, and dog-sitting, sibling rivalry quickly reaches its peak and years of buried contentions surface. As each struggles to understand the other, the brothers begin to see more deeply into themselves and the unconventional woman who gave them life. The Best Brothers is a bittersweet comedy from one of Canada’s most beloved playwrights that explores the many ways in which we grieve, and the love we find in unexpected places.

Sirens

by Deborah Zoe Laufer
A collaboration with the MSU Department of Theatre
March 26 – April 26, 2015
Directed by Tony Caselli
When Sam first fell in love with Rose he wrote her a song — a song that has been covered by every recording artist and translated into every language. For twenty-five years, Sam has been trying to write the next song – to no avail. When the couple decides to celebrate their silver wedding anniversary with a cruise in the Mediterranean, Sam hears the most beautiful music he’s ever heard and, in an attempt to capture it, jumps overboard. As he grapples with the legacy of his song, and a temptress of Greek mythology, he struggles to find a way home and to win back his wife. Out of a contemporary love story that grapples with the terrors of middle age, and the tortures of creative failure, comes a mystical expedition to find home.

Outside Mullingar

by John Patrick Shanley
A Michigan Premiere
May 21 – June 21, 2015
Directed by John Seibert
Anthony and Rosemary are two introverted misfits straddling 40. Anthony has spent his entire life on a cattle farm in rural Ireland, a state of affairs that—due to his painful shyness—suits him well. Rosemary lives right next door, determined to have him, watching the years slip away. With Anthony’s father threatening to disinherit him and a land feud simmering between their families, Rosemary has every reason to fear romantic catastrophe. Their journey is heartbreaking, funny as hell, and ultimately deeply moving. From the Pulitzer, Oscar and Tony-award winning creator of Doubt comes a delightful new work about how it’s never too late to take a chance on love.

The Art of Murder

by Joe DiPietro
July 16 – August 23, 2015
Directed by Tobin Hissong
In a remote estate in the countryside of Connecticut, Jack Brooks, one of the most accomplished and eccentric painters of his generation, awaits the imminent arrival of his art dealer with his devoted wife Annie. But the visit is not a standard one. Wronged feelings, a quest for revenge and years of dishonesty threaten to blow apart Jack’s carefully constructed web of lies and deceit. In the 2000 Edgar Award Winner for Best Mystery Play, passion ignites all the players in this chess game. Who will be the last one standing?

Hi Blog, We Meet Again…

Posted on by

Well, it’s been 4 and 1/2 months since I’ve written here.  This will be a long entry about why. 🙂

Many of you who read this blog regularly already know, but for those who don’t, from January 19th to April 1st I was in the hospital.  The last post on my blog leads right into this one, because I was writing about fighting illness, and 2 days later I collapsed and was taken to the ER.  It turns out that some of the problems I was having were due, at least in part, to bacterial meningitis.  While in the hospital, the bacterial meningitis caused my brain to swell up, and my breathing trouble turned into pneumonia.  The pneumonia turned into Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome, and they wound up putting me in an induced coma state, which I was in for 4 and 1/2 or 5 weeks.

Waking up was a slow process.  I started to wake up around the 28th of February, my wife Jeanne says, but there was about a week or so where I was awake but not very responsive, but slowly started asking some questions and responding to some questions with witty one-liners , but shortly after that I got a secondary infection that wiped me out for a couple more days, and I don’t really have any clear recollection of anything until early March when I started to become a little more lucid.  Once they’d determined that I hadn’t suffered any brain damage from the bacterial meningitis they started me on a series of different rehabilitation therapies (physical therapy, occupational therapy, speech therapy, swallow studies, things like that) which I did for a while in the acute care ward, and then moved to the rehab ward for a couple more weeks of PT and OT.

Shortly before being released back into the wild on April 1st, Jeanne helped me post on Facebook – what I wrote is here, if you’re interested.

Once I got home, I spent a month going to out-patient physical therapy, which I finished in early May.  I’m still going to dialysis 3 times a week, due to the damage my kidneys took during my illness.  There’s still hope they could rebound and heal themselves, but right now we have to move forward as though I’ll need dialysis forever, just to be safe.

SO.  Life has changed a lot in the last 4 and 1/2 months since my last blog post!  🙂  Now I’m doing physical therapy exercises at home and lots of walking to try and get my strength back.  I’m almost to the point where I don’t need a nap daily.  I’m using my cane for walking less, and soon won’t need it (although everyone wants me to get a cool cane with a sword in it!).  My kids can still beat me in arm wrestling, and we’ve had to buy me new pants because I lost 47 pounds in the hospital!  Still, life is darned good.  I’m slowly starting to do some work back at the theatre, getting better at the new diet I’ve got to live by, and trying to gain some muscle weight back!

This has been the most amazing experience, even though there is a huge part of it that I have no recollection of at all.  (I remember Jeanne taking me into the Emergency Room on January 19th, and I threw up.  The next clear memory I have is waking up in early March with people looking down at me, wondering what happened.)  During the time I was down, my family and I received the most amazing amount of support and love from friends and family… it was, and continues to be, simply overwhelming.  Cards, food, messages, chores, errands, money, prayer quilts, helping with kids and their travel needs, the list goes on and on.  My friend Emily started a thing called “Team Tony”, and created a t-shirt with my image on it for people to buy as a fundraiser to help my family cover medical bills.  That took off and, amazingly, 693 shirts were sold and $14,000 was raised.  Everyone started posting pictures of themselves wearing their Team Tony shirts, and it was the most wonderful, uplifting thing in the universe to wake up in the hospital and have my wife and family share this amazing outpouring of generosity and love with me.  I truly believe this massive positive energy helped me recover and heal, and it’s been the most life changing experience in the world – I’m so incredibly grateful.

So.  This is the longest post ever.  I’ll end it here.  But I’m hoping to be posting a lot more regularly – this experience has been such an eye-opening journey.  I have so many people to thank, and so much more I’m looking forward to sharing about it and, to be honest, I’m still processing it all.  Not a day goes by that I don’t re-realize how lucky I am to be here right now, and how all of this time with my family and friends is a gift that I almost didn’t get.

It’s good to be back.

Okay 2014, let’s shape up a little.

Posted on by

 

It’s been a while since I wrote on here about the adventures of Wheezy McCoughCough, The Bronchospasm Kid.
(I think the last couple times were here and  here, if you’re interested.)

Some of that is because I didn’t feel like using this site to complain about health issues, and some is, well, I guess that’s really the reason!  The last few weeks have been a challenge, though, and I feel like it’s worth writing about.

Just after Christmas, I was hit by another bout of breathing issues, (wheezing, coughing, bronchospasm, fever, chills, shortness of breath) which knocked me flat on my behind for a while and, unfortunately, kept me there more or less since then.  I’ve had better and worse days, and managed to fit in a fair amount of work, but the last two weeks have been particularly hard.  I’ve felt sort of like this:

hurlinggnome

 

 

Well, I guess I haven’t felt exactly like that, since that’s a fictitional gnome hurling rainbows.  I pretty much just wanted to use that image, because no matter how lousy I’m feeling it cheers me up a little.
(And the video of it is even funnier, if you’re interested!)

My doctors, thankfully, are working diligently with me and I am eternally grateful for the awesomeness of my wife, kids and co-workers who have helped me.

It’s very hard for me to lay on the couch taking medicines wondering why I can’t breathe and not be doing something at the theatre.  I dunno, I’m a little bit of a control freak, I like to make sure things are happening, but I also love my job.  At the same time, if I’m not there I feel like I’m letting people down.  Thankfully, my friends at the theatre can certainly run the thing without me for a while.  If that wasn’t the case, we would’ve been doing something wrong these last 8 years.  But at the same time, I don’t like feeling useless, or like I’m putting the burden of what I should be doing to earn my paycheck on everyone else.

Still, the lesson here is “When your doctor tells you to rest, and your wife tells you to rest, and your coworkers and friends tell you to rest… You should shut up and rest.”

So, I will.  And I’ll be grateful for the amazing people and opportunities in my life… and I’ll hope that the cure to whatever this medical mystery tour I’ve been on the last year presents itself soon.

In the meantime, everybody have a great start to 2014, and take care of your health!  🙂

 

The light of a thousand suns: A short story.

Posted on by

So, sometimes you have to go to the eye doctor, and they warn you:  “We’re going to dilate your eyes.  You’re going to need sunglasses after your appointment, or driving will be a challenge.”

I don’t wear sunglasses.  I wear regular glasses, but I’ve never worn sunglasses.  I guess the sun doesn’t bother me?  I dunno, maybe I’m just a guy who squints a lot when he’s outside and never realized it… I also don’t even remember the last time I had my eyes dilated, but I’m assuming I must have at some point.  I take their warning seriously.

So, anyway, I find out yesterday I’m going to need sunglasses, so I borrow some from my family.  Now, I have a wife and two teenaged kids, so my options weren’t awesome, if you know what I mean.  Plus, I needed a big pair, to go OVER my regular glasses.

So, this morning, I’m at the eye-doctor, and after all the testing they remind me “Your eyes are still dilated a little, make sure you use sunglasses to drive!”  I say, “You bet!”, but as I’m walking through the hallway the light’s not bothering my eyes, and I think maybe I’ll be fine.

I head outside.

Now, on a normal day, the sun is pretty bright.

Today, however, it’s particularly sunny.  Also, I realized about 1/2 second too late: the world is covered in days worth of record-breaking snowfall, making every possible surface a giant mirror.  A giant mirror designed to do one thing:  Reflect a million gajillion searing little laser beams of doom from every possible angle directly into my dilated, wide and willing eyeballs.

It’s interesting.  I don’t REMEMBER crouching at the base of the building in a fetal position with my arms wrapped around my head, but that’s the first place I actually remember *being* when I could think again.  I’m not sure if I fell there, or if I flung myself there in a protective flailing attempt at not having my head explode.  As I slowly regained my senses, I remember thinking several things at once:  1) Am I crying or are my eyes watering enough to flood my shirt? 2) Where is my ibuprofen?, 3) Is this how things in a microwave feel? and 4) Is my car close enough to crawl to, or am I going to have to stand up?

And that’s the story of how I spent part of the day driving around absolutely ROCKING a pair of oversized Hot Pink Sunglasses.  LIKE A BOSS.

A New Year’s Eve Pic Post!

Posted on by

A bunch of random things from the last couple weeks of 2013!

20131231-223036.jpg
Mike Tyson, apparently, wants us to have a nice Christmas.

20131231-223159.jpg
We had a bunch of family time – here Max and his cousin Jamis are about to unleash Nerf Warfare on the rest of us… Unexplainably topless.

20131231-223346.jpg
We got some snow! I love a white Christmas!

20131231-223519.jpg
For a fun change of Christmas Eve, we went out for Chinese food. (We did our usual traditional big family dinner earlier in the week!)

20131231-223722.jpg
Christmas morning aftermath!

20131231-223848.jpg
My awesome coworkers at Williamston Theatre at our staff Christmas Lunch!

20131231-224426.jpg
Any “Cards Against Humanity” fans out there? They had a great “12 Days Of Christmas” thing this year you could sign up for… This was my final gift! So fun!

And, finally, I just like this a lot:

20131231-224057.jpg
Happy Holidays everyone!

A nice early gift.

Posted on by

With family scattered all over, sometimes the act of getting everyone together can be a challenging task that happens a lot more rarely than we’d appreciate.

This week, my parents came up from Florida for the holidays.  They spent a couple days with us, and then we all piled in the car to make the drive to my brother’s house in Orchard Park, NY.  My brother Dominic and his wife and kids moved there this Spring for his job, and so our family is more separated around the country than we’ve ever been.

As we drove the 6+ hour drive, the sun set and the weather got a little rainy.  It was a very fun family trip, lots of laughing, games were played, and as we were passing through Pennsylvania it occurred to me that it had been many, many years since I’d had a long car trip with my parents.  And now that my kids are getting older, who knows how many more Jeanne and I will have with them.

So, I was driving… and there was this wonderful, perfect moment.  My daughter, tired like teenagers get, was sleeping and gently snoring in her seat.  My mom was reading, quietly engrossed in her book.  My wife and son were in the far back seats, watching (for the first time ever) episodes of Firefly on the DVD player and wearing the headphones so that, although we couldn’t hear the show, we could hear them laughing and exclaiming things to each other as they watched.  My dad and I were talking as I drove, just chatting about life and health and schedules and a million things.   Just as we came to a lull in the conversation, something happened on Firefly that got Jeanne and Max laughing, and they shared a look and a moment that I caught in the rear-view mirror, and as their laughter settled Maggie sighed loudly and contentedly in her sleep.  I looked back at my Dad, and he was just smiling, looking out the window, as my mom continued reading.  That little moment, all of us together, headed to spend time with more family, was just perfect.  Then, of course, it faded away – I had to change lanes, we started chatting again, snacks were passed around, and we continued down the expressway on our journey.

But that moment – I’ll hold onto that for a long time.  Who knows if we’ll get one of those again.

That’s the best gift I could’ve asked for this season.

Five Things Friday!

Posted on by

It’s Five Things Friday!

SO: 5 random things from my life:

1)  When I was a little boy, I used to play the accordion.  It was almost as big as me.

2) Most days of the week, I have an ongoing “group text message” going with my younger brother and sister that is normally pretty hilarious. Say what you will about the pros and cons of texting, but I love that – although we all live far apart – we can still chat and make each other laugh this way.  dtgfunny

 

 

 

 

 

 

3)  My first car was a fire-engine-red Ford Pinto.  I loved that car.  One time when driving it, the stick shift came right out of the floor in my hand.  I handed it to my buddy Spencer, who was riding with me, and said “Here, hold this” and then drove about a mile back home in 2nd gear!

4)  I wore a bow-tie to kindergarten.  A clip-on one.  Nearly every day.  Because I wanted to.

5)  I have a tattoo.  It says “Maggie” and “Max” in a band around my upper right arm.

 

 

“Over The River And Through The Woods”

Posted on by

We opened our latest show at Williamston Theatre this weekend, and I couldn’t be happier with it.  It’s a piece that I love, because it’s all about a big Italian family, it’s very funny and very sweet, and it takes me back to my Grandma Caselli’s house when I was a kid!

We’ve been fortunate in that audiences are loving the piece as well.  It’s one of those plays that makes you both laugh and get a little weepy, it feels just right for this time of year, and the cast is fabulous.  We’ve gotten some great reviews so far, too:

MODOReview
Encore Michigan
Lansing Online News

“Over the River and Through the Woods” is a show that is a generous serving of laughter spiced with tears, longing, sadness and pure delight at all the wonderful things that family can be. It may not talk about the holidays at all, but it has the heart of the holidays. It is about the ways we love each other, grow away from each other and always carry with us the gift of where we came from.” – Bridgette Redman, Encore Michigan

EM_2150_OverRev

SO Much To Be Thankful For!

Posted on by

Happy Thanksgiving!  Here in the USA, it’s a great day to take a look at and appreciate all the reasons we have to be thankful.

And boy oh boy, do I have things to be thankful for…

IMG_3772

 

 

 

 

 

 

First and Foremost – these three people!  Just look at how awesome they are.  I am constantly amazed at how strong, talented, thoughtful and wonderful they are.

My parents and brother and sister, my whole extended family and in-laws.

The amazing technology that lets my family stay in touch and talk/text/share photos daily, even though now we all live far apart.

The doctors who are helping me solve my breathing and lung issues.

The Williamston Theatre, and the amazing family of people who I get to work with there.

Zombies:  Specifically, tv shows and games about them.

The fact that our power came back on after only 3 days of being out after the recent storm, and we have a warm place to live.

Our pets.

The wind storm that blew most of the leaves out of our yard.

The theatre industry in Michigan – thanks for letting me have a career for 20+ years.

Science Fiction!  Books, movies, games, tv shows!

The wonderful friends I’ve got, some who I’ve known since 1st grade, and some I’m just getting to know.

The fact that we can get a new coffee maker, and that I can have decaf coffee.

The fact that I’ve been able to mostly eliminate caffeine, and still enjoy decaf coffee.

The incredible people who donate time, money, energy and positivity to Williamston Theatre.  In the middle of our 8th season, it’s still amazing to me that it exists and prospers.

TV Talk, and getting to host a fun show there with my pal Joe.  A little extra income, a lot of fun, and a great new experience to learn from.

Those moments in the middle of the night, when I wake up and walk the house just to check on doors and kids, and the gentle breathing and talking-in-their-sleep sounds that my family make when they sleep.

My Fitbit Flex, which helps me keep motivated to stay in shape, and the LoseIt! app on my iPhone, which helps me track calories and glucose!

Major League Baseball!

Turkey and Stuffing.  With Gravy.

Slippers.  Man, I love wearing my slippers.

And pajama pants.  Warm ones.

Our elliptical running machine, and the “Zombies, Run!” app that I use while exercising! (Nothing like a good interactive zombie story to motivate you to lose some weight and get in shape!)

Almost 20 years of marriage to an amazing person.  The life we’ve built together.  It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty darned great, and it’s ours!