In the theatrical world, it’s a good problem to have.
Every seat for all three of our Phoenix Gay Men’s Chorus performances of Lights, Camera, Elves!, December 21 and 22 at the Herberger Theatre, has been sold.
While we are turning people away who might have bought additional tickets, we are also turning up the emotions, music, mayhem, excitement, and energy for two final rehearsals Thursday and Friday night.
***
This will be my fifteenth consecutive year singing in holiday concerts with my LGBTQ friends: 2010-2016 in Chicago with the Windy City Gay Chorus; and 2017-2024 with the Phoenix Gay Men’s Chorus.
Of course, I don’t remember every holiday tune, wondrous moment, or distinctive venue relating to those performances. But the net effect is the sense of belonging–the ever-widening space that occupies my heart, which is rooted in this collective community experience.
It’s difficult to explain, even for a wordsmith like me. If you have sung with a chorus, you understand.
If you haven’t, there is something inherently magical and healing that comes with standing side by side and contributing your voice to the greater good of a beautifully blended piece of choral music.
Nearly one hundred of us will sing, laugh and dance on stage this weekend. I will probably cry a little too as we perform captivating arrangements of Do You Hear What I Hear? and Pure Imagination.
But the tears will be mostly joyous and thankful ones as I channel the smiles on the faces of friends and family–past and present–who have surrounded and supported me on the risers and in the audience for fifteen glorious years.
What I share here always comes from my heart and the firing (sometimes misfiring) synapses of my brain.
Lately, I have been drawn to writing more poetry. It helps me to process the pain–personal and national–which I have been wearing like a cape that shrouds my best impulses and intentions.
Today, as Christmas and the end of the year approach, I am taking a different path.
Before I take the stage next weekend for my holiday concert with the Phoenix Gay Men’s Chorus, I want to reflect on bright-and-shiny moments–present and past–which have been tempered by devastating-and-unavoidable losses in 2024.
***
Tom and I are among the dwindling few, who continue to send Christmas cards in the mail to our closest friends and loved ones.
It’s something that brings both of us joy, and in my book that means it’s something worth doing–no matter what other Americans do.
I know that practice places us in the minority (rather like the disastrous outcome of our presidential election), but I don’t care.
Since childhood, I have always identified as “different” or–more specifically–as an outsider. Maybe it was my brain’s subconscious attempt at preparing me for the obstacles I would face as a gay man.
At any rate, conformity is for the faint of heart. It takes courage to stand by your differences, and I have a feeling I will need to muster a boatload of courage as we head into 2025.
Maybe that approaching storm is why I have taken comfort recently in an old Christmas memory.
For several years in the late 1950s and early 1960s, before Dad had his first heart attack, he took Diane (my sister) and me in our old, green Plymouth to search for our family Christmas tree.
We didn’t have much money, so he usually drove us to a tree lot adjacent to a Site filling station. Strangely, I remember the price of gas was 29 cents a gallon on the sign that swayed in winter’s wind.
Dad was a tall man–six feet, two inches. One day I would reach that same stature, but going back sixty-five years, I was a little tyke with a wool stocking cap covering my crew cut.
Dad wanted to select a natural tree (usually balsam, because they were cheaper than Scotch Pine) that was at least his height, so when it was placed in a tree stand all of us (he, Mom, Diane, and I) could gaze up at the beauty of its lights, ornaments, and tinsel hanging on every branch.
In the cold and damp St. Louis air, it usually took us several rounds up and down the aisles of the tree lot to find the best shaped tree. But we always found one to our liking and–with heavy twine–somehow tied it to the roof of our sedan.
When we got home on December 4 or 5, our family practice was to cut a small notch off the bottom of the tree trunk, then deposit it into a metal bucket of water to keep it fresh.
Inevitably, the water in the bucket froze, but with a little heat from the Midwestern sun, around the middle of December we were able to pry it out of the bucket, screw it into our stand, and decorate our family Christmas tree in our living room.
***
Back to reality. We lost a few friends in 2024. Peggy’s passing in mid-November is the most recent.
I was touched and honored when Glenn–our dear friend, neighbor and one of the kindest and most dependable people I know–asked me to write his wife’s obituary.
Peggy’s memorial service last week was a beautiful reflection on her meaningful life as a teacher, wife, mother, grandmother, animal-lover, and upstanding citizen. I will miss her.
In general, I am aware of the “shrinkage” (and greater vulnerability) that comes with age–the loss of friends and family one by one, the institutions that close their doors, the connections that fray (literal or otherwise), the visits to the dentist to replace crowns and teeth that wear down and require repairs.
I experienced all of those in 2024. But there were inspiring moments, too.
Tom and I traveled to Minneapolis in July for the quadrennial GALA chorus festival. The singing, listening, bonding, and carousing with other LGBTQ friends and chorus members filled our cups and our hearts.
It was also a privilege to share England and Scotland with my husband in late September. That week-long tour–from London, to Bath, to Lake Windermere, to Shakespeare’s home, to Liverpool, and the cobblestone streets of Edinburgh–was our tenth wedding anniversary gift to each other.
And 2024 was the year I began to teach again. I had fun in October and November coaching a dozen aspiring and diverse writers in my first memoir writing workshop at the Scottsdale Public Library. I will do it again in January 2025 with a new batch of students.
***
It feels like the best way to end this meandering post is on a high note. So, why not share a photo of the pre-lit artificial Christmas tree Tom and I decorated and adore in our Arizona home?
On Christmas Eve, we will sit together in front of our tree, open our presents, and give thanks for the love we share and the diverse branches of family and friends in our lives who adorn our world.
For me, one of those branches is sharing ideas and stories with all of you.
My mother loved fruitcake. I think making and eating it reminded her of her Carolina roots.
As a teenager and young adult, I remember seeing her and many of my older relatives consume fruitcake.
The thought of munching that dark, rich, moist, nutty, fruity, and rummy consistency repulsed me.
Anyway, she liked having fruitcake around during the holidays. I didn’t.
In the early 1980s, when Jean (my ex) and I lived in the Chicago suburbs, Mom hadn’t caught on to my fruitcake aversion.
Every December, she ordered a rather expensive variety of fruitcake, made by the Trappist monks of the Assumption Abbey, and had it delivered to us.
(Assumption Abbey is a monastery tucked in the foothills of the Missouri Ozarks.)
Jean and I didn’t have the heart to tell Mom to stop sending us fruitcakes. So, every year, we received another tin of it, which sat unopened on the bottom shelf of our refrigerator.
We never found a way to recycle or share it with others, because no one else we knew liked fruitcake either.
Inevitably, year after year–sometime in May, June, or July long after the last presents were unwrapped–Jean or I extricated the fruitcake from the back of our fridge and dumped it in the garbage.
***
If you follow my blog, you know I sing second tenor with a gay chorus–to be precise, the Phoenix Gay Men’s Chorus (PHXGMC)–and have written several librettos for PHXGMC.
For the uninitiated, we are a joyous, talented, and rambunctious LGBTQ-plus organization, comprised of more than one hundred singers and musicians (who also wear multiple hats as artistic consultants, dancers, actors, writers, marketers, costume designers, stagehands, sound technicians, and lighting crew).
At times, the switching of hats from one day, week, or number to the next is a dizzying process. But when you volunteer for an arts’ organization you believe in, it comes with the territory.
As I write this, we are entering the heavy lifting phase of Lights, Camera, Elves!, our holiday show coming December 21 and 22 to the Herberger Theatre in Phoenix.
Anyway, as I swam laps on Tuesday and considered what to write this week, thoughts of my mother’s love of fruitcake and a coincidental plotline in our concert popped into my head.
You see, like my mother, Rudy–a character in our concert–adores fruitcake. He can’t get enough of it, and that obsession leads him into trouble and a terrible trap.
In fact, Act One ends with a hysterical, rousing number–Recycle the Fruitcake.
In the mix, I should back up and tell you that Scott, our choreographer, has asked me to play a bit role in the fruitcake number.
For about 15 seconds, I’ll be crossing the stage wearing an orange hazmat suit, while carrying a toxic fruitcake in this holiday tin. Meanwhile, the chorus will be singing this lyrical line:
“A fruitcake can be wide, a fruitcake can be thin, a fruitcake can be toxic, so they keep it in a tin. So, when you get a fruitcake, never let it touch your skin, ’cause you never really know where fruitcakes might have been.”
Brandon and Mike (two other chorus members) and I had loads of fun co-creating the libretto for Lights, Camera, Elves! … and we are coaching the cast as they prepare for our performances.
The show is a story of redemption, featuring Santa’s love for holiday movies, a misfit security guard named Rudy, and three recalled-and-mischievous elves (Spike, Ginger, and Eddie) … all told against the backdrop of gorgeous and fun holiday music.
We’re excited, because we are expecting full houses for all three of our holiday shows.
Though my mother has been gone for nearly twelve years and was never able to see me perform in any of the fifteen holiday concerts I’ve appeared in since 2010, I know she would have loved the spirit and beautiful music in this show … along with my creative impulse to recycle my fruitcake memories.
I am a writer, gardener, and gay man. Yesterday, today, tomorrow, ever after.
Those three dimensions of my life–hardwired into my DNA–aren’t the only attributes that describe me.
But they are the ones I choose to write about today.
***
Eight or ten years ago, when Tom and I were snowbirds splitting time between Illinois and Arizona, we bought a Mexican fire barrel cactus at a Desert Botanical Garden plant sale not far from our condo.
We planted it in a yellow ceramic container. Tom’s grandfather, Sam, left it behind when he passed in the fall of 2001.
(Beginning in the early 1970s, Sam and Lucy–Tom’s grandmother–lived in the condo Tom and I now call home.)
From the start, I loved the way the fire barrel’s red spikes vibrated year-round in the desert sun. Every April, it produced spectacular orange blooms. Plus, it didn’t require much water.
When we became full-time residents in the Grand Canyon State in 2017, I paid closer attention to this cactus.
It was a grounding natural force, stationed outside our backdoor on blazing July afternoons and crisp December mornings.
In 2020, during the height of Covid-19, we passed it every morning on our way to walk the canal.
Those were walks to simply stay sane. To keep our bodies and minds moving. To get lost in the beauty of the buttes near our home.
At one point, I began to notice that our Mexican fire barrel cactus was leaning south toward neighbors who would pass by. It was almost as if our spiky friend was listening to their conversations.
That observation inspired me to write Eavesdropping, an essay that appears in I Think I’ll Prune the Lemon Tree, my book (published in 2021) about Arizona life.
Unfortunately, as it is with all forms of life, there is an ending. A closing of one loop and the beginning of another.
Today was the end of the line for our trusty, prickly friend. The relentless summer and early fall heat of 2024 in the Valley of the Sun decimated it.
This morning, I grabbed my thick gardening gloves and trowel. I pried the decaying cactus out of our yellow pot and deposited it in the dumpster.
The good news? I salvaged (and cleaned up) our vintage container with roots to my husband’s past.
It waits outside our backdoor for a new occupant.
***
Far beyond the gardens of our backdoors, backyards, patios, and public parks, each of us–gay, straight, bi, or trans–has the right to pursue and realize a happy life … ever after.
Today, the day after National Coming Out Day, I have some additional thoughts on this topic beyond what I’ve written before in this space and in my lemon tree book.
As I’ve said in the past, coming out is not a singular process. Of course, the first time you disclose your sexual orientation to family and friends is monumental, because there is always the risk someone important in your life may not accept you for who you are … or who you love.
However–even after you pull off that bandage, feel a sense of relief, and deal with the potential consequences of having risked personal loss simply for being yourself openly–there is the realization that we live in a predominantly straight world where some may not view you in a favorable light.
Every day, we who are gay find ourselves in situations where we need to decide if we will share our authentic selves in the moment.
What I’ve discovered is that when I stifle that authenticity impulse in certain social situations, I feel like I’ve lost my voice. That’s problematic for a writer … and a singer!
Here’s an example. On Day 1 of our recent-and-fabulous tour through the United Kingdom with twenty-two other vacationers and our guide Phil, we met the entire group for a “welcome drink” in the dining room of our London hotel.
As a part of getting acquainted, Phil asked us each to quickly share a little about ourselves and who we are.
Right away, I heard a few other couples–straight, older couples about our age from places like Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Florida, etc.–say the trip was a wedding anniversary celebration for them.
About halfway around the room, it was my turn. I had two choices: to share that Tom and I were celebrating our tenth wedding anniversary; or to stifle that impulse, come up with some sort of alternative response, and withhold the joy I felt about exploring England and Scotland (two places we’d never been) with my husband.
At this stage of my life, it was an easy decision. Because, at age sixty-seven, I’m comfortable with my gay identity–and prepared for all sorts of responses–I chose the first option.
Doing so, freed me up to enjoy the trip on my terms. And you’ll be happy to know, that our fellow travelers–visibly, at least–accepted and embraced us for who we are … a married, gay couple.
Of course, I still remember the arduous times in my thirties and forties. Living in the straight Chicago suburbs. Trying to raise two boys as a single dad after a messy divorce. Coming out to my ex-wife, my mother, my sister, my sons, my coworkers, my neighbors.
The list was long. The process was painful. But I endured. Slowly, I began to love my true self … and so did most of the people around me. A few relationships fell by the wayside, but I have no regrets.
Yesterday, I took a spin through social media. One of my newer friends, who joined the Phoenix Gay Men’s Chorus recently, posted a video of him telling his story about coming out over the past year.
It was a story of pain, transformation, and personal fulfillment. Really, how he (with the help of a gifted counselor and close friends) loved his true self and was ready to share it with the world.
As I watched the video–and heard him say he and his wife divorced and that they and their five children have begun to move forward to find more solid footing–it nearly brought me to tears.
I am so proud of my new acquaintance, my new friend. I told him he is an inspiration for those who have yet to come out … and for those of us who already have.
Because, in this spiky world, I don’t think we can change hearts and minds, live happily ever after, or even simply be content, unless we are visible. Unless we share our whole selves.
It’s been nearly forty-two years since the American TV sitcom Cheers debuted on September 30, 1982.
In its inaugural season (fall 1982 to spring 1983), Cheers ranked near the bottom in the Neilsen ratings. But by the mid-eighties, it caught fire with audiences and became “Must See” TV for millions–ultimately running for eleven seasons and 275 episodes on NBC.
If you aren’t familiar with the concept of the series, the show was set in a Boston neighborhood bar. Locals–like Norm, Cliff, and Frasier–came there to drink, socialize, unwind, and escape the grind of their day-to-day lives.
The opening theme song written by Gary Portnoy, Where Everybody Knows Your Name, captured the sense of familiarity, comfort, and community bar “regulars” knew was waiting for them every time they walked through the door and descended down the steps for a drink.
But it was the bar banter with Sam, the owner, and the escapades (sometimes sexual) of the Cheers staff over the years–Diane, Carla, Coach, Woody, and Rebecca–that drove the creative content, tickled our funny bones, and warmed the hearts of young and old viewers.
***
I write frequently–in my books and blogposts–about the importance of community connections in our lives.
To feel fulfilled, I believe we need frequent connections to people (animals and plants, too) around us, along with a balance of alone time to recharge our personal batteries.
Of course, singing with the Phoenix Gay Men’s Chorus (PHXGMC) fills a portion of that need for me. (I’m excited for our first rehearsal this Tuesday evening for the 2024/2025 season. We have a new artistic director and 112 singers!)
Each week, I look forward to the musical mayhem, creative camaraderie, and safe haven we share at PHXGMC.
From a writing standpoint, Tom and I have discovered another source of community connection we cherish just a few miles from our condo.
For almost a year–two or three times each week, usually in the afternoon–we have packed up our laptops and driven to Grounds on 2nd in Old Town Scottsdale.
It’s our favorite urban market, coffee shop, wine bar, and local hangout … and a conducive spot for writing. In fact, I’m drafting this post there right now.
The owners and staff are fun, friendly, and welcoming. They and we have become fast friends. They greet us with warm smiles, iced coffee (yes, it’s still hot here!), yummy pastries, and a comfortable place to plug in so we can write our next story or plan our next creative endeavor.
It’s pretty simple. Grounds on 2nd is a welcoming, bright, lofty, contemporary neighborhood watering hole with comfy chairs and rambling plants that green up the room and soften the edges.
Best of all, when Tom and I open the glass doors and walk in … to write, or drink, or just relax with friends … everybody knows our names.
In summer’s flurry of joyful singing, record-breaking heat, Covid resurgence, political revelations, and Olympics coverage, June is gone. July is close behind.
Until now, my Covid recovery, birthday revelry, and travels to and from Minneapolis for the 2024 GALA Festival prevented me from posting highlights from Encore, our Phoenix Gay Men’s Chorus concert in late June.
Suffice it to say Encore was a musical review of favorite chorus moments and tunes (A Million Dreams, Some Nights, What Was I Made For?, Bridge Over Troubled Water, Proud, I’m Still Standing, For Me and ten more.)
Beyond that, it was also a reflective celebration of Marc Gaston’s twenty-two years as our artistic director–laced with storytelling vignettes (I wrote), LGBTQ anthems, and dazzling dance routines.
As a singer and one of several storytellers, I couldn’t be prouder of the program we created and performed for three exuberant audiences at Tempe Center for the Arts.
I will leave you with a snippet of dialogue … along with four images from the concert … that represents the joy, energy, rainbow colors, and love, which reverberated in the room away from the summer heat.
“When I sing with this chorus–these amazing people–and I absorb all the music and camaraderie, it feels like the sky is the limit. It feels like I could rule the world.” Mark Johnson, Storyteller #1, in Encore.
I’m back home. Inside the furnace, better known as the Valley of the Sun.
I have begun to reemerge from an affirming, magical, inspiring five days of LGBTQ bonding and music with my chosen family at the 2024 GALA Festival in Minneapolis.
From July 10-14, 7,000 singers (representing nearly 300 choruses and presenters from around the world) inhabited the Twin Cities.
We owned the stages. Occupied the hotels. Flooded the restaurants, bars, shops and streets with gaiety and glee.
But it was more than the magnitude of this quadrennial event that has left an indelible imprint on my creativity and identity. It was the sense of joy, kindness, support, and human possibilities that dazzled me most.
At a time in this country and our world where so much hatred abounds, I was reminded that when love is present–when people truly come together to care for one another and cheer each other on–we can be that Bridge Over Troubled Water (one of the songs my Phoenix Gay Men’s Chorus mates and I performed) of hope for one another.
This was my third GALA. I shared all of them with my husband Tom: 2012 and 2016 in Denver; 2024 in Minneapolis. Each one has nurtured me, deepened my sense of artistry and compassion, and reinforced the importance of rekindling/kindling old and new relationships.
In this 2024 installment, over a five-day period I was able to reconnect and celebrate with friends from Chicago (who perform with the Windy City Gay Chorus and the Chicago Gay Men’s Chorus), Washington, Seattle, and–of course–Phoenix.
A friend and ex-colleague (from my past consulting career) who lives in the Minneapolis area, also surprised and delighted me by attending our performance on July 12. It was a treat seeing her again.
If you follow my blog, you know I have written five books. One is a book of poetry; the other four are memoirs or creative nonfiction. I’ve also written lyrics and librettos for the Phoenix Gay Men’s Chorus.
Already, I have begun to scribble ideas in a spiral notebook that were sparked by my latest GALA experience. Who knows? This may lead me to a stream of poems or lyrics I have yet to compose.
For now, I will leave you with an idea and image that captured my attention on Saturday as Tom and I watched a series of choruses perform inside the auditorium of the Minneapolis Convention Center.
A few rows in front of us, a couple neither of us knows relaxed and leaned in. Away from the heat and fire in the world, they rested their heads against one another. They held each other. They listened to beautiful music in a safe space.
Many of us in the LGBTQ community have spent large portions of our lives searching for answers, longing for love and understanding.
The beauty of the GALA Festival is that–through the power of music, relationships, and community–we can move from longing to belonging.
Moving beyond this amazing and affirming five days in the upper Midwest, we will continue to raise our voices inside our choruses and be our authentic selves outside in the everyday world.
Truly, we are much more than a large collection of singers. Together, we represent a movement of kind, talented, and diverse humans with the power to change hearts, minds, and attitudes.
It may or may not surprise you to learn that I’m sipping hot herbal tea–lemon and ginger–as I write this.
Ordinarily, that would feel counterintuitive to surviving the summer desert heat. (We are expecting 115-degree temperatures in the Phoenix area again today.)
But I am determined to eradicate the nagging remnants of Covid congestion. Plenty of rest, fluids, hot tea, Sudafed, and throat lozenges are helping me slay this beast. (I am no longer Covid positive or contagious.)
I want to be clear-headed for my sixty-seventh birthday on July 6th. (Actually, it’s OUR sixty-seventh birthday. In a gift from the cosmos, Tom and I are exactly the same age. I’m no mathematician, but what are the odds of that?!)
We will celebrate by seeing a production of Fiddler on the Roof at the Phoenix Theater–it’s getting rave reviews–followed by dinner at a Phoenix restaurant.
Then, early next week, Tom and I will travel to Minneapolis for the quadrennial GALA choral festival. 7,000 LGBTQ singers (representing hundreds of choruses from the US and around the world) will be participating in this massive community choral event.
It will be more than five days of non-stop music, singing, listening, cheering, and applauding. It will be a giant uplifting and affirming dose of camaraderie, which all of us in the LGBTQ community–the entire world really–need right now.
If you aren’t familiar with GALA, it’s a phenomenal program–gay music camp, of sorts–which happens only once every four years. Of course, the 2020 program was Covid-cancelled.
Therefore, GALA 2016 in Denver was the most recent festival. I still have fond memories of standing on stage with my mates from the Windy City Gay Chorus.
We were asked to perform the song I Love You More from Tyler’s Suite at the closing ceremonies in front of 3,000 people. It is a positive moment seared in my memory … and it happened on my 59th birthday.
Evidently, the GALA 2024 organizers were able to repurpose countless stacks of 2020 lanyards, which someone must have purchased four years ago. Look closely, and you’ll understand what I mean.
Anyway, on Friday, July 12th, at 12:30 p.m. (Central Time) I will perform with my Phoenix Gay Men’s Chorus mates on the Minneapolis Convention Center auditorium stage.
We will sing six songs: Bridge Over Troubled Water, You Are Enough, Proud, For Me, I’m Still Standing, and Sing to the World Our Light.
For more information, go to http://www.galachoruses.org. If you love choral music, you can purchase a live stream pass for $35 and see any/all of the chorus performances you like.
Trust me. No matter where you live, the quality, scope, magnitude, magic, and healing power of the music at this exhibition will dazzle you.
In the 1960s–when the San Francisco Giants appeared at Busch Memorial Stadium in St. Louis to play the Cardinals–the bleachers were a heavenly place for Dad and me to be.
Because, on many hot summer days and nights, in addition to watching our beloved Cardinals’ legends perform on the field (especially Bob Gibson and Lou Brock), we saw Willie Mays patrol centerfield.
Simply put, there was no one better–before or since–at chasing down line drives and long fly balls. Securing the ball in his mitt with his patented basket catch. Smiling at fans who gravitated to his magnetic personality.
Willie was the face of major league baseball in those days. His affable presence and disarming charm seemed to neutralize the racial prejudice that haunted many other black athletes when they traveled from town to town.
We ALL observed Willie’s greatness and humanity with awe and pride. He was a hero to black and white fans alike.
I won’t recite all of Willie’s remarkable batting statistics and records. I’ll leave that to the experts. Suffice it to say, his lifetime batting average of .301, 660 home runs, 3,293 hits, 1,909 runs batted in, and 339 stolen bases made his election to the Hall of Fame in 1979 a no-brainer.
Willie brought exuberance, fun, and a boatload of hitting and fielding talent to every game he played over more than two decades.
He was a legend off the field, too. For instance, he spent many hours playing stick ball with kids on the streets of New York before the Giants moved their franchise to San Francisco in the late 1950s.
I cried when I learned of Willie’s death on Tuesday at age 93.
Truly, there will never be another Willie Mays.
***
Beyond past ballfields (and my continued propensity to root for the St. Louis Cardinals as I approach my 67th birthday in the scorching summer heat of Arizona), my personal sense of awe and pride lives and breathes in a far different venue: on stage with the Phoenix Gay Men’s Chorus.
This weekend we will be performing our Encore show at the Tempe Center of the Arts. I’m proud of the libretto I’ve written for the show.
Five storytellers–I’m one of them–will connect the music with tales of reflection concerning who and what our chorus is. More than that, what it means to us in 2024.
For the audience and us performers, it will be a high-energy, emotional rollercoaster of favorite musical and choral moments, punctuated with dazzling choreography.
For added emphasis, this will be the final performance for our artistic director, Marc. He will pass the conducting baton to our new director, Antonio, who will usher in a new era of awe and pride for the Phoenix-area LGBTQ community and all our avid supporters and music lovers.
My friend Randy–baritone section leader for the Phoenix Gay Men’s Chorus–surprised me at rehearsal on Tuesday night. He handed me this descriptive name plate, which–four years ago in the depths of Covid–felt unlikely and unreachable.
As background, this unforeseen opportunity in my writing journey emerged in 2022, when I wrote lyrics for a few original songs for the Phoenix Gay Men’s Chorus (PHXGMC).
Shortly after, PHXGMC’s artistic director Marc asked if I would have an interest in crafting a libretto for Born to Be Brave, the June 2023 performance.
Quickly, that led to libretto #2–Thanks for the Memories: A Gay Christmas Carol–performed in December 2023. Remarkably, what began as a novelty developed into a creative trend.
Over the past few months, I’ve been “noodling” and “angsting” over libretto #3. Marc, Scott (our choreographer) and I met a few times this winter to select the music and brainstorm creative approaches for Encore, our June 22-23 concert at Tempe Center for the Arts.
Randy knows I’ve been working on this behind the scenes. But what he doesn’t know (until he reads this) is I finished drafting libretto #3 on the same day he smiled and handed me his gift.
A beautiful arrangement of A Million Dreams from The Greatest Showman will open the show. That’s ironic, because–in my wildest dreams–I never imagined seeing the word “librettist” attached to my identity.
I think this is one of life’s lessons. That the person you ultimately become at 65 or beyond may not reveal itself at 20, 30, 40 or 50.
But if you hang around long enough, and allow yourself to explore outside your comfort zone, you might discover you are capable of creating something meaningful you never dreamed of.
Mark Johnson Stories 