Any mail for me while I was gone?

Dear Christmas music lovers everywhere...

About three months ago, I decided that it would be good for me to break the wintertime blues and audition for a play for a local theater group in Fort Wayne. The play is called "Lend Me A Tenor" and I got cast as the world famous Italian tenor Tito Merelli, known to his fans as "Il Stupendo".

As March turned into April, I had to buckle down and learn a bunch of lines and master deliberate and delicate movements on the stage in order to get the role properly. I also was the only member of the cast who had free time to help build sets, paint floors & walls, etc., etc.. Needless to say, this took up much of my free time (thereby robbing me of the time I used to devote to this blog).

When April turned into May (quite the operation she had), everything came together. Each cast member trusted their lines and movements, the light and sound cues were on the money. I added one final touch to my physical transformation into an Italian tenor: the proper haircut and beard.

I was lucky to meet and get to know Frank Ferrante, the premier Groucho Marx impersonator of our time, when he toured through Indiana with his various plays on Groucho. Frank imparted onto me how to cut & shape the Groucho Marx haircut and it served the role extremely well. So much in fact that several audience members have asked the director of the play "he was wearing a wig for Act 2... but was that a wig he was wearing in Act 1?"

If you're in the neighborhood of Fort Wayne and want to see this impressive haircut (and not a bad play to boot), you've got only one more weekend to see it (and me underneath it).

As for this blog... four words: "The stack is back." Next to my computer monitor is yet another stack of Christmas CDs waiting to be catalogued and reviewed here.

And the secret can finally be revealed: I've been transferring some rare and extremely deserving Christmas LPs (about 15 so far) into CDs that I will hopefully share with all of you at some point.

It's beginning to look and sound a lot like Christmas...


Capt