I wrote a full musical in college while cancer tried to take me out. That sentence sounds impossible until you know the details.
I studied at Binghamton and spent my junior year creating a two act musical called Times Like These. I wrote the book, the lyrics, the music, the set, the choreography, the lighting, and the direction. I pulled from Stephen Schwartz, Stephen Sondheim, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Bock and Harnick, Rodgers and Hart, Kander and Ebb, and George Gershwin. I planned to finish it during senior year and debut it before graduation.
Then the symptoms hit in the fall of 1995. My left hand shut down. I could not play. My brain was trying to kill me. Doctors told me I had six months. Surgery came in early 1996. Everything collapsed except the stubborn instinct to stay alive and keep creating.
I finished Radiation in April. I could barely walk across campus. I still decided to stage whatever I could salvage from the original show. I broke the musical into scenes, songs, and vignettes. I asked friends to join me with no promise of glory. They showed up anyway. They carried me through the work. They helped me rebuild the music when my hand finally started to move again.
We renamed it Changing Times. We mounted a full production in early May. The score captured every ounce of anger and relief that came from surviving long enough to sit at a piano again.
This video comes from that moment. Spring of 1996. Twenty one years old. Fresh out of Radiation. Playing music the doctors assumed I would never play again. I stayed alive because I ignored the push for chemo thanks to my Uncle Jay who told me to protect my brain so I could keep making music.
This stands as proof that cancer did not wipe out the pianist in me. It tried. It failed. My friends carried the rest.
