Just recently reviewed the numbers on “The Forgotten Carols” tour, and said a prayer of thanks for a successful season (our nineteenth anniversary). I haven’t always been so fortunate with tours of shows I’ve written:
In 1989, I wrote a musical review called “Celebrating the Light,” and it ran for five summer seasons at a beautiful little theater called The Promised Valley Playhouse. There were probably a lot of reasons the show ran as long as it did: The cast of the show was a terrific group of college entertainers who had their own following and had been inspiring crowds around the world for decades. The community had a tradition of attending this theater that dated back half a century. The production value for the show was remarkable, given the ticket price, and so it felt like an amazing “deal” for live theater. And because it was subsidized, the show was cheaper than a movie. Ask anyone who’s been there and they’ll tell you it was an absolutely charming space and in the heat of the summer the air conditioning was great.
Of course, I thought the show was a hit because of me.
The line between ego and ignorance has often been very blurry for me (obviously), but I believed there must have been something magic about that show that must have been inspiration or else the crowds wouldn’t have lined up to see it summer after summer after summer.
With more naïveté than arrogance I told my wife that I thought we needed to take the show out on the road. I explained to her how we’d hire a terrific group of college age entertainers, offer the show at extremely affordable prices so families could come, and we’d go to places where we knew some folks who liked my music.
“How you planning on financing this, Michael?”
“Well I guess we could go out and look for investors, but I just hate asking people for money. Maybe we should take some savings and invest in ourselves and do some good with it.”
“How much of our savings do you think it’ll take?” A fair question coming from my partner in life, my dearest companion, and the one who handled most of the money anyway.
“How much we got?” I asked.
She told me.
“That ought to about do it — and won’t we feel better about using our money for something that matters rather than just having it sit around earning interest.” I said this as if it made perfect sense.
“So,” she responded, “you want to take everything we have and finance a traveling production of ‘Celebrating the Light.’ You think you should only charge eight or ten dollars a ticket because otherwise families won’t be able to afford to go.”
As she was patiently reviewing what she understood to be my great plan for our life savings I imagined she ended it all with the thought, “Are you crazy? If nobody comes we won’t be able to afford to go to any show at any price. But she didn’t. She listened as I tried to explain that we were going to hire somebody to do advertising, and that we just had to have a little faith in ourselves. Life is taking risks, blah blah blah; we may not make a lot of money, but we’d surely recoup our investment, blah blah blah; and we’d probably do a lot of good along the way.
She listened to the dream, as she had for so many years, and smiled the way she always had when she was about to give me her support. “Do you need it all at once, or in chunks?”
After four shows of a thirty-five show tour, I knew we were in trouble. Even on the nights we had decent crowds we were losing money. By the second week we were hemorrhaging money so fast no tourniquet could stop it. Some nights there were almost more people on stage than in the audience.
I went through all the stages of loss and grief about every forty-five minutes of every day. How could this have happened? I wanted to blame the promotional guy, or the advertising team, or the fans who wouldn’t support me, or anyone that came to mind, but the truth was, it was my fault. I went into this adventure without enough preparation on the business end, and way too much faith without works.
Don’t get me wrong. It wasn’t all gloom and doom. The good news was the show itself was wonderful, and most towns have cheap pizza that could be paid for that night if we sold ten CDs, five T-shirts and a couple of hats.
By the time we got to Seattle I realized that I’d lost everything. Even if the rest of the shows on tour sold well, it was over. It would take years and years to recover, if ever. I wasn’t handling it well. I could tell because I was using expressions I used to think were only defensible if you’d smashed your thumb with a hammer. And I was crying a lot.
That evening we had booked two shows and I was in a local bookstore trying to sell a few more tickets and schlep a couple of CD’s. I was hoping if we were lucky, we might be able to avoid contracting scurvy and actually have a green salad added to our after-show meal.
It was about 3 in the afternoon and the store was virtually empty when a woman and her three children came into the store. The mother spotted me instantly and walked toward me with the sweetness of a long lost relative.
“Michael, you’re here. I was afraid we wouldn’t make it in time. I’ve come to get tickets for the show tonight.”
“Thank you so much.” I said, “You have no idea how much this means to me.”
She asked me if I’d sign the back of the tickets she purchased, and as I did I asked her about the large patch over her eye.
“What happened to your eye?” I avoided starring by focusing on my autographs.
“Oh, my eye…not there any more.”
“What happened?”
“Too many surgeries. They went through the eye socket to get to the tumor and after the last couple of trips to the operating room it never worked quite right so the doctors and I decided to leave it out.”
You know, you can only keep your eyes on the signing of a ticket for so long and then you sort of have to look up. Having heard what she told me, I feared I was going to look at her they way my third grade teacher told me not to look at someone in a wheelchair.
I tried to disguise my real reactions by saying something upbeat. “Well, the surgeries must have been successful because you’re here and you look great.”
“Well, all but this last one was. Turns out they couldn’t get all of the tumor, and it’s malignant and it’s fatal.” She didn’t say this the way I thought someone with an inoperable brain tumor would share such information. She wasn’t depressed, she wasn’t self pitying, she wasn’t playing the noble heroine. She just said it like it was.
I noticed that her children, which I guessed were about 8 and 5 and maybe 3, were at the other end of the store, so I asked her quietly, “So how long do you have?”
“You know, Michael, they either don’t know or they just won’t tell me.
But I think I’ll make it through tonight, so don’t mess up.”
She laughed a big laugh, and patted me on the back in a way that let me know I didn’t need to be self-conscious about what had been said because she certainly wasn’t.
That night the shows went well. After the second one my friend with the patch on her eye came running up to me in the foyer where I was signing the back of a “Celebrating the Light” T-shirt. She wasn’t rude, but she couldn’t wait to get to the front of the line and when I saw her I accommodated. She was the kind of woman you just knew you could hug, and so I did. She was crying.
“Michael, Michael, Michael. Do you have any idea what you have given me tonight.? I have worried about what I could give my children that they could hang on to when I was gone. And tonight, with this show, was the gift with a message I prayed I could give them, so thank you, thank you, thank you! Our family will treasure this for a long, long time. Bless you, bless you. You’ll never know…you’ll never know”
That night, after the show, the tour manager asked me if I had any idea how much we’d made that night. For me, at that moment, the answer was: twice what I dreamed of, and more than I deserved. The title song of the show we were touring took on new meaning.
I BELIEVE THERE’S A LIGHT THAT SHINES IN EVERYONE
I BELIEVE IT’S THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD
I BELIEVE THERE’S A VOICE THAT WHISPERS THERE’S A CHOICE
AND OUR JOY WILL COME FROM CHOOSING WHAT IS RIGHT
AND CELEBRATING THE LIGHT
On the way to Boise, the next day, I told the tour manager we ought to stop for lunch at some place nice. You know, with steaks and a real nice salad bar.
“You know what that’s gonna cost.”
Doesn’t matter, I thought, we’ve got something to celebrate.
That “celebration” was short lived, unfortunately. I wish the impact of that woman’s story could have fully sustained me through the financial disaster of the tour, but it didn’t. There’s something about losing money, (big chunks of your own hard earned money) that finds its way to center stage even when you’ve tried to write it out of the script.
I would call home with updates on how things were going and tried to apologize to Lynne for losing all our money. Because I was so distraught about the financial situation I was convinced my wife was too, but she seemed to be more worried about me, what this was doing to my spirit, how this was affecting my faith in myself and in my ability to follow the light I was singing about every night. Though I ended each day praying for a miracle, she was praying for me.
The miracle of big crowds, massive CD sales, financial resuscitation and corporate sponsorships never materialized, but that doesn’t mean a miracle didn’t happen. The miracle was my wife. She kept praying for me by night, and cheering me on by day. Those calls, and surprise visits during some of the most difficult parts of the tour, were my connection with what really mattered.
Not only did she support me throughout the entire ordeal, but she never criticized me for what I’d chosen to do with our money and my time. Never criticized me for losing my perspective, or for having such a hard time letting go. She listened, she understood, she didn’t run away emotionally or physically. She loved me in a way I never knew I could be loved and I didn’t fully appreciate it until long after the crisis ended.
I remember one afternoon in Idaho, twenty shows into the tour, Lynne called with great excitement in her voice. She couldn’t wait to tell me she had wonderful news that came in the form of a coded message from on High. She told me that after she’d been praying for me she picked up the scriptures and came across these words: “…do good continually and ye shall receive your reward; yea, ye shall have mercy restored unto you again; ye shall have justice restored unto you again; and ye shall have good rewarded unto you again. For that which ye do send out shall return unto you again, and be restored.”
She was so convinced her reading this wasn’t an accident, but was Providence. So confident was she that we were, in deed, “doing good” with our resources that she wasn’t worried. (Truth is she never was concerned about the money. She was concerned about me, and so, her antenna was tuned in to messages that would help me endure my crisis, not hers.) It’s coming back, she told me, it’s all coming back, so enjoy the rest of the tour and get home and let’s get on with our lives.
I didn’t know how long it would be before the restoration of our savings would take place, but I was given a far more valuable gift than a profitable investment. I was allowed an opportunity of rediscovering the priceless nature of a partner and a friend. What a woman!
I’ve often said that she is the reason my heart has a song, but there are lyrics to the song “Celebrating the Light” that I now know belong more to her than I ever realized.
CELEBRATING THE LIGHT, THAT SHINES IN ONE AND ALL
AND LIFTS US WHEN WE FALL
AND ANSWERS WHEN WE CALL
Listen to Celebrating the Light
