In 2010...

In 2010, I promise to blog on a much more regular basis.

Some random recent photos:


-- Post From My iPhone

The 2009 Christmas card

Based on a dyslexic misinterpretation of Dickens.

Tour Schedule

Boo!

Yes, I still exist. I fear this blog has fallen to the wayside lately, as work and travels have kept me busy.

During the upcoming holiday season, I will be touring in the U.S. as the baritone soloist with the New Sigmund Romberg Symphony Orchestra.


Here's the info: Updated without confusing state abbreviations for non-US people

November 30
TROPICANA CASINO, Atlantic City New Jersey
3:00 pm... opening with a matinee. Great!

December 1
LANDER UNIVERSITY CULTURAL CTR. AUD, Greenwood, South Carolina
7:30pm

Dec. 2
SKIDAWAY ISLAND PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, Savannah, Georgia
7:30 pm

Dec. 3
LOUISBURG COLLEGE, Louisburg, North Carolina
7:30pm

Dec. 4
OFF

Dec. 5
THE CARLSEN CENTER, Overland Park, Kansas (!!!)
3:00pm & 8:00pm

Dec. 6
REYNOLDS PERF. HALL, Conway, Arkansas
2:00pm

Dec. 7
Off

Dec. 8
ERIC MEYER CIVIC CENTER, Gulf Shores Alabama
7:30pm

Dec 9-10
OFF

Dec 11
RAISIN CENTER FOR PERF. ARTS, Monroe, Michigan
8:00pm

Dec 12-13
Off

Dec 14
NEWBERRY OPERA HOUSE, Newberry, South Carolina
3:00pm & 8:00pm

Dec 15
UNITED METHODIST CHURCH, Englewood, Florida
1:30 & 7:30pm

Dec 16
FLAGLER AUDITORIUM, Palm Coast, Florida
7:30pm

Dec 18
Off (Travel)

Dec 19
Fly away home...

Long time

This has been my longest dry spell since creating this blog in 2002.

Sorry for that. I have been out on the ship, doing the shows, and not much else.

I'm out of the loop. Facebook status updates and that's pretty much the extent of my communication.

Help me find my way back in! :)

wide load

Thank you, I am aware that the photo on my menu page is a bit stretched in a less than flattering way. I appreciate the gentle, compassionate way in which this was pointed out.

"It looks like that headshot has put on weight."

Thanks, jerk. :)

Site work

Yes, I have been lax in posting to the blog lately. Does anyone know a good way to link your blog to Twitter? This would be ideal. Let me know what you think of the changes as they happen. Mostly superficial, some substance.

Can you hear, can you hear the thun-duh?

I am home. Well, in Kansas, anyway, on Dustin's sofa, writing this entry. The contract from hell is over, and those of us from what I termed "Team Zmed" have scattered and only now fully acknowledge the difficulties we really faced.

Now we're better, though. :)

I'll write more soon, but for now here are some pictures from the end of the contract.

You Can't Manufacture Inspirado

Obviously blogging has not been high on my to do list in the past several months. There is no good reason for this, but I have been doing a lot of writing - songwriting - on my new guitar (named J.C.) and lots of other random projects. Somehow a little stupid webseries I started with another guest vocalist, DON LIVE!, has found an audience of some sort, and it's essentially nothing.

I have been painting, a good deal, as well. The inspiration is there, but it's been a bit... unfocused. I have been inspired a great deal by the very clear creative energies of a tremendously gifted Australian, and recently she read some things I wrote a long while back and encouraged me to do something with them. So, after reading my good friend John Clemo's blog today, I realize that there is no better place for these things than my woefully out of date blog. The next few entries, then, will be comprised mainly of anecdotal short stories from as long ago as 1998. Here goes, with a little number I wrote sometime around Christmas 1998. Opinions and thoughts are welcome, by the way.

___________________________________________

EVERY DOG HAS THEIR DAY, or rather their unfortunately limited number of days. When you grow up in a relatively stable home, there are a lot of things you take for granted, simply because they have always been and will always be. When I was a boy, living on a farm in the middle of Kansas, every boy had a dog. Every family had their canine mascot that served as a playmate for their kids who lived too far away from other people’s kids to be able to simply go down the street for a visit. My family had many dogs, but there was only one that still sometimes makes me painfully sad when I remember. The alpha male of our pack, which varied in size from two to as many as six if I remember right. One advantage to living on a farm is that I was able to take in pretty much every stray that happened by or was dropped off. The dogs were strictly outdoors – rarely if ever was one allowed into the house – but they would always show up when a little boy stepped out the door of the house and called “Blue”.

Blue was the name of our alpha dog. A stereotypical name, but of course I remember him as a totally unique animal. He’d been named Blue because he had one brown eye, and one eye which was half blue and half brown. He was a mutt, mostly Australian Shepherd. He was a big gray dog with patches of other colors on his face, and a mane of white and black. It all seems rather clinical when I remember it… I have to struggle to get a clear picture. Mainly, I remember the feeling of knowing Blue was there. When I would step out the door at night, in the dark, and know I could just say his name and wherever he was he’d appear and escort me across the big yard to my grandparent’s house. When friends and I were playing and it got too rough he would separate us… always with a touch more roughness toward my friends than to me.

None of the other dogs were allowed to get too friendly with me. One Easter, his last and my eleventh, I was playing outside with some friends who’d come over, and with the new dog my dad had picked up. When this new upstart spent too much time with me, Blue would make sure he got the message that he needed a “time-out”. Eventually Blue was fed up and in a misdirected nip at the other dog, he caught my left index finger as well. God, it hurt. I remember it bleeding and the nail being punctured right through. I cried and wailed, and then I remembered seeing an afterschool special in which a boy’s dog had to be put to sleep because he’d bitten someone. Then, I got more hysterical making sure that everyone knew that I forgave Blue and nothing should be done about it. I loved Blue like a brother. Blue was born the same year I had been, he’d started out as the runt of a litter from my mother’s dog Trixie, who didn’t live long enough for me to remember her. We’d been raised together, Blue and I.

It was 1986 and I was in sixth grade at Burns Elementary, hating school as I always did. I realize now that had I been in a normal school system in a larger city I probably wouldn’t have hated it nearly as much, but things being they way they were I missed a lot of school because I was “sick”. It was after an actual five day bout of the flu in early April that I was about to return to school after a few days of absence. I woke up in the morning knowing I was going to have to return to the terrible pit, and went into the kitchen to greet the “lovely” morning. My mother was sitting there with my sister, and she sat me down at the table. My parents never did the sit-down-and-have-a-talk thing, so I knew something was up. I never would have guessed what.

“We’re going to keep you out of school another day,” my mom said. I wasn’t unhappy to hear that, though thoroughly surprised. “This is really hard to tell you,” now Mom’s face started to twist a bit … by the time she half finished her next sentence she was choking through tears. I’d never seen her cry before. “Your dad and grandpa… they found Blue… Blue’s died.”

At this point I can’t begin to describe the feeling of shock and pain my twelve year old body went through. I couldn’t stop crying. Hell, thinking of it now, a lifetime later, I still very nearly cry. My mother had important things to do that day, so rather than leaving me at home she made the wise move of taking me to my brother’s in nearby El Dorado. Understand that all the men in my family had a deep attachment to Blue. It was probably three hours later by the time we’d left home and made it to Walt’s, and I’d managed to stop uncontrollably crying. Walt had only just found out himself, but to his credit his focus was on making his little brother happy for the time he could. He decided to take me to an arcade, and as we pulled out of his apartment complex I began my earliest memory of emotional avoidance – talking frantically and passionately about Transformers. Just as I launched into my diatribe about how it was ridiculous to give robots faces when obviously … “I’m gonna miss him, too,” Walt interrupted.

I started to cry again, and I don’t remember when I stopped. We buried Blue that evening, and I put a toy sword my dad had made me on the grave to mark it forever. To this day when I go home I hold that spot hallowed in some way– though the sword is long gone.

I went back to school the next day, and I barely made it through. My mother had called my best friend’s mom and told her what had happened so she could tell Dusty. That way, I suppose, my mom thought he’d be less likely to accidentally say anything wrong and could watch out for me a little. Dusty, whom I still consider my best friend to this day regardless of distance or any circumstance, was the only thing that made my school career bearable for most of the time until I’d graduated high school. Dusty also had a dog with another very original name – Puddles, or Pud for short. Best friends that we were, I don’t know when Puddles passed on, but I wish I would’ve. I know what it must’ve been to lose her.

It was five years later before I again lost anyone close to me – a high school friend killed in a one-car accident on an icy country road. It wasn’t until now, or at least two months ago, that I lost anyone else in my family. By the odds, that makes my life very charmed. A quarter century with so few casualties. Blue’s death, though, is the major single memory I have of my childhood.

Significantly Overdue

Happy New Year everyone... or at least, that's how my new year e-mail went. Some of you didn't get that email only because I've lost a lot of email addresses somehow.

So, the following is somewhat a retread of my new year email, but expanded and with stuff added to make up for lost time here.

So here I am, wishing everyone a belated Merry Christmahannukwanzawali and a happy and prosperous new year. 2008 was for me what major league baseball franchises call a rebuilding year - yes, I've said that before, but this one actually served its purpose well. Rolling into 2008 I was dealing with the accumulated war wounds of a really poor idea that I'd been part of for a few years, but I had found what would turn out to be a very happy home as a guest entertainer for PCL on the Golden Princess. For the turn of the year into 2009, here I am on the Coral Princess, with a number of great people. Sure there are those one would not consider great, as always, and those whom one might not be unhappy are leaving soonish... but this contract is nearly over and the next looks to be great as well. The plan at the moment seems to be finishing up here on the Coral in late February, then I’m planning to take a nice vacation back around home in Kansas. I'm most excited about a trip  I'll be taking to Australia in late March. After that, a little more time at home probably studying before heading back to LA at the end of April for rehearsals.

For some reason I find myself feeling really optimistic about 2009, I think because I feel very lucky to have this job - especially in this economy - and because (knock wood) things seem to be moving in  promising directions all around. I feel very lucky to have been able to met some great people this year with work, and to have had the opportunity to spend time with old friends and family this past summer. It’s made me think of all the friends I’ve lost touch with due to the unavoidable isolation that so much travel creates, and one of my goals for 2009 is to reconnect with some of those people. In retrospect, considering the crap leading into it, it was not a bad year at all and basically kept improving as it went.

Happy New Year 2008 - a picture just over one year old now. A great group of singers I was lucky enough to spend a contract with on the Golden. Emma, Joe, Leslie, and me. This was two days after they'd joined the ship - I'd joined early.

There is no chronological order to these "highlights of 2008" photos. Leslie's 80's themed birthday party in the wardroom on the Golden.

Indian Independence Day on the Golden with Steve, Chad, and some South African guy we decided fit our needs for this photo.

Jesus performing a blessing/Jedi mind trick.

Penguin Night in the wardy on the Golden.

San Diego Zoo... PANDA WATCH

Best Thing I Ever Did... got my parents to take their first vacation ever and brought them on a cruise to Alaska on the Golden.

Curtain call for CINEMATASTIC

Matt Jones and Don Winsor welcome you to Las Vegas, where it is ridonculously hot in July.

Dusty and Michael Karraker at the Cosmosphere. I added the marshmallow sticks and flames. Dusty and I first went to the Kansas Cosmosphere together in something like third grade.

For a while, I dated a Jamaican dolphin. Her name was Ronar. It didn't work.

The Coral... Tallis of Canada, Marina of Australia, Don of Kansas, and Riana of Washington meet crazy pirate guy of Ocho Rios.

Tallis and Marina and I on Halloween... I never travel without my Oompa Loompas.

The first few people to attend the Pre-Halloween Party I held in my cabin on the Coral.

Meeting and working with Adrian Zmed has been a real pleasure. So much so that I made him part of my Christmas card this year.

Tallis and Marina shortly after we woke up on Christmas day.

Our tree, our gingerbread house, my pen, one of the cast shirts I had made for everyone for Christmas, and my official Goulard Family Christmas Pants. (Tallis' family sent Marina, Tallis, and myself gifts of special pajamas to wear on Christmas Eve, thus I named them the GFCP.)

Tallis and Marina on New Year's Eve... a long story of its own.

And shortly after New Year's, we joined the Coral Orchestra for a Rock Night in the crew mess. Patrick and I are pictured there being "Soul Men."

So that's a bit of catch up on what I've been doing. There's not a lot of opportunity for internet on this run, and I honestly haven't had a lot to report. So... I'll try to do better. Really.

No, Really.