I have tried many times to update this newsletter, but perhaps this afternoon I will succeed, because it is the last day of A.D. 2022.

In my last newsletter, I had just started working at Wert Bookbinding, a small business not too far from Hersheypark populated by employees mostly older than my own parents, which receives paperback books from mostly college libraries from New York to South Carolina and replaces the flimsy existing covers with hardbacks, mostly a boring single cover with the title and call number stamped on the side.

About a month after that email, I would audition for --- and be cast in --- A Christmas Carol at DreamWrights Center for Community Arts, where just before the pandemic I was 'Tumnus' in a production of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Live theater was coming back, although we rehearsed and performed with masks on. The show, directed by DreamWrights' new artistic director, Gregory DeCandia, and twin sister dancer/choreographers Deidre and Gabriel Casey, had an intentionally scrappy feel: an urban backdrop, graffiti and broken windows. As Marley/The Narrator, I mostly watched the action from a catwalk above the stage, where I was provided a piano to occasionally aid in my narrative duties.

The Ghost of Marley, borrowing from Hamlet, which is name-dropped in Dickens' original tale, is in Purgatory, a theological concept which I'm not exactly sure when I stopped not believing in. I am not sure whether I was in Purgatory or Limbo during those shows. To be sure, I had a tremendous time; but there's something indescribably odd in the sensation of driving an hour from home to be in a mostly-empty theater to rehearse with people you mostly don't know, not unlike being at a church on a weeknight.

There are, of course, parallels between the church and the theater, parallels which I will not try to draw out here since it is New Year's Eve and I have not even got to the beginning of 2022. I do believe this was the year I finally cut Christian radio almost entirely out of my life. For a while, I set my morning alarm to WDAC, because I remembered the voice of Mike Stike from childhood and it was comforting to hear him again. I slowly started to realize a series of business advertisements they ran were a recurring series with the same characters. But eventually I tired of the lies. That's all right: back in 2019 or '20, I started listening to WXPN, which is not religious but does have the same attractions of conservative Christian radio against the iHeartRadio top 40 drivel (although I love the drivel too): radio hosts talking conversationally into the mic, programs you feel you have some humanitarian duty to listen in to sometimes (cultured songs, as opposed to sermons), and an hour of children's music at 7pm on weeknights.

The new year began. I saw a good number of plays before spring came --- Virginia Woolf's Orlando, adapted by Sarah Ruhl, at Gamut Theatre in Harrisburg was a standout --- but my days mostly consisted of stamping numbers in the backs of books and putting piles of loose pages into a gigantic machine that applied glue to the spine.

My 8th-grade homeschool co-op improv teacher reached out to me about a project we had been talking about since 2018: her original children's play "It's a Fairy Tale!," which had several songs but was in need of original sheet music.

DreamWrights reached out to me because they needed a rehearsal pianist for Spring Awakening, being directed by the Casey sisters. There have been times this year I have mentioned Spring Awakening with some degree of minimization --- "just a job" kind-of comments, although I was barely paid --- because it's a provocative show. I cannot say I was comfortable with everything I learned about the original Broadway production from the HBO documentary that released while we were in rehearsals! But I did not have significant issues with anything in our production, and I was grateful for the chance to be a part of a show that, while fictional, told truths about life, without providing easy answers.

I played for the first night of auditions and then came down with COVID. Still don't know where from. Luke, my housemate and good college friend, brought me a butt-ton of food (I had sorta been planning on surviving the week on sardines and peanut butter), and I watched a lot of the 1980s Superboy TV series on my phone, which I have not done before or since.

Between being the rehearsal pianist and the pit keyboardist for Spring Awakening, "It's A Fairy Tale!" came together in a week by a group of young campers at the Red Lion Rec Center, and I got to play for that as well, wearing a gloriously ridiculous orange suit and top hat made for me by the intrepid costumers. Some of Christina Myers MacCloskey's other children's drama camps were held at Canadochly Evangelical and Reformed Church instead of the Red Lion Recreation Center, so when that church needed a pianist twice a month, she sent me their way, and I got my first ongoing job as a paid musician.

Luke found a place to live in Lancaster without me, and me continuing to rent the farmhouse without him wasn't an option, so half out of desperation, and half because I knew I would enjoy it, I asked the members of Poplar Place, a progressive Christian intentional community in Lancaster City, if I could stay there at least a month. (One of my housemates during my time in the Shalom Project had moved straight out from the Shalom house to Poplar Place.) Long story short, I am now a member of Poplar Place myself.

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I regretfully quit the bookbinding job to move to Lancaster. I worked for a couple months at an ice cream shop where, instead of scooping, we poured liquid cream onto a freezing surface, mixed in the flavor ingredients (someone ordered a strawberry ice cream? grab a strawberry from the box of Driscoll's to mash up), and roll up to place into bowls.

I quit that job too when I got a well-paying offer to spend a couple weeks accompanying a high school play with improvised incidental music of my own making, and I used the extra time to make digital copies of my childhood home videos. (Editing them is an ongoing process, but I've whittled down my first five years by a factor of five into a 3.5hr documentary at least. Please grant me the pretension of calling it a documentary.) I've been meaning to search out full-time work (grocery store employee? substitute teacher?), but with my occasional piano gigs, my bank account has been holding surprisingly steady. In the new year, I'll be starting as a church pianist for the choir and church services of a Methodist church within walking distance.

Hang in there this new year. Feel free to drop me a line anytime at (717) 584-1778 or at [email protected]. No guarantees I'll write a timely reply, but I'd love to hear from you.