Today is a kind of Christmas.
I am performing tonight in a show with my friends Eric Lane Barnes and Tina Gluschenko.
We are singing songs written by Eric.
I have known him for over twenty years now. There is something very unique to be a singer and to sing one of your best friends songs onstage. It's a gift. We have been performing off and on for all these years and tonight is a first, the first time the THREE of us will be sharing the stage together.
I met Eric when he was the accompanist for a voice teacher I was taking lessons from. We hit it off pretty instantaneously when we found out we had pretty much the exact same sense of humor. We could walk up Michigan Avenue and that was all we needed for entertainment. Looking into a store window and seeing a strange animated figure rotating it's head back and forth, some kind of advertisement from the 50's or 60's that was still there and old and sad. We would stare at it smiling and just howl with laughter.
We started working together when he played for me for what was my very very first cabaret show. I did it at a place called The Raccoon Club on Wells Street just under the EL tracks at the brown line Chicago stop. I remember we both very proudly wore Willie Wear suits. Do you remember those AWFUL suits?! The year was 1986 I believe. After that we both were in “Four Hits and a Miss” together. He was the musical director. It was the group that inspired me to put together “THREE Hits and a Miss” years later. (Although he wasn't part of THAT group, we did do several of his arrangements.
One time he was playing for me at a club called Boombala. I remember telling him that I wanted the overture to “The Wizard of Oz” played on the piano before my show. As I waited in the wings, sure enough he played it and it made me tear up. We did crazy things. We have crazy “skits” that we do that to anyone else would just be absolutely weird and maybe even stupid. But it makes us howl (again) with laughter.
Tina. Tina and I have known each other ever since we were paired up in the chorus of “Anyone Can Whistle” at Pegasus Players in the late 1980's. Again, instant, “where have you been all my life” friendship. Once again someone who I made up stupid little “skits” with just to entertain ourselves. Hours of entertainment and laughter just by doing things. She used to come over to my apartment on Addison and I would make pigs in a blanket hot dogs with Pillsbury Crescent Dough. We loved to sing really loudly in cockney accents. We nicknamed each other Hansel and Gretel and wandered around Andersonville on a winters night looking for Glugg and talking in thick german accents. Tina and I toured together for nine months in “Into The Woods.”
She was Cinderella and I was Jack.
So the thought of the two of these people and ME onstage together is, well, as I mentioned earlier, a sort of Christmas. This is also an example of having a wish, an idea and turning it into a reality. Even if it DID take almost twenty years. It is going to be well worth the wait.
Visit Eric's website.