A Blast from the Past

There may be no greater pleasure than reconnecting with a friend and colleague from 28 years ago and filling in the gaps in our respective lives.
That's what happened today when one of the finest writers I've ever worked with stepped back into my world.
Michael stopped writing in 1980 when he left The Morning Call in Allentown, Pennsylvania, where I was his editor. I'd hired him after working with him for years at The St. Petersburg Times in Florida where he helped reshape that newspaper with original, inspirational and inventive writing that cut a swath through our feature department.
He was a big man, physically, back then. And he's substantially bigger now. When he hauled his Falstaffian body aboard our motor home, it sank about three inches as he climbed the steps.
During the past 28 years he moved his creative energies from writing to the stage. He gained a national reputation as a Renaissance Festival king. His basso profundo voice fairly vibrates your inner core when you listen to him. When he sings, his operatic bass is riveting and mesmerizing.
We connected because Jo and I drove our motor home over to Orlando for a "free" weekend at a membership park where their top salesman was put in charge of convincing us of the value of buying a $16,995 membership package. When that didn't work, the price dropped to a mere $6,995. And still we didn't buy in. Then the salesman seemed to take the rejection as a personal rejection of him and he became curt and snippy.
Eventually, after two hours of hard selling, soft selling, arm twisting and ultimately personal abuse, he threw in the towel. He handed over our promised $100 in Walmart gift cards and the 30-day free membership in the parks around the U.S. They had offered these incentives to get us to agree to listen to the sales pitch.
And then we were free to enjoy the rest of our weekend at this quite pleasant park.
Michael's arrival made the day special. He's a bear of a man. He may weigh more than 350 pounds and he has just been hired by Disney World in Orlando to play a British version of Father Christmas this holiday season.
We patched the memory quilt of where we'd both gone and what we'd done since last we'd worked together.
My last recollection of Michael as a feature writer was to watch him struggle to put words on paper while sitting in front of a manual typewriter in the newsroom in Allentown. I remember the sweat - yes, real beads of actual sweat - on his brow as he struggled to find his muse. Singing is easy for Michael. Acting is easy for Michael. Writing is hard. Even though he has few peers, he told me today that he always felt like a fraud, that he was not as good as everyone thought he was when it came to writing.
To this day, he said, he wakes up from a recurring nightmare in which he is poised in front of a typewriter and he cannot write the first sentence of his story.
So he walked away from that work, loaded his wife in a VW bus and drove around the U.S. visiting national parks. Eventually they hooked up with the Renaissance Fair circuit in which he played the role of Henry VIII, and his wife played one of Hank's wives.
They did that for eight years before he moved into the Disney complex as an actor. Now, he is between gigs (that's actor talk for being out of work). But things look up after Thanksgiving when he takes on the role of Father Christmas.
He is 62 now; his health is not so good - heart stents, gall bladder removed, the toe next to the big toe on his left foot was recently surgically removed to stop an infection down there.
But the voice is still there. Ah, the voice: sonorous, creamy rich, musical. He's like a bottle of port that has been brought up from the cellar. What a joy to find him again and to connect for even a few hours.