When I retired several years ago I had four "pillars" for life's next phase: 1) grandkid time, 2) music, 3) writing, and 4) house projects (in the aggregate, these activities lowered the risk that I would drive my wife crazy being around the house all the time).

For the last two years, I've been plying my musical trade in St Augustine where I was lucky enough to fall in with the folks at the local playhouse "The Limelight Theatre". I debuted as Charlie Davenport, the general manager of Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show in the musical Annie Get Your Gun. The music is vintage Irving Berlin with great chord changes and melodies. The feature song is "There's No Business Like Show Business" which Ethel Merman made famous in the Oscar and Hammerstein production that ran on Broadway in 1946.

The show was a great theatre baptism for me. The hardest thing was learning to sing and dance at the same time. But I persevered and I didn't make a fool of myself on opening night.

Shortly after Annie Get Your Gun wrapped I had my next role as Tom Jackson in Horton Foote's "The Young Man from Atlanta". It was a sharp left turn going from a lighthearted musical about Annie Oakley to a compelling drama about an aging couple. I had never heard of the play or Horton Foote. Turns out, Foote wrote the screenplay for the classic movie "To Kill a Mockingbird" and, years later, the story and screenplay for "Tender Mercies", an under-the-radar movie starring Robert Duvall as a country western singer, down on his luck in the tumbleweeds of Texas.

"Tender Mercies" made an impression on me when it came out in 1983 and inspired one of my early songs, "Little Things".

The chorus goes :
Little things make me careful
of losing myself
Little things help me forget
the times I have doubts
and if you remember to look for the signs,
you'll always find hope in little things

Both "The Young Man from Atlanta" and "Tender Mercies" are plays where the "little things" are what matters when cracks appear in the mirror and dreams get shattered.

Fast forward to our opening night of "The Young Man from Atlanta" when I wrote this song "Lily Dale". I was moved by the heart wrenching performances of the actors who play the aging couple struggling with their son's suicide.

It's fun symmetry going from being inspired in song by Foote's "Tender Mercies" in 1983, when I didn't even know he was the author, to being inspired almost 40 years later by another of his wonderful works, "The Young Man from Atlanta" .

Inspiration Symmetry