After the audience at the Jimmy’s No. 43 songshare event basically demanded that I write the whole thing, I thought: Challenge accepted, but what's actually next?  Like a lot of writers, I need the fire under my ass of a deadline to buckle down and do the work.  I then thought — hey, what if I commit to a very public presentation of the whole thing in a very visible place?  I gave myself about nine months as the ultimate deadline, and friends put me in touch with Jennifer Tepper at 54 Below who was more than happy to put me on the calendar, even without a full score written yet.  

I was off to the races.  With August 7, 2015 on the books as my first go-round, I reached back out to Danny, who was thrilled at the prospect of moving this forward, to Tiffany Topol, who was pleased to jump in and keep Zelda-ing, and to my dear friend and NYU classmate Nick Myers (one of my favorite people and a brilliant composer in his own right), who agreed to music direct and orchestrate the concert.  

During that early writing and research period, I hopped a Megabus to D.C. so that I could visit the Fitzgeralds in the churchyard cemetery of St. Mary’s, an unassuming Catholic church directly across from an industrial park straight off the Metro in Rockville, Maryland.  The story behind their interment in that churchyard is fascinating.  Scott’s family had a plot there, but when he died in 1940, the Archbishop of Baltimore declared that since he was a lapsed Catholic who wrote disgusting sinful books, he was not welcome in any cemetery in the diocese.  Consequently, he was initially buried in an unassuming Protestant cemetery down the road, and when Zelda died eight years later, she was buried with him.  But then thirty years later — after the cultural reappraisal of The Great Gatsby led to the Fitzgeralds gaining a respected place in the canon of American literature — their daughter petitioned the archdiocese to reconsider their decision, and they did, leading Scott and Zelda to be moved to the family plot, where they remain today.  (Very Evita, minus any mysterious disappearances.)

So I stood there in the bitter January cold in the St. Mary’s churchyard and asked for their blessing.  I felt a real obligation to get their story right — not Wikipedia entry right, but spiritually and creatively right.  I promised I’d do them proud.  (I hope I have.)

And so I furiously wrote an entire score that spring and summer.  (No book… yet.  I’ll get into that next week.)  And the team kept growing.  Joining Tiffany as Zelda would be the delightful Joel Perez of Fun Home, who brought such a sweet golden-voiced swagger to the proceedings. 

The five-piece band rounded out to include my dear friend Ryan Kerr on clarinet, Micah Burgess on banjo, Ian Jesse on upright bass and my then-roommate Suzanne Davies on violin.  Dream team!

My memories of the night of the show are very blurry — my mom hopped a Greyhound from Kentucky to be there, and my dear late friend Kenwyn Dapo brought me a bouquet of flowers made out of balloons. (Her burlesque alter ego, Mistress B, incorporated balloons into her act. She was amazing, and she's so very missed.)

A lot of folks came out to support the show, in spite of it being at 11:30 at night.  (Almost a decade later, the idea of a show starting at 11:30 is so upsetting to me.  ha ha)  And I got the fine folks at Famous in NY to capture the show for posterity.  The entire thing is on YouTube here:

So it was a success! Just as with the Jimmy's No. 43 performance, people really responded to the show.

The best part?  Here I was with a first draft of a score that I was proud of and excited about.

The worst part?  It was a score without a book.  I had my work cut out for me…