Chad Patterson is more than just a friend. He is family. In fact, he’s the very best kind of family, the chosen sort.
We collided into each other’s lives just after high school in the halls of the theater department at Lansing Community College. Our separate paths that led to the same spot on the planet were mirrored in many ways. Sports and pop culture, specifically movies at an early age, drove our curiosity, fueled ur fascinations, and helped us to gain a small understanding of the world around us. We both used our razor sharp wit and flair for performance as a preferred method of conflict resolution or to win over an opponent.
Somehow those naive and misguided young men have become fathers, husbands, business owners, community leaders, and mentors. Chad has two children, Seth and Del, that are both pursuing careers in the arts. His kids, like mine, were given the gift of art and creativity as a way to see the world anew and to find a greater purpose within it.
Seth (23) is currently in residency at The Florida Repertory Theater. Del (16) is enmeshed in the local media arts and technology program with an eye towards a career in video editing and behind the scenes film work. Lori, Chad’s wife, and my high school classmate oddly enough, has taught elementary school in Grayling, MI for nearly 30 years. The Pattersons are the kind of family you need and want in your community.
Chad has spent his career literally living and working on the front lines of art and education for a quarter of a century. For more than twenty years he owned and operated Acting Up Theater Company. During the school year, Chad and his co-star worked with elementary classrooms all across Michigan in weeklong residencies. Over the course of five school days, Chad and his team, would work with the teacher and the entire class to write, stage, costume, decorate, and dress a full one act play based upon a moment from Michigan history. In each school, several classes would participate. With that program, Chad built an entire generation of young Michiganders that grew up seeing theater and history come to life, and in the process were able to create a formative experience that will forever enhance their viewpoint on both of those fields of study.
Each summer, with school out, the Acting Up team would custom write a show tailor made for that year’s statewide library reading program theme. Over the course of the program's two decade run, Chad brought live theater and arts education to tens of thousands of students in hundreds of communities across the state. Chad was even fortunate to complete at least one full summer with each of his children, teaching and starring with them on the library tour.
Chad is also the longtime theater director for Garyling high school’s theater productions, and has worked in a variety of roles working in student development and accessibility for the last several years. On many a night in northern Michigan, you can hear Chad as the voice of the Grayling Vikings high school football and boys/girls basketball broadcasts on Grayling’s Q100 FM.
Just this February, in a move that surprised even Chad, he left his position at the high school to become the morning show host at Q100 every weekday. Did I mention that Chad had never done a minute of radio before he was asked to do games?
You can’t interview your best friend of 30 plus years and pretend you're going to be anything close to objective. The tightness of the relationship manages to tug constantly at the typical stitching of an interview. Inherently, there is a comfort level that exists between an interviewer and a subject that know little or nothing about each other.
The back and forth of that relationship has very clear boundaries, and is temporal. The interview will have a clear beginning and end. More importantly, while each interview experience is unique in its own way, they all conform more or less, to the same sets of strictures. In that sense, this is not a good interview.
Once a threshold of intimacy between the parties has been breached, especially over an extended period of time, enough walls have been knocked away, that you find yourself with more answers than questions. The fewer discoveries and secrets there might be left to unearth, the more difficult it is to maintain the rhythms of a typical interview.
In reality, I am the very worst person to interview, my brother, Chad Patterson. But, what I can do is show him to you in a way that no one else can.
Before you dive into what Chad does and why it’s worth knowing about, I just want you to know what he’s like. He’s a really good dude. He is funny and clever, loud and lovable. He’s an attentive and devoted father, and he puts his money where his mouth is and does more in and for his community than almost anyone that I know.
This isn’t an interview so much as it is two brothers having a conversation while other people listen in. I hope we can convey in some small way just how deeply we care about each other and how the intentionality of that love is at the center of our daily lives.
Our relationship is special because we share a deep connection, but that connection has been fostered with work and maintenance over a lifetime. When you hear these two people talking with each other there is complete and absolute trust. That is probably a more rare commodity than we might realize.
One of my mantras here is that all of the best things in my life that I am not directly blood related to came from chasing down the passion of cool shit. When I first met Chad Patterson I was not quite 19. I was terrified of the future and the present, lost, unfocused and dealing with a host of undiagnosed mental health conditions.
I had largely chosen theater because it seemed the closest thing to a “career” that I could imagine that seemed like it would still be fun. Maybe I’d find a path. I didn’t.
But I found Chad. And he found me.
I hope you all have a friend like this in your lives. I feel so grateful that he is in mine, and that I have this interview to prove it. Now, he’s in your life too. Here is a talk, not an interview, my very dear friend Chad Patterson.Here’s hoping this isn’t the last time that Chad and I sit down for one of these. There is so much to talk about, and we’re just getting warmed up.
Cheers,Matty C
