Welcome to Season 4 of the Tim Tunes Podcast. We’re starting this season with a serialized set of podcasts that encompass the music and script from my musical, “The Waiting Room”. In this episode we’ll cover three songs from the show. The first song establishes what the show is about. The second gives us a little bit of a look ahead and the last song digs into what the experience is like.
Back in the mid-nineties a friend told me that he had been diagnosed with cancer. At that point he was one of those “husband of a wife’s friend” kind of friends. It was around that time that we started playing golf together. We would ride to the games together and that gave us a time to talk. Alone, without the wives or children or other relatives in the car with us we were able to relax and talk about what was going on with each other in a “safe” space. My friend and I didn’t believe in the same things politically, but that never interfered with our ability to be friends. It was as if this safe space was more important to us than winning any argument over some philosophical or political point. I should mention that my friend didn’t usually speak very much when others were around. He was noted for his reserved character. He was a sort of self-made renaissance man in the sense that he could fix anything, mechanical, not emotional. He recently passed away and now I think of him often.
In 2010, I joined a group called Voices of Hope. This is a group of singers, actors, dancers, musicians, and crew who perform to raise money for cancer research and to support those who are going through the cancer journey. My friend was well into his second cancer diagnosis, and I began to form an idea as to how to help Voices of Hope, or any fundraising group, raise money by creating a set of songs around this journey. It was then that I got the idea to make this set of songs into a musical. So, I set about writing the songs in the early 2010s and seeing if I had enough material for a show.
I decided to go with the “Jukebox” format where different characters sing their songs. Some of these songs are thought pieces where we are taken out of the action of the play and into the mind of the character and other pieces occur in the present within the action of the play. In casting about for some kind of plot or organizing principal, I hit upon Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’ five stages of grief. Both of my parents had recently passed away and I had personally experienced this. So, the five stages denial, anger bargaining, depression and acceptance, became the first organizing principle for the show.
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