It’s National Nurses Week, so I had to post. Here I am, upstate in the Great Western Catskill mountains since March 16th. Today is Friday, May 8th.  This house used to be a haven for my huswife and me for those few days we would have off.  We would run up here and get some much needed rest and relaxation, and then back to the city to go to work.  That of course, now, is a thing of the past.  This house for the past two months is my home.  Kim, my huswife, (a term I made up that she likes because of the fact that after 18 years of marriage, she told me she was trans non-binary and doesn’t care about pronouns, and hates they/them) is an essential worker and needs to go back and forth to the city to work.  At the beginning of this shut down, I was at TINA: THE TINA TURNER MUSICAL on Broadway, as a rehearsal pianist and Keyboard 1 sub, plus that particular week I was in rehearsal for a revival of my show RADIANT BABY, a musical about the life of Keith Haring.  We were so excited about the cast we had assembled, and were in day 4 of rehearsal, when our producers told us that the reading was cancelled.  So for the first two weeks Kim and I were up at the house, we started to cheer people up by asking for the names of their pets and going on Facebook live and singing the pet songs we wrote that we personalized for everyone.  This was a minor hit amongst our friends, but soon we realized that even though Kim had never written a song, we were actually good at it together.  Every night we saw grim images on TV of the overworked healthcare workers in New York.  We had to do something.  My friend of 40 years, Andrea York, suggested that we write a song thanking the healthcare workers.  So we did. I sent my raw piano/vocal track recorded on Garage Band to Taylor Peckham, my friend and Conductor of SUMMER: THE DONNA SUMMER MUSICAL to orchestrate it based on my arrangement. Then I invited pretty much everyone I knew to submit a video of themselves singing the chorus of the song.  Andrea did the same, and so did Kim.  We got 80 submissions.  I was at home, isolated in the Catskills with Kim taping my iPhone to a mic stand, and shooting myself at the piano singing and playing in shitty clothes I had up here (except for my TINA Broadway hoodie!).  My sister, Janice Barsha, editor extraordinaire, and owner of 70 Degrees Productions, had the daunting task of aligning all the videos to the track. Janice is in Boston, Taylor was in NY and I was in the Catskills.  All the videos came from different places around the world. Yes, I say world, because 2 submissions came from friends in Japan.  Some of the cast of TINA sent their videos in (thank you Carla R. Stewart, Dawnn Lewis, Judith Franklin, Myra L Taylor, Katie Webber and Aurelian Budynek) as well as colleagues in the business I so admire: Broadway’s Michael Winther, Leslie Giammanco, Marcy McGuigan, Shaleah Adkisson, Sheilah Rae, Linedy Genao, Marissa Rosen and Courtney Bassett, Comedienne/singer Sandra Valls, Singer/songwriter Jonatha Brooke, pianist Mitchel Forman, pianist for Stevie Wonder, Victoria Theodore, George Clinton from Parliament Funkadelic, recording artist Valerie Romanoff, singer Melissa Hammans, singer/songwriters Bruce Sudano and Ryan Amador and Joy Reid from MSNBC’s AMJoy.  And the riffing on chorus 3 and 4 was by the amazing Cristina Rae. Also, people who weren’t musicians but wanted to be part of it participated as well.  The artist Hunt Slonem sang with his famous parrots screeching in the background, and Kim’s Port Authority Police Officer friends told us they had to do “around 300 takes” to get it right.  Screenwriter Nancy Fichman, and actress Jen Landon contributed, too. Also, Kim and I are Buddhists and chant Nam-Myoho-Renge-Kyo, and fellow members of the Soka Gakkai International, our Buddhist organization helped out as well, submitting great videos.  We tried to make the chorus as singable as possible so everyone would feel comfortable. Then after Janice worked her magic and got everything aligned visually (and for you musicians, there was no click track!), we sent it back to Taylor for the re-mix, so that when the 80 videos came in and out visually, you would hear their voice simultaneously.  This was a real challenge because I did not give the instructions on which chorus to sing, and chorus 3 and 4 are in a different key than chorus 1 and 2.  So we had to choose who went where based on what they sang.  Most did not sing chorus 3 and 4.  Simultaneous to all of this, we reached out to various hospitals to send them the song and asked if they had any pictures of healthcare workers on the frontline that we could use. We did not want to get into any rights issues.  Hats off to Francesca Losito who runs a department at Kaiser Permanente in Anaheim, Ca, who rounded up her staff for chorus 4.  They are the ones who created the signs with the words to the chorus on them and stepped forward in their PPE to share and turn the song upside down, thanking US for being there for THEM.  It was quite moving because I would never have asked them to do any of that.  It was Francesca’s idea.  Other hospitals sent in stills and thank you to Georgia Peirce for that, plus Andrea’s close friend and godmother to her child, Jill did so as well.  Dina Losito, Francesca’s sister and my friend for over 30 years, lives 1 mile from Elmhurst’s Hospital, which was hit really hard.  She rode her bike past the now famous  “THANK YOU” sign across the street from the hospital, and got that footage for us. So now you know how it was done since so many of you were asking me.  We did not use Zoom or iMovie. We sent the video out and immediately got e-mails from hospitals who were showing it to their staffs to uplift them.  One website even featured us on their home page (caringon.org). Here is the result of our efforts.  Please get this to as many healthcare workers that you can.  This is not over yet.  

Thank you so much.