Local Middletown Artist Ignored by Local Media (Patch , Asbury Park Press, NJ 12)

Local Artist Gets Ignored by Local Media

An Irish-American newspaper saw the story. His hometown media largely didn’t.

MIDDLETOWN, NJ — Tomorrow marks the 25th anniversary of September 11, 2001.

For months, I’ve been preparing to commemorate that anniversary in a very personal—and admittedly unusual—way.

I wrote a one-man musical.

Beautiful Estrangement is based on the true story of my Middletown family’s trip to Ireland in September 2001. We went there for my mother Nancy’s 60th birthday, traveling the country on a nine-day CIE tour while searching for the dilapidated County Cavan cottage where my grandmother had once lived.

Then September 11 happened.

We were thousands of miles from home. My sister had flown out ahead of us and became one of the stranded airline passengers later associated with the story told in Come From Away. The rest of us were stranded in Ireland for six days.

Twenty-five years later, I turned that experience into Beautiful Estrangement—an original American-Irish folk musical that I wrote, adapted and now perform as an immersive one-man show.

And I’m premiering it right here at home.

You might think that would make an interesting local arts story.

Apparently, not everyone agrees.

Over the past several weeks, I’ve contacted local and regional media organizations, sent press releases, supplied photographs, explained the story and tried to get the word out about a project created and performed by someone from the very community so deeply affected by September 11.

That outreach included Patch.

For the most part, the response from local media has been silence.

There has been one notable exception.

The Irish Echo was the only publication that took the time to cover Beautiful Estrangement. In its story, “Separation and Discovery After 9/11,” the Irish Echo recognized something that, strangely, has been difficult to get my own local media to notice: this isn’t simply another September 11 remembrance. It’s a Middletown family’s true story about Ireland, family, separation, discovery and what happened when an ordinary vacation collided with one of the most consequential days in American history.

For that coverage, I’m genuinely grateful.

I’m not a celebrity. I don’t have a Broadway producer, a publicist or a large arts organization behind me. I’m a local writer, musician, inventor and small-business owner who decided that this family story was worth preserving—and that the 25th anniversary was the moment to tell it.

Maybe that’s precisely why I’m writing this myself.

Local art doesn’t begin on Broadway. Sometimes it begins with somebody sitting alone with a guitar, an old family story and the slightly unreasonable belief that they can turn it into something worth seeing.

Whether Beautiful Estrangement succeeds is for the audience to decide.

But tomorrow night, the curtain goes up regardless.

Beautiful Estrangement premieres September 11–13 at Navesink Library Theatre, with five performances: Friday at 7 p.m.; Saturday at 2 and 6 p.m.; and Sunday at 2 and 6 p.m.

Tickets and information are available at BeautifulEstrangement.com/tickets.

And if you’d like to read the one publication that decided this local story was worth telling, read the Irish Echo’s coverage: “Separation and Discovery After 9/11.”

Maybe the local media won’t tell this story.

So I just did.