It’s a late post, I know. But perhaps this will be up for tomorrow as well. We’ll see how I feel and what I do. If I feel prolific… there will be a new post tomorrow.
I got back earlier from dropping my friend, Kien at the railway station. He should be arriving in San Francisco pretty soon. He’ll spend a night there then flies off back to London.
This has been his fifth visit here – the last 4 to perform at the Rogue Festival… and he’s planning to return again next year. (If you haven’t yet… here is an article The Fresno Bee wrote on Kien this year.) It was great having him here… I will look forward to his return. He has been my touchstone and continuum to my past and early youth in Malaysia… in the present. Something that was really missing in my life for 20 odd years. There is a certain comfort in that. Helps make me feel less “alien” than I sometimes do.
Don’t get me wrong. I have carved out a good life out here and I have wonderful friends who accept me for who I am… mostly… lol. But there are times when I am more aware of being the expat that I am. So, having a touchstone like Kien (whom I grew up with) feeds the need for that “special” comfort of home that I crave sometimes. Sort of like having that ‘special dish that grandma” used to cook in her own unique way brings that sense of home to us.
Anyway, I get home and realize that I’ve left Skype on from chatting with a friend earlier in the day. There is a message from another friend from home… Mike, who has tracked me down via the internet. It reads…
“…need to get in touch with you fairly quickly. Someone wants to stage Frogway in KL, credible people. My email…”
Mike? Frogway? Talk about a blast from the past! Mike and I wrote Frogway together in 1980. We wrote as the “M&M Song Factory”. It was staged in 1981 in Malaysia and then in 1984 here in Fresno to sold out audiences. It was the first play I had written… and it was a musical about a singing frog. Think of it as an amphibious “Star is Born”.
So, I ring Mike via Skype and we chat for about an hour. Catching up and talking shop about Frogway. Laughing about the fact that our names are unique enough that Google search brings us up instantly.
Now Mike is one of the premiere jazz pianist in Malaysia… dare I say internationally. (Really, this cat is quite the phenom.) You can get a bit of a sense of the awe he inspires by reading THIS. It was a wonderful conversation and looks like we will be working together again after a 27 year break. It’s something I’m really looking forward to. We also casually floated ideas about some other projects… plus, he may come perform in the Rogue next year. This could mean the return of the “M&M Song Factory”. (Perhaps I need to brush up on my lyric writing.) It was great to reconnect again and it felt like it was just yesterday that we last spoke.
So, I said goodbye to one friend today (more of a “see ya soon”) and hello to another. Both (in fact, Mike and Kien used to play together in several bands) returning from a different life I lived in the past to further enrich my present.
EDIT: 5:27 PM
Gotta go anytime… anywhere… this is what you need!