Tomatoes Tried to Kill Me but Banjos Saved My Life Transcript Written By: Keith Alessi

Tomatoes Tried to Kill Me but Banjos Saved My Life Transcript Written by: Keith Alessi

1 © Keith Alessi 2021

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2 © Keith Alessi 2021 Directed by: Erika Conway

Character: Keith Alessi

Beginning of Script. They say that you can tell who a person really is by looking in their closets. I had 52 banjos in mine! Music What do you get if you toss a banjo off the top of the Calgary tower? Applause Music What’s the difference between a banjo player and a side of Prime Alberta Beef? That side of beef can feed a family of four. Music What do you call the most attractive young lady in all of Calgary on the arm of a banjo player? A tattoo Music So, what kind of guy squirrels away banjos like acorns in his closet? Especially when he grew up in a big city listening to Motown music? And why would that flatlander embark upon a journey that would take him to answers at a simple country store on a crooked road in mountainous South West Virginia? And what would compel him to take to the stage, for the first time since senior year in high school in 1972 telling the story? As I see it, we’re all going down that road of life, we’re learning lessons as we go. My roads never been a straight one; it’s always been full of twists and turns. I never know what’s around the next bend. It might be a stop, could be a detour, it could be the destination I just don’t know. And therefore, I like to look through the windshield, not the rear view mirror. Cause it’s very difficult to navigate the present when you’re looking in the past. I have found my road full of obstacles, challenges. It’s never been a function of if they were going to show up, it was when. And, when they did, what choices did I make? How did it affect the rest of that journey? We all do that.

3 © Keith Alessi 2021 I recognize there are certain challenges in life that are too large to be overcome, we have no choice, but each and every one of us has a choice about what we put in our closets. This is a true story, every word of it true. About my journey down the road, and how the pursuit of a passion took me to a place that I could have never imagined. But every journey down the road starts at the beginning…. Music There are moments in life that forever change the way we see things. I call them the “big bang” moments. And like the big bang they propel you in a direction, they forever change things for you. That echo of that bang is a constant down throughout your lifetime. These events often occur when you are kids when we are most impressionable and least experienced. As long as I can remember, I wanted to be a pilot. I grew up near a general aviation airport and I would jump on my bicycle every single morning and would ride down to the field. Now this was before there was a lot of security around the field so you could get in pretty close. I had saved up all my paperboy money. I had bought a special aviation radio. I could tune into the aviation frequencies and I’d listen to the pilots in those airplanes communicating with the tower. And I spent my days picking those airplanes out and watching them enter the pattern getting cleared for landing and I just dreaming about the day that I’d be piloting one of those airplanes. Christmas Day, 11 years old, I get the best present ever. My own toy airport. It’s got a big cardboard runway I run it all the way from the kitchen to the dining room. It’s got a little plastic control tower, a terminal, fuel trucks, baggage carts. The center piece of this toy, A big grey plastic airliner. Pan Am it says on the back. Captain Keith is spending his day, tuning in his radio, talking to the tower, getting clearance to land, fighting the trickiest crosswinds and landing and nailing them every time. All the passengers in the back would applaud every single landing. Bus drivers don’t get that kind of respect. Well, I’m having a ball. When for reasons never explained or fully understood my father, Tullio, comes storming through that room in a fit of rage and destroys my airport by stomping it into little pieces on Christmas Day. Bang. I’m in a state of shock. I'm angry. I'm scared. I’m confused. Then, I cried like a baby. I grew up in Italian household, tomatoes were constant. They were everywhere. They were on the table as a side dish they were in a pizza they were in a sauce they were in a sandwich…. they WERE a sandwich. There was always tomato vines growing in the backyard.

4 © Keith Alessi 2021 My father Tullio was born near Venice Italy. His family settled in Windsor ON when he was 10. Couldn't speak word English although he was a very bright kid. My grandparents never learn to speak a word to English. He struggles in school but by the time he gets out of secondary school he now has a full ride to college. He's the top student in his class there as well. He graduates and he joins the Canadian military. Now if you heard him speak after graduation, he didn’t have a hint of an Italian accent. He spoke the Kings English. He became an officer but because he was considered the potential hostile alien because of his Italian birth, he had report in uniform to a parole officer twice a month. He resented that and never got over it. I'm the second five children the five children, 2 adults, we all grew up in 1100 square foot one bath bungalow. These tomatoes are a staple because it was a very very good day if there was meat on the table in that household. At birth I become both a first generation Canadian and the first generation American 'cause my mother's family born in Calabria Italy, they settle in Toronto but then they migrate to the states. Apparently, this is before they built the wall. Now most of us who grew up at the border, By the way you know that movie The Godfather. I hate that movie. That movie ripped off my family history! They did! 25 years before that movie was made, my Grandfather, Ernesto Bruno Napolitano, drops dead of a heart attack in his garden tending to his tomatoes. Every time that scene shows up in that movie, I want royalties. Like so many families of the 60’s, we grew up watching TV and we had a luxury. We were growing up on the border and we had 4 TV stations. We had CKLW TV out of Windsor and then we had the three American stations. This was before they had remote controls. Youngest kid in the room, that was the remote control. And we’d watch all those shows and if you didn’t see them live you can certainly see them on the Internet or Netflix or somewhere. These families in the 60s, ‘Father Knows Best’, ‘My Three Sons’, ‘Ozzie and Harriet’. They depict these idyllic families in which the women are all dressed up in jewelry, cooking bacon and eggs for their husbands in suits, kids are all well behaved and I'm looking at these families and I’m wondering…. who are these people? This isn’t the life I’m livin. But I was drawn to another family. The Beverly Hillbillies. The Clampetts. And a man named Jed.

5 © Keith Alessi 2021 Music Oil Texas Tea Movie stars Swimming pools Ya’ll come back now ya hear? That song, that song. The Ballad of Jed Clampett. It captures my imagination. It makes no sense there were no banjos ringing in my ears growing up. Interestingly that song is also inspired many of the great banjo players that you know. Steve Martin grew up in Southern California, Tony Trischka, Syracuse New York Bay Lafelck New York City, there’s just something about the banjo. For me it was the fact that whenever the banjo was playing, people were smiling. It cut through the clutter. I wanted to learn to play but there's a problem. Banjos are most frustrating of the stringed instruments. There made of different kinds of metals and woods, they expand and contract the different rates they have synthetic add skinheads their impossible to keep in tune. And believe me on the cold dry Calgary days it's been a challenge. People pick up these instruments they get so frustrated they discard them, and you'll find the highways and byways in North America are littered with discarded banjos. I go up. I buy my first inexpensive banjo. I bring it home. I want to play that three-finger style just like Earl. Music Here’s what it sounded like…. Music I got frustrated. I quit. And into the closet that banjo would go, and there it would remain largely for the better part of 20 years. Immigration. Complicated topic then, complicated topic now. I don't claim to be an expert. I have a sample size of one but I can tell you this. Every single slight real or imagined that occurred during Tullio’s day, he attributed it to his immigrant status.

6 © Keith Alessi 2021 And although he was brilliant, he had seething rage which he brought home with his words, his belt and his fists. I was always scared of him. I never thought him as my father he was just Tullio to me. My mother was an absolute saint. She grew up in the Great Depression, she now enters her own deep personal depression spending the last 30 years of her life bedridden and institutionalized. Now no kids should have to come home from grade school to find your mother trying to hang herself. But we did. Each of my siblings took their own road. I had a sister, 35 years ago she took the road to Arizona she joined a cult and she still in it, a brother said “don't contact me” took the road to California never to be heard from again. Me? I'm at a different point on the road. I'm an undersized physically immature kid. I was. I realized I can't go back down the road, I can't stay where I’m at, so I established two patterns in my life to continue throughout my adulthood. I blocked out all that activity, all that anger I was one of those folks who could compartmentalise. I hide behind high emotional walls. I choose only to see the glass 3/4 full but it comes at high price. Because you isolate yourself emotionally behind those walls. Now I tried to fix my mother. I couldn’t I was a kid but I didn’t understand that. That perceived failure on my part haunts me to this very day. The other thing I knew intuitively is I have to continue down this road and get outta here. And that means taking one step at a time, one day at a time. There has to be something better ahead. Just stay focused on the present. Now, I know I have to get out of this house of horrors, you need financial resources, I have none. So, I start compulsively working. Two paper routes, babysitting, raking leaves, shoveling snow, mowing lawns, whatever it took. By the time I get out of high school I got enough money to pay for University. I’m on the road out. I go into business. I launch a career. I hitched my wagon to a series of troubled companies. Ironically my inability to fix my mother results in me hitching my wagon to a bunch of broken businesses. I think I can fix them because I only see upside where everybody else is downside and quickly rise through the ranks.

7 © Keith Alessi 2021 Hi. I'm Keith. And I’m a recovering executive. This work is very stressful. The hours are long the moves are frequent. Through this entire period of time, I maintain my love of the banjos and my love the tomatoes. But as much as I loved those tomatoes, they’re not always loving me back. A banjo would come out of the closet on occasion, I’d try to play it I would fail. And then it struck me. It dawned on me, I had epiphany and if you golf you've had the same epiphany. The only thing that’s preventing you from golfing like Tiger Woods…. you need better equipment! I needed better equipment. I run out and I buy my first real banjo. This is an Earl Scruggs Gibson Mastertone replica. I pick it up…. guess what? Problem wasn’t the equipment. Closet now has two banjos in it. As kid I collected. I collected stones and coins and stamps and baseball cards, now I’m a banjo collector. Whatever the occasion, whenever in doubt, I buy a banjo. Closet was filling up. I reached that proverbial fork in the road and I have to make a choice. Down one path, stay in high paying job in a big company. Safe. Down the other path take a chance on myself become CEO with small broken public company down in states. It was a tax service. I'm CPA by training. Try that line at a cocktail party. Clears a path right through the food. I'm fairly certain I'm the only CPA performing at the high-performance rodeo. I take the chance. I become the CEO of this little company and we fix it. And in 1997 it becomes the leading gaining stock, any stock exchange in North America. It grew 1300% that year. We beat out the number 2 stock, a little company called Yahoo that year. We sell out. I'm a Celebrity all the sudden. I’m on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. I was on Lou Dobbs on TV, couple of magazines. Mom was proud. Tullio gives me the only compliment he ever would in my lifetime, close to one anyway. But he says “Keith…. you used to be my son, now I’m your father. I was 43 years old at the time, supposedly I've reached the pinnacle of business success by what people tell me. But this can't be the destination 'cause I'm feeling hollow I'm unfulfilled I feel untethered. But I purchased my freedom. I have choices to make. First choice I make I buy a very fancy banjo. One built by Jeff Stelling my very good friend from Afton Mountain Virginia who also built this banjo that I’m playing tonight. Now Jeff wasn't a very good friend at the time……but you buy 10 banjos from a guy…. Retirement was great I taught at the Graduate School level, that was fulfilling. I got the coach my kids high school basketball team that was great too. Retirement wasn't meant the last for me.

8 © Keith Alessi 2021 The real world comes a knocking again, now I'm running another broken company, this one an energy company up in Edmonton. Results are going well stock is going up but I'm really starting to feel stresses again. And those tomatoes now were causing me some major problems. I'm having severe acid reflux. Heartburn. And I’m combatting it by consuming massive quantities of Tums, those 500 milligram Wintergreen flavors was my medicine of choice and I self medicated by eating those things like candy. They were in my car, they where in the office, they were on my desk. It helped but I was at a point on that road again and I had some choices to make, and I realized hey, I’m not getting any younger. I was 61 years old at the time and I thought to myself, you know if I'm going to get to learn how to play those banjos, I better get to it now. And I got inspired again because I had started to attend banjo camp. It’s as geeky as it sounds. 250 banjo players descend upon a college campus for a weekend. They’re regaling each other stories of banjo glory. They are buying banjo straps, music stands, CDs, taking lessons. Some of them come to learn…. Music…. the most disturbing song. Everyone who knows this song knows its twisted, dark, from a very twisted and dark movie. One so twisted and dark I can't talk about it in front of a daytime audience. Suffice it to say, it kept a whole generation of men out canoes. Now one of the coolest things about Banjo camp…you get banjo paraphernalia. And there I got my favorite piece of banjo paraphernalia. It's a T shirt and it says on the front “Banjo player…. will play for a dollar” and on the back it says “will stop for 5.” That’s the most high turning asset I’ve ever owned! I sit out in front of Timmies every morning and in about 10 minutes I’ve got a big double double, a couple of donuts. I'm good to go. I was doing this show in Edmonton earlier this year and if you've ever been up on Whyte Ave in Edmonton there's a Tim Horton's there. And they’ve got a motorcycle gang that hangs out at it. Now I know Calgarians are alot tougher because you are not a bad ass motorcycle gang if your eatin Timbits at Tim Horton's. It’s not all fun and games at banjo camp, there’s a deep underbelly. Ugly. Banjo envy. It’s real and I fell victim to it it's my own fault I don't blame anybody else for my

9 © Keith Alessi 2021 shortcomings I got distracted I own this I left a very expensive banjo in my car overnight. I come out in the morning…. every window in that vehicles busted out. There's my banjo and five more. Now Banjo Camp’s great. The problem is you can’t maintain any momentum. It’s three days, you get all excited, you think you learn something then you go home, and you forget it. So, I need structure. So, I go down to the local music store and I signed up sign up for the first banjo class, Banjo 1. Monday night 8 o'clock. I show up and it’s me….and 18 Millennials. Music And they wanted to play…. Mumford & Sons. Music That’s not what I came to play! Music That’s what I wanted to play! So, I come up with a plan. I’m a guy with a plan. I’m gonna quit that CEO job. I’m gonna get a van. I’m gonna drive all over North America. I’m gonna go to Banjo camps I’m gonna go to bluegrass festivals. I’m gonna commune with other banjo players and learn to play those banjos. Ever seen that movie Bohemian Rhapsody? I harboured a fantasy right out of that movie. I’m going to write the first banjo opera. So, on a Monday morning I walked into the office in Edmonton, and I quit that CEO job. I going to go all in on that banjo dream. But there was going to be a detour in the road. There often is. 13 days later, I was told I had a 50% chance of surviving a year. Bang. Music A rare and deadly form of esophageal cancer. Stage 3. I’m in a state of shock. Music Then, I got angry. I was scared. Confused. Then I cried like a baby. Music

10 © Keith Alessi 2021 But I had a couple of choices to make. Would I give up? Do I merely survive? Or do I truly live my unlived life? I chose to live. Music Desperation, panic, fear, despair. There are no words to describe getting a diagnosis like that. Is this going to be painful death? Prolonged. I'm not the first person to try to grapple with the concept of nonexistence. My religion teaches me there's a better place, but I had so many things I wanted to do in this life. I’m numb. I'm walking back from the hospital I get this diagnosis; I'm looking at the people in the streets the people in the restaurants it hits me…. hard. Those people, that city, my passing is largely gonna go unnoticed by them. I've been in the world 61 years at that point, the world was gonna go on just fine without me in it. I have never felt so insignificant. I'm weeping openly on a city corner; a lady walks up to me and she asks me “Is there anything I can do for you?” I've got nothing. I’ve hit bottom. But I've been here before. So, I take a step and another step and another step forward. What else can I do? This diagnosis comes as a total surprise. I had never been seriously ill a day in my life. I wasn't a smoker, I was nothing but a social drinker, there’s no history of cancer in my family. Well…. It would appear after all those years the tomatoes had come back to exact their revenge. That acid reflux, that heartburn, it was the cause of my esophageal cancer. Heartburn can cause cancer. For all the love I had shown those tomatoes! Tomatoes tried to kill me. Well, there was work to be done. Work is what I do best. I go into CEO mode. I get the doctors together. I want data, facts, figures, protocol, what's the plan of attack. They quickly tell me what they need to do, and they launch into their treatments. In my personal life, however, I returned to form. Where does Keith go when there's a problem? Behind the walls. I got great family I got great friends they’re all praying for me they’re all reaching out trying to help me but I'll have nothing to do with it. This is something I can do on my own. But those of us who live behind those walls will bring them down a little bit and for me, it was a 13-pound Jack Russell terrier, Shadow. She's a rescue. She knows I rescued her. We go to a dog park every day she's off leash chasing balls. That dog…. She cries when I take her to drive thru window at Burger King. She knows she’s getting a burger. Pattie only. That dog gets downright angry at me when I go through the drive through the bank. It's time for treatments to begin. I'm looking at months of daily radiation, weekly chemotherapy followed by a very tricky surgery. I’m overwhelmed after the first

11 © Keith Alessi 2021 treatment and I recognize this is going to be a long, long arduous detour and I'm overwhelmed by what lies ahead so I break it down like I always do-little steps just stay focused what's in the windshield don't worry about where you’re heading. Get through one day one day one day. As the treatments began, I'm always cold, I'm having my hair thin out I’m losing my memory. I can't remember the names of family and friends. I’m falling asleep in the middle of the day. I’m always cold, I feel isolated even when there's people around me. I get PTSD when I pull into the parking structure at that hospital every morning as I know what's about to happen. I'm always getting poked and prodded. As Chemo continues, they can't find veins because veins collapse and it is 4, 5, 6 times before they find a vein. Somebody forgets to turn the spigot all the way and a 3-hour chemo session turns into 6. They’re always giving me these barium drinks 'cause they're doing swallow test and CT scans. Did you know there's 3 flavors of barium drinks? There is banana, strawberry and mochahito. I tried them all, banana that's the best one. I keep wearing down. It’s a dehumanizing experience. Every day they ask you your name and your date of birth and I give it to him and I'm getting angrier and angrier. Why do they keep asking me this? Give me this arm we need to put in IV, give me this arm just going to boost you up, give me this arm go to take your vitals. Then it dawns on me. I'm not vital anymore. You're looking at a guy who's used to being in charge of things and now I'm in charge very little, but I can remain in charge of my attitude and I decided I'm going to stay positive no matter what. Now I know you can't get through cancer with an attitude alone, but it helps. Every day 9:00 o'clock I have to be at the radiation ward. It is 30-minute session 16 exposures for seconds at a time. It's brutal. And every man there, every morning is complaining, commiserating about their problems. Believe me, I'm sympathetic, I’m empathetic but I had no time allow this negativity to seep into my consciousness so I put on my iPad music and I listened to it and the music you heard when you walked into the Theatre this afternoon was the 30 minutes of that playlist that would motivate me to go into treatments. The top of that list, a song by Kelly Clarkson “Stronger” that song really resonated with me. I’d get out of the treatment after 30 minutes and I said to myself I don't have to deal with any of this for the next 23 1/2 hours I'd run home and pick up the banjos and try to play. Monday night, that's banjo class tonight 8:00 o'clock. It's also chemo day, I barely make it through a class. Those 18 millennials, they stood tall.

12 © Keith Alessi 2021 They bracketed me, made sure I was doing OK. They made sure I got home every night they were amazing. I have a great instructor. My immune system is compromised I can't go out in public he comes to my house sits across the room in a surgical mask we continue to play. As the treatments progress I am so weak. I can no longer lift up bluegrass banjo. That instrument weighs about 16 pounds. That's where this instrument arrives on the scene. It’s not what you think it is. It's a banjitar. It’s five strings it's built by a banjo builder Rob Bishline of Oklahoma city, and makes a mediocre banjo player sounds like 1/2 decent guitar player. Sir….do you don't difference between a banjo player and a motorcycle? You can tune a motorcycle. Ma’am, do you know what a perfectly tuned instrument sounds like? Nobody does. I get through treatments in pretty good shape. They tell me I was in the top several percent of patients they had seen. I was lucky. I was blessed. I had a good metabolism that reacted well to the chemo cocktail they had given me. Not everybody is so fortunate. I like to think I had a bit little extra going for me. Because you know how the universe kind of puts in front of you what you need when you need it? It did so for me. There was a story international in scope. It was everywhere you turned, magazines, newspaper, Internet, TV, radio, you couldn't miss it. And I grabbed on to this story for inspiration and it drove me forward. It inspired me it got me through the finish line 'cause I just knew if Kim Kardashian could lose 20 pounds after that second baby… Music …. I gotta be able to get through cancer. Music Time for surgery. 7 ½ hours. More complicated than open heart surgery. 2-5% of the people who get this surgery die on the table. Am I concerned?

13 © Keith Alessi 2021 You bet I am. Am I gonna wake up? I do. Recovery Room. They say I’m in a good mood. They say I’m singing. Imagine that. A Willie Nelson song? Music Singing. I woke up still not dead again today. Tomatoes tried to kill me straight away. But if I died, I wasn’t dead to stay. Cause I woke up still not dead again today So, I roll up and down the road playing banjos as I go. They say my case would kill a normal man. But I have never been accused of being normal anyway. So, I woke up still not dead again today. I had a dream last night that I died twice yesterday. But I woke up still not dead again today. I love me the Banjitar. It and I have a lot in common. You'd expect to find a sound hole on this instrument here…. it's up here. You'd expect to find my stomach down here but as a result of the Hiatal esophagectomy I received in which they remove your esophagus, my stomach is now here. Notice the symmetry? I have a little itty bitty chest stomach. Life is interesting with a little itty bitty chest stomach. You gotta eat small meals, you gotta sleep sitting up, but it certainly beats the alternative. It also gave me a

14 © Keith Alessi 2021 superpower. If I'm walking around downtown here tonight somebody goes to mug me and punch me in the stomach…. they’re gonna miss. Banjitar man! I spent two entire weeks in an intensive care unit. It’s a long time. I make three promises to myself when I’m there. Now these aren’t bucket list items, I’ve lived a very big life there was very little I felt like I needed to do…. but I wanted to do these three things. The 1st? Make certain you take time to tell all the folks you love how you feel about them. That I did in short order. Check. So, if you know me awhile and haven't heard from me……. I also wanted to go back. I want to go back to a place where I lived once before where I was happy. Content. For me that meant going to Southwest Virginia. Blue Ridge Mountains. Shenandoah Valley. Back to teaching. Back to the music. And a place where a guy can buy a lot of banjos. Warning. Scene change. Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia Music These are ancient mountains the Appalachians. Blue Ridge is part of them. They descend from the northeast to the southwest along the east coast of the states, they are the oldest mountains in the world. They were once the tallest mountains in the world. And the oldest rivers in the world flow through them. They’ve been eroded through the millennial. You know we’re not that bright in the states. We got 50 of them but we only came up with 47 names for them. So, we’ve got North Dakota and South Dakota. North Carolina and South Carolina. We have Virginia and West Virginia. I have a home high up on the escarpment of the Blue Ridge in Floyd County, Virginia South West Virginia. Thirty miles from South East, West Virginia. This creates a lot of confusion. It put John Denver on the wrong country road. Almost heaven West Virginia Blue Ridge Mountains Shenandoah River. One problem. Those Blue Ridge Mountains and Shenandoah River are in Virginia! John was doing a concert in Charlottesville VA. He was singing a lyric as it was originally written almost heaven Western Virginia, realized West Virginia rolls off the tongue a little better, changes the lyric, the folks over at Morgantown, West Virginia get really excited the folks over there in Charleston and they appropriate the song written about Virginia and they make it their state song.

15 © Keith Alessi 2021 It can only happen in the states. If you know the two states involved makes a lot of sense. Music I'm settling back here, spending my days riding through the mountain passes, down the rivers the fields those homesteads. I’m feeling myself being drawn back in time. Somewhere simpler. I still like the bluegrass banjo but now it’s the open back banjo that’s driving me. Music This part of the country was very important when the content was being settled because if you wanted to get to the interior of the continent those impenetrable mountains were tough. You had two practical ways to get through them. You could go North through the Hudson Valley or you could come South through the Cumberland Gap. Where I live in Floyd County is where a bunch of cultures came together as it pushed through the gap and it created a very unique sound in a very unique music. Up the great Carolina road was coming the enslaved population they brought with them their banjers that became banjos. The British were coming up from the Tide Water and brought their fiddles and the Scott Irish population was coming down a great Valley Virginia with them they brought their bagpipe traditions. And this music all came together in this musical neighborhood and you may call it roots music, you may call it mountain music, you may call it old time music, but it has a very distinctive flair about it. Usually, it's very simple group of instruments and it's mostly banjo and fiddle music, sometimes a mandolin will join in. Some places didn't get guitars for 60 or 70 years after others, so the banjo was a heavy backbeat that kind of music. Here's a song that, here's how you would hear it played in our neck of the musical woods. You’ve probably heard this song before it's called ‘Shady Grove’ is a very ancient tune and there’s hundreds and hundreds of versions of this but this is how it sounds in our neck of the woods and when I hear this song I always hear the vestigial sounds of bagpipes. Music Now you might be asking yourself…. why is that man playing the banjo up here? In old time music everybody is striving to get the most authentic old-time sound and if you notice the sound when you play the banjo up here…. is different than down here…… so old-time players like to play up here and some builders even scoop out the neck so you can play that further up here. They also like to deaden the sound of the

16 © Keith Alessi 2021 head whenever possible. Many people put socks and they'll put diapers back there to deaden the head so it's not as bright. I find squishy stress ball tomato works just great. Now, I play with a metal pick. Many, many players put acrylic nails on. I'm not willing to go there yet. Slippery slope. This…. this is my favorite banjo. I call it my cancer banjo. Beautiful instrument. It’s built by Jason Romero from Horse Fly British Columbia. Jason and his wife Ferris are incredible old-time musicians. They sweep the Junos all the time. Their instruments are in such high demand. You have to get on the wait list in order for them to build you a banjo 5 years from now. When I got my diagnosis I was told I had a 15 percent chance of surviving five years. You want to motivate me. If I can get on a 5 year wait list for a Romero Banjo…I will live! The problem is….it is also very competitive to get on the wait list. You have to show up exactly at midnight on New Years to get on the list. Now this is where being an account really pays off. I've got three devices. I got my phone set to the atomic Clock, and I got my iPad, I got my laptop and shoot emails back and forth to myself figuring what's the lag time for that I'm sitting here till he gets over here. Because if you show up one second earlier you don't get on the list. And then I think I got it figured out it dawns on me. What if the servers in Horse Fly British Columbia aren't as fast as the ones in Vancouver, that's where I am. So I give it a chance to hit the button and BOOM I'm on the list. Perfect. I had a very good day March 2018. See, Jason will build banjos for himself and then he'll offer him to anybody on the wait list is a lottery everybody on the wait list throws their name in the hat hoping to get pulled so they can buy one of his banjos. It’s a Sunday morning, it’s10:00 o'clock, I get a call from my oncologist. She's calling to tell me that my tests had come back clean I had quarterly testing at this time they come back clean for two entire years I'm going to semi-annual testing. YES! One hour later, I get an email from Jason Romero. My name got pulled for this banjo which I promptly purchased. I don't know what your belief system is but the universe was talking to me loud that day. I did this show at the Vancouver Fringe Festival in September of 18 on Friday night the lights come up and who sitting in the back, Jason and Ferris. What a night. What a night. Now old-time music is played in primarily A and D tuning for those of you that follow those things. We’re moving to D. Coming out of A-mobile actually. And these instruments are so sensitive this one particular because it has a Skinhead you changed one note, and they all go where they wanna go. I’m starting to understand why musicians have roadies. Just hand you a ready tuned instrument. That’ll work.

17 © Keith Alessi 2021 Second promise that I make in the intensive care unit. I'm going to become competent enough to be confident enough to play my banjo's solo in public. I’d spent a lifetime building a world class banjo collection that I could not play. Until about 3 ½ years ago I could barely navigate one of these instruments. That promise led me to this stage. Yup. That's right. Those of you support independent Theatre, God bless you whether you do it as a patron a sponsor or volunteer or staff because where else would untraditional background people get their voice heard? And what are the odds that you know the minus 25-degree weather in Calgary you're going to get a banjo playing account up here? There’s a problem. I want to learn to play old time music. You can't play it alone. You gotta come down from behind your walls 'cause old time music is played in a jam format. It's a circle of musicians that gather. And a jam is a democracy. Young, old, black, white, rich, poor, left wing, right wing, nobody cares about any that stuff you check that and your technology at the door, it's all about the music. I started attending jams in Virginia. Now, I don't know the music. The songs are different, the tunings are different, but I start paying attention. It was really confusing to me as you hear songs, and they have two or three different names and part of that is because this music was passed down through oral tradition so people took tunes and put different names to them and depending where you heard the song it might sound different. These musical tunes were part of the economic currency at the time. You could be living in isolation upon your mountain but if you wanted to raise a barn you need your friends and relatives and neighbors to come help you and they would they wanted to get fed and they wanted you to play music and they wanted to dance so this music became dancing music. And here's a tune you might hear at a jam. Music Now if you don’t know the name of a song an old-time jam and you wanna sound like you're legit here's what you say. Well, I heard that tune in Kentucky and there they called that song ‘Dead Possum in the Middle of the Road’. Chickens and possums are very prevalent in old time music so that song you may recognize you may recognize it as ‘Fly Away’ you may recognize it as ‘Susanna Gal’ between all of us it's Dead Possum in the Middle of the Road.’ In Virginia there is a 300-mile heritage trail called The Crooked Road, it's literally crooked and it follows the rivers and streams and it's a heritage trail celebrates the music people the art the food the dance. And along it you're going to find a lot of really important cultural destinations musically. You're going to find the Carter family

18 © Keith Alessi 2021 residence that gave birth the country music. You’re gonna find Ralph Stanley's homestead, he was a heck of a bluegrass player. And in Floyd Virginia, you're going to find the Floyd Country Store. The Floyd Country Store is a Mecca for this style music. Think of it as like the Grand Old Opry of this music and it's there, every Sunday 1:30, that musicians get together for an old-time jam. Now here, this is where things really start changing for me because the pace is much faster than I was used to, the music is more authentic, the circle of musicians could be 30 to 50 on any given day there's going to be 20 or 25 flat foot dancers dancing in that circle and there might be 100-200 hundred people in the store depending on the day. And boy are things changing fast for me. Now here's a local song, this song is called ‘Shooting Creek’ and it's named after a Creek that shoots out the mountain areas it’s gotten a lot of play outside the area as well there's people say if you listen closely, you can hear the sound the water going over the stones in the Creek. Music Shooting Creek. It’s in Floyd I meet a fellow by the name of Andy Buckman. Andy becomes my old-time instructor and it's in the parlor of his farmhouse of Franklin County Virginia that the mysteries of music start unlocking for me. And then it happens. Music On a Sunday. In a circle. In the jam... At the Floyd Country store. In the drive and the drone of the music. I feel it. I feel the music. It descends upon me in a physical manifestation. I feel vibration in my chest. It's almost like a fog lifts and I get it. And I feel connected to the other musicians in the circle, and I feel connected to the dancers. I feel the song it's almost meditative. I feel connected to the people who gather around. And all the sudden there's this overwhelming sense of calm that descends upon me. And I feel safe. And I feel open, and I feel excepted. And I feel like I belong. My journey has taken me down that crooked road to that simple country store to the circle of people and they've always been here. But I’ve been tuned into the wrong frequency the entire time. In the sounds of the simple instruments, I feel a connection. I feel I have found what I was looking for, even if only in the moment. Music Cancer, it gave me great clarity. It simplifies things. Made me realize, most of the things I'd spend my lifetime in my days pursuing, weren’t all that important. Eric Church is a singer, I’ll paraphrase his lyric.

19 © Keith Alessi 2021 “Some of it you learn the hard way, some of it you read on a page, some of it comes from heartbreak, most of it comes with age. You realize very quickly money ain’t rich. I realized many of us have tomatoes and banjos. The toxic lives we're born into or the circumstances we find ourselves in. And the lives we picked for ourselves. You can complain about the road your on. You can pick another road. I'm no banjo virtuoso, and that was never the point. A jam is a lot like a cancer ward. They're both democracies. They don't care who you are, where you’re from, what you got. They’re all the same. And God bless all those medical professionals who treat everybody in those wards the same. Dignity, love, and respect. And I came to realize, banjo wasn't meant to be a solo instrument. It’s best when played with others. It wasn't till I lowered the walls; it wasn't till I came down and I joined the circle. That's when the real healing began. The healing power of music, healing power of the arts. It’s real. Banjos saved my life. Music So…. how does the story end? I’m still here! My tests keep coming back clean, I remain optimistic but vigilant. I got my pilot license and I got to fly real airplanes. I got to perform on stage! I’ve had magazines and newspapers and TV stations say very nice things about the show, but Accounting Today magazine is yet to be heard from. Mom passed away about 15 years ago, she was getting care in an institution, she was probably in the best spot she had been in a long, long time. Tullio became reclusive. He, at the end, was living life as a hoarder. He had chosen to fill his closet up with unfulfilled dreams, bitterness. I had to check him into an Alzheimer's unit. He couldn't remember what he had for breakfast but he had vivid detailed memories of his childhood in Italy and the one passion he and I shared…. hockey. Saturday night on the couch in the living room from the Garden. Howie Meeker, Hockey Night In Canada. Inevitably our last conversations turned to the hockey heroes of old. Howe, Mahovolich, Esposito. Near the end my father, Tullio, he wasn’t scary anymore. He was a shell of his former self. That brilliant mind that had gotten him through life failed him in the end. He thanked me for looking after him and when he died, I felt sorry for him. I still go to a lot of hockey games. And when I do…. he’s there. I still like the taste of a tomato. I'm finding them, and life, to be a bit more digestible. I'm emptying out the closet. Nobody needs a separate banjo for every week of the year. I'll keep the ones to meet most to me and settle on a more rational number of you know 15-20. It would be easy to look at my life and say it's been a bit of a highlight reel but not so. It’s been messy. But the joy of life is in the mess. You know there are days there are

20 © Keith Alessi 2021 days I beat myself up with regrets. What could I have done with those banjos if I had gotten out of the closet 5-10-20 years ago -40 years ago when the first one went into that closet. But hey…. that’s looking in the rear-view mirror. I like to look through the windshield. I would rather have learned the lesson late in the going, than have missed out on the jam. There's a lyric by Trace Adkins I really like it resonates with me goes as follows. ‘Those old ghosts still chase me, feels like they're losing ground. Yeah, I'm still crazy, just a little watered down.’ That’s my story, every word of it true. They say you can tell who a person really is by looking in their closets. When you go home this afternoon take a look in yours. What's in there? What drew you to those things? Why did you keep them? If you don't know find out! Don't wait. Take those things out of your closet and see where they might take you. They might not take you to the place you think they will. But maybe, they’ll take you to the place your supposed to be. My banjos took me down a crooked road to the Floyd Country Store. Is it a stop? Is it a detour? Or is it the destination? I don’t know. I think I’ll stay a while. Music The third promise. If I ever did find myself on a stage, I’d play something I wrote myself. Consider this the beginning of that Opera. Dedicated to 18 Millennials. Its call ‘Damn the Tomatoes Full Speed ahead.” By Keith Alessi. Son of Tullio. Survivor. 4 years, 2 months, I week, 4 days, and counting.

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