Under the headline, “DAD DECIDED HE COULD DO BETTER JOB,” Nancy Gilson of The Columbus Dispatch wrote: “When a dad has a daughter obsessed with the stage, he spends a lot of time watching children’s productions.

“Last year, I was sitting in the Davis Center and they were doing Scrooge, The Stingiest Man in Town,” David Meyers said. “The kids were trying hard, but I didn’t really like the material. . . . Late in January, I thought, you know, I could probably write something better than that.”

. . . He took a draft of his play to Davis Center Director Michael Schirtzinger, who liked it and scheduled the production. Meyers asked his friend Scott Michal, composer of the opera Christobal and a former cellist with the Columbus Symphony, to create the music.

“The whole idea was inspired by that kids’ production I was witnessing,” Meyers said. “Go to enough of these rehearsals and you realize they never get the right kids to audition and there always are too many girls. Part of my plan was to create something that wouldn’t be gender-specific and wouldn’t be hard to cast.”

Gilson gave my musical its first “ink” in anticipation of the premiere on December 12, 1997, at the Davis Discovery Center.  The Upper Arlington News subsequently named the show the third best way to get into the holiday mood, and then the local government cable TV station, Channel 3, sent a five-camera crew to videotape a matinée performance for repeated broadcast over the holidays.

However, what I failed to do was take any photos of the production.  Scott and I were simply too caught up in getting “our vision” on the stage, especially since the director was less than enthused about the whole thing.  She had never directed a musical before and clearly wasn’t interested in devoting much time or energy to it – which was a little ironic given that the musical is about a jaded director whose bad attitude about staging another production of A Christmas Carol was starting to rub off on the kids in the show.

Several years afterwards, I was given a few photos that had been taken by somebody (possibly Mike Schirtzinger).  This particular photo shows my daughter, Elise, in the role of “Max” conducting a choir at the Open Door Mission.  Although she was the female lead in the original production and sang “He’s Not An Easy Man” to open Act II, I didn’t even get around to taking a picture of her.

I will forever be grateful to Nancy because her article played a critical role in getting the musical published.