I'm Not Dead... Yet! (49 page)
Not a new subject matter, but I was hoping to put a comic spin on it, along with some very cool music.
Even Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward made a special trip to come see our show. (Amazing people… I was so lucky to work and get to know them and become friends during
Harry and Son
.)
Paul Newman was an extraordinary man. I was so honored that he and Joanne came to a performance. When we were backstage afterward, he told me that
Open Heart
truly touched him and he wanted to go out for drinks and discuss the show. This meant the world to me. But I was in such bad shape physically, struggling for every gulp of air, that I made some asinine excuse as to why I couldn’t go out with them. I’m still angry at myself for not finding the energy to do it and talk with Paul… I have so few regrets, and that is one of them.
There were two very real problems
I had during this run of the show:
1)
I could not breathe—
and my character
never
left the stage in the 90-plus minutes of the show. So I mapped out certain sections (strategically) where I could turn my back to the audience without them knowing it, and gasp for air before I had to sing. It’s really tough having to sing when you have no air supporting your voice. Very tough… but I learned a lot from
Pirates
and my other Broadway shows.
2) We sublet an apartment from CraigsList that was a three-floor walk-up. The only problem with an ‘advertised’ three-floor walk-up in New York was that if the brownstone was made of
duplexes
, you may have the third ‘floor’ apartment, but it was now a six-floor walk up. So after every show, every night, not being able to breathe and coming home from giving every ounce of energy to the show and the people who came to see our show, I had to walk up 6 flights of stairs with a bum heart, doing a show called
Open Heart
. It was an ironic (funny) almost-killer scenario.
I returned to Boone exhausted after our New York run.
The next order of business was for Karla and me to focus on my heart—
again
.
We found an amazing hospital in Charlotte called Carolinas Medical Center and a bright and gifted cardiologist, Geoffrey Rose from The Sanger Clinic. Dr. Rose calmly explained our options, and we were wise to place our trust in him. He recognized my symptoms and had me undergo a valvuloplasty to try and open up my pulmonic valve by Dr. Hadley Wilson.
The test showed that insufficient blood was flowing through the valve and
the balloon was unable to widen the valve.
I needed surgery to replace my pulmonic valve (the one with the cadaver valve on it—okay, pulmonary homograft). Karla called LA to get all my records and the ‘cardiologist to the stars’ got on the phone and put in his 2 cents, telling her it had to be calcification causing stenosis of the pulmonic valve; that after two heart surgeries, my body’s reaction was responsible for creating the constricting hardening of the valve. Whatever the reason, it was definitely time for the valve to be replaced. Yup—open heart number
three
.
The ride from our house at the end of the dirt road on top of the hill was over two and a half hours to the hospital in Charlotte. Lyric’s cow Lola was going to give birth any second and only Karla knew what to do if the calf was breach and how to save the calf and Lola,
I decided we couldn’t chance losing the calf. I would drive down to Charlotte alone and meet the surgeon recommended by Dr. Rose.
Dr. R. Mark Stiegel was tall, strong and rugged, but had the hands of a pianist. He also had an accent so thick that if judged by stereotypical first impressions he might be the last person a Northerner would want as his open-heart surgeon. Moments after meeting him I had complete faith in this amazing man. I was worried what Karla’s impression would be if she were to meet him
briefly
the day of my surgery, and not get the chance to see he is quite brilliant. (She loved him.) We talked and I was able to discuss things a bit more in-depth now that it was my third open-heart operation. I liked his answers and his honesty.
Lola needed no help and the beautiful calf was born (Violet)
and we built a shed for mother and daughter
in the pasture, because we could get some very cold weather,
then gave Vincent (our bull) back to the breeder—otherwise we would be having a calf every year. We had two magnificent animals Lyric trained to harness and take for walks.
Now a lot of farmers might think we were insane. We weren’t. We just wanted to give these two cows the best life possible and Lyric and Karla did just that. And Zephyr had fun.
