Sparks from the Fire

Yesterday was an amazing day.  The Siyahamba Project that I’ve been working on for the past 4 months and that has recently been performed at the Annual Meeting of the Christian Science Church in Boston was posted on YouTube.  I sat at my computer amazed at the outpouring of gratitude and affection coming from hundreds of people as their letters poured in from across the world for both my wife, Julia Wade, and myself.

Norm

Many people worked together to make this project become the success that it is, but one man was its leader – and very few know about his work because he took no credit.  He is the Producer of the Annual Meeting for the Church and the Executive Producer and visionary of the Siyahamba Project.

I have known Norm Bleichman for over 4 decades now and am blessed to call him my good friend.  We were roommates in college and shared many of the same interests in music, sports and show biz in general.  We also had a popular college campus radio show back then called The Blinkman Show where Norm and I with a cast of total morons would perform send-ups of Superman and Batman comics complete with musical underscoring.

We laughed a lot.  We discovered the Beatles together.  We MC’d many of the campus shows as a stand-up comedy act – he the funny guy, me the straight man.  I say with complete sincerity that Norm Bleichman is the funniest guy I’ve ever known.  He has kept me laughing throughout a lifetime and that’s a lot to say for a friend.

After college he went off to fight for our country in the Viet Nam war while I became a draft dodger.  After the war, he came home to work at his dad’s plastic factory while I came to NYC and started a successful show biz career.  I’ve always said that one of the best things I’ve ever done was to help convince Norm that he could be funny on a national scale and get him to finally quit plastics and go to work as a successful comedy writer in Hollywood.  Doing this, he kept millions of people laughing for many years.

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