Bob on a tour of Broadway, Manhattan's mid-
town theater district, on a dark and rainy day.

Neither rain nor sleet nor . . . wind deterred Bob Strozier recently from a brief tour of Broadway, where he hopes to mount a musical in the not-too-distant future. Bob has a better shot at this than those of us who, unlike Bob, have not published numerous articles and book reviews in prestigious publications, edited magazines, and written plays that have been staged in Manhattan.

It was outside a Broadway theater that an incident occurred that inspired Bob to write a play, and then the book and lyrics for a musical based on it. As Bob tells the story, he was feeling lonely and sorry for himself one Saturday night about 15 years ago when he passed by a Broadway theater. He noticed an attractive woman who was holding tickets and obviously meeting someone. Bob can’t remember the name of the theater, but he does clearly remember that after he had glanced at the woman and she had glanced back, she approached him and said, “Excuse me, are you Jerry?”

Bob was somewhat in his cups, but he had his wits about him sufficiently to reply gallantly, “I sure wish I were, but I’m not.” Well, that’s real life, but Bob began to imagine what might have happened if he had said, “Yes, I am.” And then he thought, “That’s a play!”

The play, Fault Lines, was given a full Equity production for a week in October 2003 by the WorkShop Theater Company, in midtown Manhattan. In the play, the opening scene takes place in front of a theater named the Broadhurst. Bob says that he didn’t know when he wrote the play that there was a Broadway theater named the Broadhurst. There is, and it was a stop on his recent tour of Manhattan’s midtown theater district.

Bob stops in front of the Broadhurst theater,
a name he thought he had made up for his play.

While Fault Lines was being put on, Bob received a song from a friend that she said had been inspired by the play. Bob then wrote lyrics for another song and sent them to his friend, and a week later she sent him the melody. So began his collaboration with Barbara Hustedt Crook on a musical, There's Something I Need to Tell You.

A paragraph about their collaboration led off a story in Time Magazine in 2006 titled, “The Surprising Power of the Aging Brain” (by Jeffery Kluger, January 8, 2006). At the time the story ran, Bob was 65 (he’s 68 now) and his collaborator was 60. Arguably, their “aging brains” had not aged so much at the time that their power should have been surprising. Still, neither of them had written a musical before. Their efforts might inspire others to break out creatively in their senior years.

Bob has been told that it usually takes about 10 years to get a musical produced on Broadway. He and Barbara Crook are in the sixth year of their collaboration on theirs. They have re-worked it over the course of three concert readings at the WorkShop Theater Company, two in 2005 and one in 2007.

Bob and his team have a web site for their musical (see below) and last year they had a CD made of the show. They have put a press kit together, which they are sending to potential directors, theater owners, and the like. They would like to find a theater outside New York City to “nurture” their musical. One of these days they will be looking for backers.

Across the street from Sardi's, where theater
folk traditionally read opening night reviews.

In the meantime, a one-act play by Bob based very loosely on a short story by Anton Chekhov was staged this past June by the WorkShop Theater Company. Bob’s play, Joy, was one of five one-act plays, collectively titled From Russia with Angst, all based on Chekhov stories. The plays were not literal adaptations but, rather, imaginative transformations of a story’s core idea.

The story on which Bob’s play was based concerns a young man who excitedly tells his parents that he’s famous, that his name is now known all across Russia. It transpires, gradually, that the young man had stopped to have several drinks on his way home from work as a lowly government clerk, and in his inebriated state had been hit by a horse-and-buggy. The episode had been reported briefly in a newspaper – that was the everlasting fame the young man was so excited about.

In Bob’s transformation of the story, a young girl comes home in a state of high excitement and tells her parents that she will be famous. Millions will see her on TV, she trills. It transpires, gradually, as her father’s face gets glummer and glummer, that what they will see is a video of her on You Tube singing topless on a table at a party.

In a favorable review of From Russia with Angst on offoffonline.com (an interesting Web site for anyone who wants to see what's playing off off Broadway), Bob’s play is described as “the most overtly hilarious” of the five plays presented (“From Russia with Laughs,” by Kelly Aliano, June 11, 2009). "Off off Broadway," incidentally, refers to the number of seats in the theater - 50 - and not to geographical location."

Bob with a poster for five short plays,
including his own, in the theater lobby.

Bob spent most of his career living in a rental apartment on Riverside Drive, in Manhattan. He lived there for 40 years, until the building was converted to a condominium about four years ago. Bob’s apartment was between two others that had been vacated by the occupants, and someone wanted to combine the three. Bob got an offer that he couldn’t refuse.

At that point, Bob says, he got rid of 40 years’ worth of stuff – an inspiration to those of us who would like to downsize (see the Archives section for the essay on “Stuff”). He was able to donate his books to the library of the college where his brother is on the faculty, and he stowed just a few cartons with friends. He gave furniture and the rest of his possessions to friends or got rid of it somehow.

Since then, Bob has been a man without a home but not homeless. Some of the time he stays with a sister in Tampa, Florida, “until she’s ready to throw me out.” Occasionally he stays with a friend who got some of his stuff – “a sofa should be worth a night.” He also shares the use of an apartment in Manhattan that he calls his pied-á-terre.

Recently, Bob had what he calls a “Eureka!” moment. It occurred to him that he would not have moved out of his longtime apartment on Riverside Drive, and he could not have adopted the way of life he has, without a laptop. With a laptop, he says, he can travel anywhere, and be more productive than he was before.

Bob was pretty productive before. He has published fiction and poetry in the Atlantic Monthly , and articles and book reviews in over a dozen other periodicals, including Esquire, the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times Book Review, and the Saturday Review. He also helped to launch or re-launch five magazines, and was the editor-in-chief of two of them.

Bob in Schubert Alley in the theater district,
where he hopes for his own musical one day.

As a freelance writer, Bob says, what he missed most was going to meetings and writing and reading memos – activities that his colleagues generally abhorred. As an editor, much as he enjoyed the meetings and memos, he would begin to miss his freedom as a freelance writer. Alternating between the two gave him the best of both worlds.

Bob was born in Carrollton, Georgia, but his family left there when he was six years old, and he grew up in Chicago. His father, Robert Manning Strozier (that’s also Bob’s full name), taught at three institutions of higher learning in Georgia before becoming dean of students at the University of Chicago, and, finally, president of Florida State University.

After graduation from the University of Chicago High School, Bob and a friend whom he had known since the fifth grade went to India for a year. After that, Bob spent one year at Harvard and six months in a U.S. Army program before attending the University of Chicago, receiving his degree in 1964. After a semester the following year at the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop, Bob spent three years in India as a trainee for the Ford Foundation in New Delhi.

Clearly, Bob had made many changes in his life up to this time, but the big change in his life, he says, came when he and his friend-since-the-fifth-grade founded Audience, a Magazine of the Arts, in New York City. Bob was a founding editor, from 1970 to 1973, when he was, he says, exposed to the world of letters and learned about writing and editing.

About eight years ago, Bob was the executive editor of New Choices Magazine, published by Reader’s Digest U.S. Magazines for an “over 50” audience, and that is how he met his collaborator on the musical, Barbara Crook – he was her editor.

More recently, Bob became the founding editor of Grand Magazine, which was launched in September 2004. In a press release announcing Grand’s national debut the following month, Bob is described as the former editor (he was the executive editor) of Success Magazine and of World Magazine and part of the Readers’ Digest launch team for New Choices.

Grand, in the words of its founder and publisher, Christine Crosby, "celebrates the joys and tackles the challenges of one of life’s sweetest experiences – having grandchildren." When Bob was interviewed for the job of editor, he made full disclosure: he said he had no grandchildren, no children, and had never married. Ms. Crosby’s response was, “Noone’s perfect,” and he got the job. (Grand is now available only on line. You can check it out at grandmagazine.com.)

In 1982, Bob published an article in the New York Times Magazine titled “The Lure of Bass Fishing” (May 30, 1982). There is a note following his byline that reads as follows: “Robert M. Strozier is at work on a book, 'How To Be Incredibly Happy.'” Asked recently if he had ever completed the book, Bob said that he hadn’t, but he might if he gets his musical on Broadway.

From April 2010 BOB STROZIER

Coming up: a concert reading of
the musical Bob collaborated on.

When he was featured in the Spotlight in our July/August 2009 issue, Bob was working on getting a musical produced. He wrote it with his collaborator Barbara Crook, and now their musical, There's Something I Need to Tell You, is getting a staged concert reading in Manhattan on Thursday, April 22, at 7 p.m. at the Emerging Artists Theater, 15 West 28th Street, 3rd floor. For tickets, go to emergingartiststheatre.org or call 800-838-3006. To reserve tickets, send an e-mail to notesfromthepage@gmail.com.

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