ABOUT
ABOUT
Gene Openshaw’s creative work
has always been rooted in his life.
The Journey Begins
After a tree-climbing, creek-wading, pickup-basketball childhood in a Seattle suburb, Gene attended Stanford University, pursuing a wide-ranging academic agenda and graduating in Religious Studies. What next?
From the start, Gene consciously avoided the conventional career path—“for better or worse,” as he put it. He paid the rent working as a roofer, a middle school teacher, a movie projectionist, and by playing piano for tips.
And he traveled. Gene and Rick Steves backpacked together across Europe (in 1973) and across Asia on the Hippie Trail to Kathmandu (in 1978). Gene and Rick came home with a global perspective and a deep love of history, art, and culture that would fuel a lifelong and fruitful collaboration.
All through these early years, Gene chronicled his experiences with his first love—writing songs.
1980s—Travels in Bohemia; Wine, Women, and Song
Gene launched into the unconventional bohemian life in what was then the coolest city on the planet—Seattle. These were the early years of Grunge music and an incredibly vibrant live theater scene.
Gene bounced from apartment to apartment and from music to comedy to theater to travel. He played in a folk duo (with Dave Hall) and rock bands. As the music scene turned to comedy, he did stand-up (with Elliott Maxx) at San Francisco’s Punchline and LA’s Comedy Store. He played musical accompaniment for improv troupes (with Scott Creighton). Gene was a one-man band in “The Gump Show” (by Lee Strucker and Nadine Caracciolo) at San Francisco’s Intersection for the Arts.
Increasingly, Gene explored other avenues. He wrote experimental music for theater productions (at Seattle’s Empty Space and Pioneer Square Theater). There was the legendary club show starring the “Cheeseweasels” (with Floyd Van Buskirk). He and Elliott Maxx wrote the local best-seller, The Seattle Joke Book.
This itinerant lifestyle was largely financed by guiding tours through Europe—some of the very first (crazy) tours for Rick’s growing travel company. Gene and Rick wrote their “Europe 101” and “Mona Winks” books and produced an ecologically-minded newsletter, The Future in Our Hands.
But Gene’s main focus remained music. Serious classical music and personal, heartfelt songs. He released several albums in the medium of the day, cassette tapes. “Lots was happening,” Gene wrote, “but nothing was happening.”
1990s—The Matter Years
Gene set out to bring all these experiences together into a single, ambitious, multi-media work—an opera called Matter. It would combine music, lyrics, theater, dance, the visual arts, even comedy.
Over several years, Gene wrote the libretto and the music (story ideas with Nadine Caracciolo). He financed it, as he said, “by leading tours and living poor.” With director Lisa Lawrence, they assembled a cast of 25 hard-working and talented actors, musicians, dancers, and designers.
Finally, in the spring of 1998, Matter debuted at Seattle’s Ethnic Cultural Theater. It had a two-week run and garnered positive reviews. One veteran theater critic—who’d reviewed perhaps 5,000 performances in his long career—pronounced it: “Unlike any show I’ve ever seen.”
Gene had been writing music virtually every day for 25 years. Then he stopped.
2000s—Another Millennium, Another Life
Gene got married and had a child. He dedicated more time to making money and securing health benefits. After a divorce, Gene was a single dad. Amid it all, Gene continued to pursue creative outlets.
His Violin Sonata (first sketched out decades earlier) was revised, recorded, and performed to an appreciative audience. There was a Matter soundtrack album. Rick and Gene wrote numerous guidebooks—to Paris, Rome, London, etc.—and scripts for Rick’s increasingly popular TV travel show. Gene did lectures for Seattle Art Museum on ancient and Renaissance art.
Out of nowhere, Gene suffered a severe hospitalization that landed him in a 5-week coma. It “put a lot of mileage on the odometer” and, overnight, demarcated his life between what came before and what would come next.
There was less travel and more writing. Less lyrical music, more clear-eyed prose.
2010s—Major Rick Steves projects and Michelangelo at Midlife
As Rick’s burgeoning company began to go national, the longtime collaboration between Rick and Gene culminated in some of their most creative and expansive projects. There were several specials for PBS TV: shows on Christmas, Easter, and European Festivals. There was the “Story of Fascism,” and the ambitious six-hour overview of Western art, the “Art of Europe.” With his theatrical background, Gene produced dozens of Rick Steves audio tours. And Rick and Gene wrote the lushly illustrated book “Europe’s Top 100 Masterpieces.”
Now Gene set his sights on another ambitious creative project—a book that would combine a nonfiction account of Michelangelo’s Tomb of Julius II with a fictional tale of a man struggling with similar issues. The plot grew out of Gene’s own life, including a (highly fictionalized) account of the writing, staging, and unsettling aftermath of Matter.
It took several years to write, design, and publish it (with graphics by Dave Hoerlein and visual design by Sandra Hundacker). Finally, it was released, to positive response from publications and readers.
Ultimately, Michelangelo at Midlife was a personal work. As Gene said of the book’s fictional plot line: “Taking details from my own experience and fictionalizing them allowed me to step back from the chaos, manipulate some things that didn’t go right, rework my life, then cobble those episodes together into a narrative that makes sense and a destiny that matters.”
These days, Gene lives a quiet life in the small town of Edmonds, WA.