The Steve Shapiro Story

The Early Years

I was born in New York and tried to be considerate in choosing a time to enter the world, as I knew we were nearing lunchtime and my parents where probably getting hungry. Thus, I’ve always imagined that my father’s first verbal announcement of my birth was laced with the distinct scent of corn beef on rye.

I was the second of two sons. My brother, Daniel, is 2 1/2 years older than I am and during our childhood, he frequently felt compelled to punish me for my existence (usually with punches and other forms of physical torment) — helping to contribute to an already oddly Kafka-esque upbringing . Family legend has it that almost immediately upon my arrival home from the hospital, Daniel would regularly crawl in my crib while I was sleeping and try to kick me out.

I was a fairly shy child and I spent the majority of my early childhood watching Sesame Street and pulling lint from the carpet. 

Valley Boy

When I was just a few months shy of six years old, my family relocated to the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles, California. We moved into a smallish closed community of nearly identical townhouses, complete with a tennis court and community swimming pool. It was a typical late-1970’s upbringing. My hobbies included playing Space Invaders at the local video arcade, reading Dynamite magazine, and watching infotainment programs such as Real People and That’s Incredible on television. My fashion sense was also a product of the times — my wardrobe consisting largely of numbered sports tank tops, corduroy shorts, and striped tube socks. As reflected by the prevalence of “No shoes, no service” signs throughout the Valley, I typically considered shoes to be optional. Fortunately, this allowed me to minimize the wear and tear on my Stride Rite shoes.

Piano Boy

Within a short time of living in our townhouse, I came to realize that our neighbor in the townhouse adjacent to ours had a piano that was against our common wall. Whenever I heard the sound of piano music coming from the neighboring townhouse, I would put my ear up against the wall for better hearing. Noting my interest in music, my parents rented a piano and my father found a piano teacher who made house calls. Mrs. Juanita Stagner, my piano teacher, was a very sweet, but also alarmingly large, older woman who would reward mastery of piano pieces by drawing multicolored stars on my sheet music. She literally weighed close to 300 pounds and I was amazed at how her fingers were so nimble on the piano when she was otherwise very sluggish. I was not the most disciplined of piano students, and learned that I could improvise my way through a piece during my lessons if I hadn’t practiced it enough. As long as I stayed in the correct key, Mrs. Stagner typically didn’t notice.

The rest of my childhood was relatively typical. I made friends, collected Star Wars action figures, went to the movies, and of course I went to school. I had good teachers, bad teachers, indifferent teachers, and so on. The only thing worth noting about my early school years was that a few of my teachers learned of my piano playing and would occasionally call upon me to perform for my classmates. I even had a chance to perform for the sixth grade class elementary school graduation when I was just a fifth grader (an immense privilege, as I was a WHOLE grade lower than the graduating class), and I ultimately performed for my own sixth grade graduation as well. I quickly realized that all those piano lessons actually resulted in something meaningful — more than just learning random piano pieces so I can have my sheet music decorated with colorful stars by my piano teacher (not that her artistic additions to my sheet music weren’t aesthetically pleasing).

Growing Up

As is not unusual for most people subjected to public education, junior high school was fairly awful. Only one highlight stands out from that otherwise dark time: a terrible history teacher, Mr. Stone, who became the subject of my very first song composition — appropriately entitled “Mr. Stone.” High school, on the other hand, really wasn’t all that bad. It was in high school that I both began dating and when I really started to take music seriously — these two things being not at all mutually exclusive. Playing piano at parties really enhanced my social life. By the end of high school, I was very involved in the performing arts and even had my first on-stage dramatic role...Sure, it was only a one-line part of no particular importance and I didn’t perform my one line all that well, but it still felt like something to me.

College Boy

I went to San Diego State University where I received a B.A. in English (emphasis: Modern Literature), a minor in music, and later, an M.A. in English (American Literature emphasis). Undergraduate life had its ups and downs, but it was overall a fairly lonely time. In contrast, graduate school was a truly happy time in my life. Not only did I love my classes and my classmates, but I also met Marcie, the love of my life. Our story began in Lake Tahoe on New Year’s Eve 1995 and ended with as romantic a wedding as we could muster in 2000.

Marcie was attending UC Davis as an undergrad in genetics at the time, so once I completed my M.A., I attended UC Davis to get a secondary level (junior and high school) teaching credential in English and music. Marcie still had one year left before graduating and the teaching credential was a one-year program, so the timing couldn’t have been better. During that year in Davis, Marcie and I became actively involved with the Davis Musical Theatre Company (DMTC) where I got to play Pontius Pilate in Jesus Christ Superstar and Sky Masterson in Guys and Dolls. I was also given the opportunity to music direct The Music Man and two additional youth summer program productions. It was truly a great time and I will always have exceptionally warm feelings for Davis and the wonderful people there.

Cold (But Happy) Boy

The next big move was to Boston. Marcie was accepted to a graduate program in genetic counseling at Brandeis University and I went along for the ride. I also was planning to propose to her the following summer — a secret that I kept very well guarded. Before moving to Boston, I quickly realized that teaching just wasn’t for me and so upon arriving on the East Coast, I found myself regular 9-to-5 employment first at a charitable foundation management company and later at a private English school. In the evenings, I once again became very involved in theater. During my first year in Boston, Marcie and I both acted in a musical called Celebration with Hovey Players in Waltham and I music directed Blood Brothers with the Arlington Friends of the Drama. While I was working on Blood Brothers, Marcie went off to perform in an excellent production of A Chorus Line with the Turtle Lane Playhouse in Newton. I kept busy in my second year music directing The Secret Garden with the Weston Friendly Society of Drama (now renamed “Weston Friendly Society of the Performing Arts, Inc.”), Grease! with the Waltham Boys and Girls Club Performing Arts, and I performed regularly as an improvisational keyboardist with Improv Boston, Musical! the Musical, and TheatreSports. That’s a lot of stuff to squeeze in after working all day.

Despite the heavy theatrical load, I managed to plan an elaborate proposal to Marcie at the Hovey Players’ Abbot Theater in Waltham in 1999. One day short of a year later, we were married.

Domestic Boy

Marcie completed her program at Brandeis in the summer of 2000 and we returned to California, moving in to a townhouse in the Silicon Valley area to be near her family and begin a new life together. Marcie's professional life has included stints as a genetic counselor at Kaiser Permanente, Applications Lab Specialist at Affymetrix, Clinical Programs Manager for Cord Blood Registry (CBR), and project manager/data analyst with Apple, where I've been working all along as first a web master/internal communications writer (yes, I actually got to use my college degree) and later manager of the Online Support User Experience team. We quickly got involved in local musical theater and after working on several different productions over the next few years, I found myself in early 2004 simultaneously music directing Forever Plaid with West Valley Light Opera (WVLO) and vocal directing A Funny Thing on the Way to the Forum with Sunnyvale Community Players. After serving as assistant choreographer for Nunsense Jamboree III with WVLO in late 2003, Marcie next went on to work with me on Forum with me as choreographer — thus marking the first time (and so far, the only time) we ever worked together on the production side of the same show. Since completing these productions (plus a music directing stint very shortly thereafter with the nice folks of Fisher Middle School for the second year in a row), I retired from musical theater, hoping to eventually pursue on-stage roles again. After taking the better part of a year off from theater, I discovered the wonderful people of the Tabard Theatre Company and was privileged to be offered the role of the humorous “Mr. Beaver” character in their production (a non-musical alas!) of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. The show proved to be quite a success for the group and it was among the most fun I’ve had in a theatrical production in years. I had so much fun, in fact, that I decided to give Tabard another go and was thrilled when I got cast as Joe Farkas in The Last Night of Ballyhoo. This proved to be my most fulfilling theatrical experience yet.

I have since been on hiatus from theater, as we welcomed a beatiful baby girl to our family in 1995 and added a second beautiful baby girl 18 months later. Of course, when both babies were born, there were corn beef sandwiches all around.