We made two, short but sweet, stops just outside of Minneapolis – one to see Chanhassen Dinner Theater, a place of great importance to my step-mom Sue and the other to visit my cousin, Melissa, who I hadn’t seen since she was in grade school 30+ years ago!
My step-mom, Susan Long, passed in early 2024 after an ALS diagnosis in late 2023. Most of her early years were a mystery to me. I knew that she went to her senior high school prom with my dad, Greg, and went on to study at CU in Boulder, CO. She then enjoyed a long professional career in opera, musical theater, plays, film, TV, and voice-overs and sang leading roles in over 85 productions in New York, LA and other places throughout the U.S. When she decided to have a daughter, she put down roots in Minneapolis and performed many productions at Chanhassen Dinner Theater. She raised my step-sister Kaytee in this warm theater community before moving back to Colorado where it all began. She reconnected with her prom date – my dad in 2004! What a love story.
The Chanhassen Dinner Theater is the nation’s largest professional dinner theater. It was founded in 1968 by Herbert and Carolyn Bloomberg who wanted to bring “a little Broadway to the Midwest”. They built this massive 90,000 sq. ft venue in what was then farmland, sparking skepticism about its success, but succeed it did!
The theater was holding auditions when we walked in mid-day, so we just took a look around. A picture of Sue, front and center, hangs right over the ticket counter! We didn’t get a full tour, but it was nice to see the place that shaped who she was and to feel that connection to her. I miss her so often.
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One of my mom’s sister has often lived further away from the rest of the family, but Doug and I had a chance to reconnect with my aunt and uncle when we visited Florida a few years ago. This sparked the reconnection with my cousin (her daughter), Melissa via social media. My aunt and uncle moved around a bit but mainly raised their two children mainly in Minnesota and both of them live near Minnetonka now. I haven’t seen Melissa face-to-face in at least 35? Maybe 40 years! I don’t know her well, but I’ve more recently been enjoying a lot of her social media posts. She’s a beautiful woman with what seems to me a kind heart, old soul, and such compassion that it was nice to spend just a lunch hour getting to know her a little bit better!
Michael J. Fox once said, “Family is not an important thing…it’s everything.” It was nice to get to know these two people in my family just a little bit better thanks to our RV travels!
