About the Show

Live from Elma Lanes is a one-man show about belonging, identity, and what happens when a man who spends his whole life searching for a place to feel okay...finds Elma.

Harry, a 65-year-old native New Yorker, moves to rural Elma believing he's found the perfect home. The town's motto—"Where Everyone Belongs"—seems written just for him. Awaiting admission to the Bar thirty years after graduating law school, he adapts to life on seven acres with a new lawn mower, a utility trailer, and the first of many cords of wood.

Through an impossibly wet and gloomy Pacific Northwest winter, Harry settles in with only his dogs, a couple of new drones, and the lingering effects of alcoholism for company. As spring approaches, he buys an off-road motorcycle, makes plans to transform a 30 ft. garden ring into a circus of flowers and decorative ground cover, and explores his new corner of the world as best as impaired vision, recurring gout, and a nagging weakness allow.

In early May, what begins as soreness from yard work becomes a strange, shifting, spreading, and eventually overwhelming pain. What follows is an ambulance ride down a rabbit hole of nurses, doctors, emergency rooms, hospitals, and tests, as everyone finds their way to a diagnosis.

Told with candor, humor, and a disregard for convention, Live from Elma Lanes is about a man discovering a quiet, a peace, and a rhythm of life that finally fits—only for a diagnosis to redefine what it means to be okay.

About Harry

Harry grew up on Long Island in the 1960s and ’70s, the son of a Depression-era father from Phoenix and a postwar mother from the Philippines. He has wrestled almost his entire life with anxiety, depression, alcoholism, and the persistent feeling of not fitting in. He studied with some of the country’s leading thinkers at the University of Chicago and Harvard, earned a law degree, worked as a grunt on multi-billion-dollar Wall Street deals, helped build a medical device startup, and found his greatest joy as a full-time parent to his young son. He never stopped wondering why we think, feel, believe, behave, and hurt the way we do.