NextStage is High On Life!

NextStage is achieving its goal, providing opportunities to the Santa Cruz Community seniors to use creativity as a means of improving the quality of their Lives!

Please join us for the “LOVE IN” on August 26 at 3 p.m. in the Louden Nelson Community Center, 301 Center St. Santa Cruz to support our mission.

Gretchen Jenne can personally attest to the power of music and dance to lift spirits. Her love of singing led her to community theater, performing both on the stage and behind the scenes.

Kate McGuire writes: These days Gretchen Jenne, 74, of Capitola, is singing her blues away as a member of a troupe of seniors who perform at local nursing homes, in retirement communities and at special events as well as on stage at local theaters.

But it wasn’t always that way for Jenne. After her father, for whom she was the primary caregiver, died, she developed a deep, dangerous and unrelenting depression. Despite several years of therapy and anti-depressant drugs, she was unable to beat back the demons that dominated her being after her loss.

“I really was at the lowest point in my life, I would go days without going out of the house,” she said. “I couldn’t think of any reason to go on.”

That all changed one day about five years ago when she saw a flyer at her hair salon about Next Stage Productions (NSP), a nonprofit corporation organized to develop theater art skills for the more than 97,000 seniors in Santa Cruz County. NSP was hosting singing, dancing, acting and other arts-related workshops, according to the flyer. She decided to sign up.

“I thought maybe that would cheer me up and it would be interesting to be a part of it,” she said.

A soprano who is now part of two performance troupes and is a member of the NSP board, Jenne has taken nearly all the NSP workshops including Voice, Singing for the Senior Voice, Choir, Improv, Dance, Storytelling and all the classes in the NSP summer program held every year at Cabrillo College.

“I love the activity and the people I’m involved with and I am so grateful to have found NSP,” she said, because in addition to her deep depression, she was also getting physically ill. “But I’m not any more.”

Jenne and members of the two NSP troupes will all be performing at “The Love In,” an NSP fund-raiser on August 26 from 3-to-6 p.m. at the Louden Nelson Center.

It is billed as a lively concert of ‘60’s music and will feature a silent auction, as well as a return to the hair-dos, bell bottom pants, flowery vests and hippie kit swag bags filled with items popular during that wild generation.

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NextStage production of “LOVE IN” on August 26 at 3 p.m. in the Louden Nelson Community Center, 301 Center St. Santa Cruz

General Admission $30.00 ($32.04 w/service fee) at https://lovein.brownpapertickets.com — Includes open seating and a Hippie Kit with essential Hippie shades, bandana and peace sign.