Day 3: 30 Days, 30 Episodes - #GrandmaLovesGroban

Matt Gilhooly
00:00:01

I'm Matt Gilhooly and this is the Life Shift. Candid conversations about the pivotal moments that have changed lives forever. Hello, my friends.

Welcome to day three of this 30 day challenge that I've given to myself for November. This is very similar to National Novel Writing Month, which is something that writers do something every day.

I think it's a certain amount of words that they promise themselves to write every day. That way at the end of the month, they're closer to having maybe a finished version of their novel ready to go.

So I think last year I saw a couple other podcasters do something similar by releasing an episode every single day in the month of November. So I, in a weird, fearful way, said I was gonna do this. And so here I AM on day three, this is November 3rd, and I'm gonna try to do these every day.

I'm not gonna try to record them ahead of time and I'm gonna try to make it to the end of the month. So hopefully I do. But anyway, so here's day three.

I've created a list using a little bit of ChatGPT, a little Google searching, because sometimes you just come in here and you're like, what do I talk about? So I'm just going to go through the list each day and answer one of the prompts that I found and put together.

So today is reflect on a significant personal memory and its impact on your life. So I think this is a longer story and maybe those of you that know me probably know this event in my life that I kind of think of very fondly.

But it goes back to when I was a child. I guess this is kind of the beginning of it.

When I was a child, my grandmother used to take me around, do different fun things together and explore the town, go shopping, whatever it was.

Whether that was when I was visiting her, when I lived in a different state, or when she would pick me up from middle school with a baked potato and cheese and broccoli. And I wonder why I gained a little bit of extra weight around that time period.

But we used to have a great time together and, and when we were in the car, there was never music on on up until maybe my mid teens. So it was always talk radio, which is kind of ironic. I hated talk radio and now I do this podcast. So that's kind of funny in that weird way.

But she would never listen to music.

It was just like, I guess she didn't love it or she just wanted to hear what other people were saying or I didn't really get the understanding of why growing up, she didn't like music. At least when I was in the car with her or I was at her home.

So around probably, I want to say, like in my teenage years she started to listen to music. So I remember the first CDs we bought her were Ricky Martin.

She had two Ricky Martin CDs and she also had a Celine Dion CD and these were the ones that she played in rotation. And this was like Live in La Vita Loca kind of Ricky Martin. So his pop English crossover kind of album, which is weird.

She was, you know, in her 60s, I guess, at the time, and she was just jamming out to Ricky Martin and Celine Dion. And then one day she was watching TV with her trusty DVR and she came across some kind of performance of Celine Dion.

I guess Pavarotti maybe couldn't have made it, or maybe it was Andrea Bocelli. It was Andrea Bocelli. He couldn't make it to a rehearsal or something that he was going to be singing the PR with Celine Dion.

And at this time a young 17 year old kid, as she would refer to him, showed up to the rehearsal to kind of fill in for Andrea Bocelli. And it was Josh Groban.

And at that moment my grandmother got to see some performance or she saw some interview clip of this performance and she fell in love not just with his music, but with Josh Groban. And from then on she would record every time that he was on television. She would clip every magazine article.

It was kind of like, you think of these teenage girls back in the day with these like magazines and they would cut out the people in the magazine, they put them on their walls and, and really cherish those particular pop stars.

While this is what my grandmother was doing in her 60s and it was really kind of like funny, but also like something that warmed my heart a bit because she was really tying on to something that she was super passionate about and loved in this, in this way that I could relate to as a teenager and whatever I was interested in at the time. And she would just get obsessed and it was really in a good way, I guess. So years went on. She collected all of his CDs, his performances.

One Christmas, she was still living in Fort Lauderdale and I was living in Orlando and Josh Groban was going, going on tour and his stop was going to be in Fort Lauderdale. So I got her a ticket and I had a friend at the time who also liked Josh Groban. So I got her a ticket.

My Grandmother and my friend had not met at this time, but I said, you guys can go to the Josh Groban show together. And they did, and they became friends, which was really funny. I'm no longer friends with that particular person, but that's a whole other story.

Maybe that'll come in in November. But they went to Josh Groban, and my grandmother had a great time. And that was probably the first of.

I don't know how many times she saw Josh Groban five, six times in her life, but she would have the T shirts and stuff.

And then she moved back to Massachusetts and I would visit her and there would be pictures of Josh Groban in the bathroom and pictures on the kitchen counter and on the fridge and pretty much everywhere. One time I said to her, I said, there's a lot of pictures of Josh Groban here and there are none of me. And she said.

She said, well, that's because I like pictures of good looking men. And I just chalked that up to her. Her humor. She obviously was kidding.

Well, maybe she wasn't obviously kidding, but she was joking with me in a way that she knew would be funny. And it was. But she loved Josh Groban. So you've probably heard my story that I don't remember the year 2013, possibly.

My grandmother was diagnosed with cancer and kind of went through this whole battle. It kind of like got better and then it got worse. And so we were. It was getting to this place where it was. It was not great.

And I knew perhaps this time is kind of fleeting and I need to do something big. So I knew Josh Groban was going to be going on another tour. I believe it was the Awake Tour.

So I decided that I was going to do my best to get some kind of like, really epic experience for my grandmother.

So I got on super early in the morning whenever it was on sale, and I ended up buying us front row tickets to see Josh Groban at the TD Bank north center in Boston. And it was a surprise. And so I bought those tickets. I was trying to get the meet and greet, but this was right after that Boston Marathon bombing.

So what he was doing with his meet and greet was all the survivors and the families of the people that had passed were able to kind of meet and greet with him. So we weren't able to do that, but we got some kind of VIP ticket, I flew up there and we went to see Josh Groban.

A little side note, I created a T shirt that says, my grandmother loves Josh Groban more than she loves me. And then on the. The back and said, and I'm okay with that. And grandma loves Groen was this hashtag that I used.

And so I wore that to the concert, and people were taking pictures and they loved it. But what I loved about that night was that my grandmother felt.

It felt like, I don't know, a kid in a candy store or when a kid goes to Disney World for the first time, or just that light that.

That joy, that unadulterated, unfiltered, just happiness that I saw on her face from the moment we walked in and she saw how grand everything was and how many people like her were around. She had been to other concerts, but this was like, big deal. We were front row.

She got to see Josh Groban maybe, I don't know, 20ft away from her, and she was. Just had the most wonderful time. And I took all these pictures and. And I have those to look back on.

There's one that I always put on social media because it was just a picture of us standing in front of the stage, front row. We had no one in front of us. And it was just such a great experience.

And to be able to do that for her after all the things that she had done for me over the years, it was really just quite an experience and one that I will never forget. We stayed up, I think she was up till like 1 o'clock in the morning. She was always. She was having trouble, you know, walking and. And things were.

Were getting harder for her, and she just toughed it out, and my dad was great and dropped us off and picked up from that space so she didn't have to walk and deal with parking and all these other crazy things that come along with it. But I really got to have that wonderful big night out with my grandmother shortly before, you know, she.

She went down with cancer, and we went through that whole thing, which is another story that I've shared on this podcast, and you can hear that. But I really think of that moment as, like, probably one of the last, like, really exciting nights of her life.

And I was glad to be a part of that and to able to create that for her. And I'm so thankful for Josh Groban a little, you know, just for.

For creating that light in her life for, I don't know, like 20 years, something like that, like 15 years. And how much she loved him. And he never got to meet her, but she felt like he was part of her life. And it was.

It's really, really thankful to Josh German for just putting his music out and being who he is. A side story.

A couple weeks after that concert in Boston, my friend here in Orlando, Elizabeth, she works with another singer celebrity, and she was able to get us meet and greets to the Josh Groban concert here in Orlando. So I had. I won tickets, I guess, like, through something.

I don't know how I won them, but then I invited my friend Elizabeth, and she was able to get us access to meet and greet tickets. So I wore the shirt again. So it's only a couple weeks later, and I got to meet Josh Groban. Take a picture with Josh Groban.

So now my grandmother was forced to hang up a picture of both Josh Groban and me, and I wore the shirt again. I just said that, and he was like, oh, you're the one with the shirt.

Because people had been taking pictures of it and putting it on Twitter and people were sharing it and stuff like that.

So I think he remembered or he was just saying it, but either way, I was able to take a picture with Josh Groban, have him sign a couple things for her, frame those, send those to her.

In fact, I recorded a conversation of when I emailed her the picture of me and her boyfriend, Josh Groban, because she didn't know that I was going to meet him. And her reaction was priceless, and I'm glad I saved that.

But it was really just a special period of time seeing how she latched on to something that she was really passionate about. And for 15, 20 years, she was able to just be joyful every time that she heard or saw Josh Groban.

And so if Josh Groban happens to come across this, thank you for bringing so much light to my grandmother's life.

I am so ever grateful for the fact that you've done that through your music and the way that you take care of entertaining people and making them feel like they are part of your world. So thank you for that and thank you for signing stuff when I got to meet you. And thank you all for listening to this and.

And hearing a little bit about the moment. That kind of sticks in my head as a really, really happy memory with my grandmother. So, yeah, so there. That's.

Today's episode is all about my grandmother and her love, obsession, passion for Josh Groban and how it led to a beautiful night together with her as one of the last, most memorable nights that she probably had. And I know one of the most memorable nights that I will have.

So that is today's episode for this 30 days, 30 episodes experiment that I'm doing here on the Life Shift podcast.

Hopefully you get to know a little bit about me or a little bit more about me, a little bit more about some of these stories and the people in my life and the things that I think about. So I'll be back tomorrow on November 4th to talk about I don't know. But in any case, I will see you guys tomorrow or you will hear me tomorrow.

For more information, please visit www.thelifeshiftpodcast.com.