Lisa Graff to debut new memoir show Sept. 26
Lisa Graff is about to take the stage for the third chapter of her memoir, “Chicago is My Kind of Town,” at 7 p.m., Tuesday, Sept. 26, at Shrimpy’s restaurant north of Rehoboth Beach. Doors open at 5 p.m. for dinner.
Veteran singer and star bartender Holly Lane will be her vocalist, accompanied by well-loved pianist John Flynn.
Cost for the show is $10 cash at the door. Seating is limited; sign up at signupgenius.com/go/70A0A4CA9AB2AA7F85-chicago. Reservations will not be accepted by the restaurant. For more information, email lgraff1979@gmail.com.
“It’s going to be the best one yet,” she said. “When I was 23 years old, I enrolled in a master’s program at Northwestern University. My ambition was to head to Hollywood with my new best friend Mark Locher. He did make it to Hollywood in 1980, and the show is dedicated to him.”
Graff is a writer, an actress and “a local celebrity,” some would say, who retired in 2010 and began to write for Delaware Beach Life magazine and the Cape Gazette in 2012. She found retirement challenging, so she entered a contest in the magazine with a story titled, “Getting My Feet Wet.” As a first-place fiction winner, her article was featured in Delaware Beach Life in 2011.
“I was a retired teacher, young and ambitious and totally unsure of my next steps. I took a humor class with Fay Jacobs, whom I knew well from our theater days at Montgomery Playhouse. She cast me in several plays, the most notable being ‘Steel Magnolias.’ I was Dolly Parton in a black wig! Fay was smart and didn’t want me to be a Dolly Parton clone.”
Before coming to the Lewes/Rehoboth area, Jacobs was an editor/writer for the Montgomery Village News, while Graff wrote for her community paper, the Gaithersburg Gazette. Her first published article was about the etiquette of the one-lane bridge. Every day she had to cross over the bridge to go shopping, and people would be polite and take turns or race to get over first.
“I look for humor in every situation, even when I want to cry or scream. We all have a choice about how we react to everything in life,” said Graff.
