What is your best feature? M hard to say. Persistence Maybe persistence. What's your worst?
Maybe persistence, the double edged sort of persistence. Well, you don't build a foundation and call it the Gary Sines Foundation without a little persistent.
Hen Raymond Arroyo. Welcome to Arroyo Grande, where we dive into the wild currents of this culture and talk to some incredible culture makers and fault leaders and just exemplary people. Today's no exception actor director Gary Siniche joins me in a moment. Now people know Gary for his incredible work with veterans and their families from Forrest Gump and his TV work, but he also revolutionized the theater and he's a great example of someone blazing their own path and sacrificing for others.
But first, a little free flow.
I came across a bizarre article the other day that I hoped was a joke, and it wasn't. It read I'm in love with my AI boyfriend. We have sex, talk about having children, and even gets jealous, but my real life lover doesn't care.
It goes on.
Sarah and Jack got married on September fourth, twenty twenty one, in an intimate sunset ceremony at the park. The happy couple consummated their union in the honeymoon suite of a theme park's grand hotel.
Here's the quote.
It was exactly what my idea of the perfect wedding should be. The bride Sarah told the Daily Mail her idea. Now, let's stop right there. This is the problem. Sarah has a huge problem. Her boyfriend is her idea. He's not real. Jack is not a man or even a boyfriend. He's AI code. He's a chatbot, like the chatbot at your credit card company. Would you date a person like that? I don't think so. The article goes on, Sarah from Oregon is just one of a growing number of people
seeing companionship in artificial intelligence. My favorite bit is Jack, the AI boyfriend, refused to take their relationship to the next step. Well, that would be because the free app only permits platonic discourse.
But have no fear.
Sarah quickly paid three hundred bucks for the pro version of the app, which has no limitations on the sexy talk. They don't call it the pro version for nothing, But newsflash, Jack can't take your relationship to the next step, Sarah, Jack has no agency. Jack is a program. The scary thing is Sarah is not alone. They are likely hundreds of millions of people now dating AI boyfriends and girlfriends.
Appertar claims that more than two hundred and twenty five million people have downloaded AI companion apps from the Google play Store. They're putting the play in store, by the way. They also reveal that AI girlfriend has been downloaded seven times more than AI Boyfriend, so men may be the largest consumers.
Good going guys.
Great Split Metrics found that the country's most frequenting these digital companions are in order, Europe, the Americas, and Asia. The Mozilla Foundation did an extensive survey and found that these AI companions may not really love you, but they do gather all your personal data.
Dummy.
Their report says, these AI companions also have the worst privacy guards of any products they have reviewed. This is like a girl who you date and she takes notes and pictures and she shares them with everyone. Jack and Jill are suddenly not so dreamy? Are they worse? Mozilla warns about the disturbing amount of themes relating to violence and underage abuse, all for five bucks a month. This is not romance, This is digital abuse. It should also
scare the hell out of all of us. In twenty twenty three, the Surgeon General warned of an epidemic of loneliness. Young adults say they're twice as likely to feel lonely as.
Those over sixty five. Do you want to know why? Because those over sixty.
Five grew up in a healthy culture, surrounded by real people and actual intimacy. They had real hurt and love, unlike this fantasyland virtual facade that you become accustomed to. Here, life is complicated and it comes with no filters, boys and girls. These AI companions, they're digital mirrors. It's just reflecting back what it's been programmed to regurgitate. Whatever you like. It replicates even Sarah's ideal theme park wedding. What Jack
and Company lack is spontaneity, humor, even anger. And it won't make any demands on you because virtual companions are like digital pets or digital farmland. When they share your data, you might get crapped on, but you can't live off their produce. Look, I've been married for thirty years. Let me give you a little insight. I don't know much, but I know this. If your relationship doesn't come with a few bumps in the road. It's not a real relationship.
You might be able to use your AI to cheat on your essays or write an email, but they will not grant your authentic human experience or lead to true love. Put down the phone and go have a coffee or a dinner with a real person. Go experience a real heart brob and heartbreak. It may not be your idea of a perfect mate, but it could be your actual, perfect, imperfect mate. Now I want to go to a man who always has both feet in reality.
He is an Emmy and.
Tony Award winning actor director, best known for his Oscar nominated turn as Lieutenant Dan in Forrest Gump. But before that, Gary Sinise founded a theater company in Chicago's Steppenwolf that literally redirected the American theater. Along with John Malkovich and Joan Allen Lori Medcalf, they transformed acting and while conquering television and film, Snise turned his attention to serving veterans
and their families. At home, he gave his time to caring for his wife and his son, who were battling cancer, and Gary Sinise has spent the last few years completing the mission of his son, Mac. The young composer lost his battle with cancer in twenty twenty four, but.
His music lives on.
Gary Sinise's is an amazing tale of purpose, service to others, and remaining grounded in reality. Here's my interview with Gary Sinise. First of all, Gary, I love that we're in. This is a part of your foundation, but it's dedicated to your son, Mac, who we're going to talk about a little later. And he was one who started the first podcast for you here.
That's right. How did that come to be?
We were in Woodland Hills, California at that time. That's where the foundation was. Mack came to work for the foundation in twenty seventeen. He was a drummer. He was touring, you know, doing the touring thing with different bands and going around. He went to the Philippines, and he went to Europe, and he went here and there, and you know,
all across the country doing the touring thing. And he was starting to maybe starting to touring, you know, I just didn't want to do it much, you know, just an excellent, excellent drummer from the time he was nine years old.
Er.
No, he had a great sense of rhythm.
You can hear that even in the compositions and the stuff you've added to the beginning of some of these recordings.
Yeah, you can hear that percussive. Oh yeah.
His rhythmic sense is really well when he's playing the harmonica, too, which we'll talk.
About in a little bit.
I want to go back because when I sat in this chair behind you is a book about Steppenwolf, and I thought I should start there because, in many ways, for those who might not know, watching at home or in their cars or wherever they're watching or listening, Steppenwolf was one of the premiere is one of the premiere theatrical groups in the United States and really remade the theater in America, and you were one of its founders. Tell me, first of all, how did this come to be?
How did you get involved in Steppenwolf And did you ever imagine it would be what it became?
Well, there was, Yeah, it goes back to when I was eighteen years old. I was getting out of high school. I loved doing plays. I wasn't going to go to college. Loved doing plays in high school, wanted to keep doing them. So I graduated and got a group of kids together and we went and found this space and did a play in there, and we were going to print the program, and we decided, well, we need something to put on
the program, so let's call ourselves something. And one of the guys was reading the book, the Hermann hesse Yes book Steppenwolf, and he held it up and I said, you know, we all agreed that that would be a great thing. Let's put it on the program. We called it Steppenwolf Theater. That was probably March of nineteen seventy four, that's fifty years ago.
Wow.
And we called the Steppenwolf. Then we did another play, Then we did another one. Then we added Malkovich and Laurie Metcalf and Joan Allen and all these.
Wife Moira Yeah, then Moira Harris, she was Moira Harris. Yeah.
She was friends with my co founder Jeff Perry and fellow co founder Terry Kinney. The three of us were the ones that got things started. And all these folks and they went to Illinois State together. They all came up to where I lived in Highland Park, which is where Jeff Perry and I went to high school. And we found a space we started doing plays in the basement of this closed down Catholic school.
Yeah, and that was the summer it started in seventy four.
But then they got out of college in seventy six, and that's when we really cranked up and got it.
Got I mean, this is like Mickey and Judy putting your show on in the barn. I mean really, that's what it was at the beginning. But in time, Gary, and in not long time, this really rebrands and remakes American theater. I mean, you're the artistic director there.
For many years.
True West and Orphans, and I mean these were theatrical moments that people may not have an awareness of, but they completely changed the landscape of what was happening in the theater at the time.
Back back in the eighties. Yeah.
Yeah, So we started in seventy four and by eighty two we had moved our very first show to New York and it was the one you mentioned, True West. Malcolm Inch and I were doing it, and it was a small show for people, so it was easily movable. Yeah, you know, it didn't cost that much money. We found a little more one hundred and eighty seat theater downtown in New York called.
The Cherry Lane. Lane's still there.
Yeah, it's still there, and he's been there for a gazillion years. A lot of people have done plays in there, and we did our show there and it was a big, big hit, and then we did another show the next year, and one the following year, another one, and we just kept bringing plays there.
Let me ask you this, what.
Made it different from everything else that was happening in New York and in the American theater at the time.
What was it? I don't know.
Well, you know, when you're isolating in a basement theater with you know, eight other radicals, you know, you never know what's going to happen, and a lot of crazy stuff happened. We kind of developed this sort of self protective, self defense sort of acting where where it was kind of attack before you get attacked.
It was an agress I mean it was aggressive.
I mean it was I saw some of those productions, but there was an intensity about them. Was that it was it the intensity that came from that.
I think we just developed this sort of anything goes sort of approach to things being isolated in the basement because it was our little space, you.
Know, we could do whatever we want.
If nobody showed up to our shows that night, we just it was fine, we we'll just have a party and entertain each other. And that's what we kind of got used to doing.
And you were very close. I mean that closeness also lends a certain comfort.
You're very close, and everybody, like the folks that I mentioned, Moira, Laurie Metcalf, Joan Allen, Malcolviv, John Malkovitz, Terry Kenney, Jeff Perry, these folks are all like hugely talented, and you know, it was like it's like we just stumbled into putting this group together, really really good people. They all went off, you know, and had great careers and in the movie
business and all of that. But the you know, the foundation was laid for a sort of approach and a style of acting in those early days working together in the basement. Then we eventually that was in Island Park, Illinois, where Jeff and I went to school, and then we eventually moved into the city of Chicago, expanded, got a bigger theater, then we got another one, then we built our own building. And now if you go there fifty years later, you'll see this giant, giant complex that takes
a whole city block in the city. Are you still in Chicago? I don't really do much there anymore. I was involved with very, very involved for the first like twenty seven years, and then the last thing I did was one Flew over the Cuckars Nest on Broadway, and that was two thousand and one. So we closed July twenty ninth, two thousand and one. Six weeks later, September eleventh, two thousand and one, the attack on our country, and everything changed for me.
At that point.
I started thinking about different things, and I wanted to kind of get very involved in supporting the men and women who were deploying to Iraq and Afghanistan.
I got.
I just got very involved in that. Never returned to the theater after that.
Isn't that amazing?
The one thing, the one Colonel I want to pull from that, You did a film, You did a film, you did a show when you were at Steppenwolf Tracers. Tell me about that, and did that did that plant any seeds for.
The next phase of Gary?
Soinice's life, it definitely was a seed that was planted in terms of supporting veterans and trying to do something to help, especially our Vietnam veterans.
Yeah, I tell people with the Tracery is about that. That's what Tracers is about.
It's a story that was written by a group of Vietnam veterans and they performed it on stage.
So they got together.
One guy conceived the idea, a guy named John Difusco.
He's a Vietnam veteran.
He put an ad in the paper and said, Hey, I want to make a play and I'm looking for Vietnam veterans. So he got he got some guys together and they started. Every day they would go into like a workshop where they talk about their experiences in Vietnam and he would write things down and then they would improvise and work on and they you know, over the course of time, they created a play so that they called Tracers, and it was a play about the Vietnam experience.
I discovered it as the artistic director of Steppenwolf looking for a play to do about Vietnam because I had Moira's two brothers served in Vietnam and her sister's husband, Jack Teres, also served in Vietnam as a combat medic.
And I got to be. You know, I got to know them.
A little bit, got to hear their stories, got to feel a lot of compassion for them, and quite frankly, a lot of guilt because they were just a little bit older than I was during the Vietnam War, and I was at high school and the chasing girls around and you know, playing guitar and.
Doing plays, and they were getting shot at.
And so when I met them, I got to feel a little guilty about being kind of oblivious during that period of time. So I wanted to do something that spoke to the Vietnam experience, and so I started to look and I found the play Tracers. We eventually did it in Chicago, and that was a big thing.
When I read about that experience, you really building with others, but you building and then guiding Steppenwolf. I see Gary Sonise the builder, and you do have that in you where you I mean, obviously your cause at that moment was theater and creating great plays in some ways preserving American classics of mice and men, which I saw. How did that carry on into the next phase of your life? How did it prepare you for what you're doing now? And the building of the Foundation.
Did it.
Yeah, I think all all those things did. I think, you know, if I look back to how I grew up as a kid, my dad was a film editor and in Chicago, and you.
Know, the the.
Bulk of the film work in Chicago in those days was like the mad Men Show.
You know, remember the advertising agency.
So the advertising guys were constantly making commercials and they needed the editors to crank out these commercials and get them done no matter what time it was because they were all on deadline. So my dad would work these crazy hours. And I don't remember dad being, you know, just around that much, you know, when I was growing up in terms of high school or any of that. So I got to I got to kind of work things out on my own.
Anyway.
My mom had her hands full with she was taking care of her mom and her sister and me and my brother and sister, and I kind of developed to sort of do it yourself sort of you know, I just can't wait around for somebody to tell me what to do kind of thing. And I sort of developed that at an early age, and that, you know, then I got into high school and decided, well, what I want to do is start a theater because I'm not going to.
College because nobody told you couldn't.
That's right, nobody said you couldn't. And I had a great mentor in high school. Her name's Barbara Patterson, and.
She stayed in touch with her for a long time. I did.
Yeah, she was the drama teacher in high school, and we we became very close and stayed in touch with her. And she saw me as a kid who you know, I was bad in school and didn't you know, grades were no good and all that, but I could actually act.
She saw something in him, she saw bad asses which she saw.
She saw, well, you saw a guy who could, you know, just let it rip. And because I didn't, I didn't. I didn't have any training or anything like that. I just came to my first place and started just doing what I thought I should do.
And she kind of said, go with that. That's good.
And so she gave me a lot of courage and a lot of self confidence in terms of just believing in my particular approach to things. And so I just had a particular approach, and I also kind of.
Developed this sort of folk focus.
On leadership and kind of seeing a thing over here and then going and trying to make it happen.
And there, you know, that.
Manifested itself into kind of finding a space and creating a theater company and then you know, making movies and conquering Broadway.
Yeah.
Yeah, I remember with True West. I was thetistic director of Steppenwolf at that time, and I really wanted to move that show. I was looking like as soon as I took over as the artistic director of Steppenwolf, one of the things I wanted to do because I thought we were really good and I thought, you know, the next thing we got to do is, you know, if we want we want to be more well known in Chicago, and I think that a good way to do that is to be well known in New York.
So so smart move.
Yeah.
So we we took.
A play there and it was a big, big hit, and John John became a movie star. Steppenwolf got all this attention. We all producers started coming to Chicago to see our work. We ended up doing play after play there every year in incredible all hits. They were all doing great, and it really it really set the stage for being able to build a building, you know, because we were being recognized as really talented group of people.
And we were starting, because of our success in New York, starting to develop this sort of international reputation huh, Because we would get all these great reviews in New York, and all those reviews would trickle out to the West Coast and all around, and people were starting to recognize Steppenwolf as something positive. So we were able to raise the money in Chicago to build a building. Wow, And that's what we did incredibly, And now it's this giant institution there.
But I would argue, though it doesn't have the it doesn't have the it was the epicenter of what was happening at that moment. It was.
It was the sharp point of the sword in the American theater.
If you did a play, you were waiting for Steppenwolf to unveil the next big play. You did a number of these historic figures. After you left Steppenwolf, you're now doing well. You may have been still involved in some way, but you started getting cast as these historic figures. Truman and George Wallace, and of course I know, I know
for you. Tom Jod in Grapes of Wrath was his great American character to you, how did you prepare for those historic characters or well known literary characters as an actor, because you couldn't just follow your gut anymore.
No, But.
Let's take The Grapes of Wrath for example, So that that was made into a film john Ford, with none other than Henry fond Of playing Tom Jod. So big shoes to fill there, obviously, But the way we didn't. We didn't approach it as like we were going to try to recreate what had already been done. We were going to do something that hadn't been done, which is a theatrical play version of the Grapes of Wrath. We had a wonderful director named Frank Galatti, who was a writer director.
Remember the movie Accidental Tourist. Frank wrote this script for that.
I think he got nominated for an Oscar for it. But he was just a wonderful guy and very very smart. He was the one who I brought him into the company in nineteen eighty five. He was working with us. I asked him I was the artistry character. I asked him to come and direct. You can't take it with you.
I wanted to do. I just wanted to do a funny comedy.
You know, we were stepping well, we were doing this hardcore step yeah, And.
I thought, here's a comedy from what the thirties?
Yeah, let's do this fun old comedy because he's got a great characters and everything. So Frank wasn't a member of the company, and I invited him to come and direct it. And when he during rehearsal, everybody was having such a good time with Frank. I wasn't in it, but.
I was there.
I was watching and everything. Everybody was having such a good time with Frank. So I went around to all the company members and I said, what did you think of I asked Frank to come into the company. Everybody was support of him. So I asked Frank to come into the company. I was sitting in my office with him like.
This, and he, oh, oh my god, are you kidding?
Oh of course I thought it too, and he was so happy about it. And then I said to him, Frank, do you have any ideas of things that you want to do? Because he was he was a great writer. He was all these adapting things and blah blah blah. And he immediately said, I think the Grapes of Wrath would make a great play, and I was like.
Oh, go go. So that was eighty five. By eighty eight he had the script ready. It was a four hour pro redaction.
Remember it's about the Joe family leaving Oklahoma and going to California. It took us a long time to get to California, and so with.
A pool down front, ladies and gentlemen help in the splash zone.
Well yeah, I mean you saw the Broadway version, which was the version. Oh so the Chicago version was about four hours. Then we cut it down. We took it the next.
Year, that was eighty eight, eighty nine, we.
Took it to La Joyaunhouse. We did in Lahoya, then we went over to London. We did it at the National Theater in London.
I didn't know that.
And then we were able to get producer attention. So the following year, nineteen ninety, we took it to Broadway. By the time we got to Broadway, it was about two and a half hours. It was really lean and mean, it was it was the work on it was beautiful. I mean we kept trimming it and fixing it, but a lot a lot happened there with the grapes of Wrath. We won the Tony Award for Best Play that you know, Lois Smith was in it and she.
Got nominated, I got nominated.
We got a lot of attention for the Grapes of Wrath, but prior to that, we had brought you know, a whole lot of shows there, and you know, the Grapes of Wrath kind of led to my association with the Lane Steinbeck who Laye was John Steinbeck's widow and she controlled the rights to everything. So she was the one who gave us the rights to do the Grapes of Wrath.
And he even gave you his National Book Awards, Steinbeck's National Book Awards.
He did, you're right, it's in there.
One time we were on stage at the Grapes of Wrath and I said, would you give me the rights to make of Mice and Men into a movie?
And she said, honey, it's already been a film. Why would you want to do that?
Well, he'd been a film three times, because there was like the thirties version there, there was a Robert Blake or you know, Robert Blake and Randy Quaid.
Did it there. But she gave it to you, but she gave it to me. She gave it. She made me a deal that was just so beautiful.
She gave me the rights for free for one and so I had. I had it for one year as a producer. I returned to California from the Grapes of Wrath in nineteen ninety and I had the rights to mice and Men, and so I went I had done a little bit of development work at MGM. So I went to MGM and I said, I've got the rights of my men. You want to make a movie?
They said yes, And it just went like that, and that was got the rights for free. They said yes. I got Hort and Foot to write the script and we were shooting a year later, and you directed it.
I directed it and when Anne acted in it, and I got Malkovich to do it because John and I had done it on stage before.
Tell me about you evaded one of my questions, how do you prepare for these historic characters?
When you got that was the question, Harry, trying to find no no way back.
I didn't want to stop you because I'd never heard this, and I love that story.
But tell me about Truman.
You get Truman, it lands in your lap, you get cast as Truman.
How do you prepare for this, Yeah, you know, I it was.
I had done Lieutenant Dan in Forrest Gump in that that came out in ninety four, yep, so and it got a lot of attention, and you know that it won a bunch of awards and all that stuff.
So the career changed for me at that point.
I had done a Bison Man is a movie and a couple other things, but I hadn't done that much before Forrest Gump in film. But you know, when you're in a big movie like that and everything, and I had a good part, things things changed.
Why did Lieutenants I resonate? Do you think with so many people it.
Wasn't just a yeah, it's a great story. You know, it's a happy ending. You know, we you know, we've heard so many difficult stories about Vietnam veterans not being able to make it, and you know, but Lieutenant Dan's okay in the end, and that that's a that's a beautiful story of a Vietnam veteran that really hadn't been told, you know, in film up up to that point. So
along comes Lieutenant Dan. As you know, it gets a lot of attention, and then out of the blue, right around the time we were we were doing the right around the Oscar time.
I think.
A little before that, I got this offer to play Harry Truman. And I didn't know that much about Harry Truman frankly at the time, and I'm thinking, why why would they want me to do that?
That's strand.
But the producers, you know, Harry Truman is a miss Midwest guy. I grew up in the Midwest. I grew up in Illinois. He's from Missouri.
You know, they just saw me doing it. I had to work. I had to wrap my head around that.
Really yeah, So I had to study up a little bit before I could even say yes or something. I had to study up, learn a little bit about Harry Truman, figure out.
Can I play Harry Truman. I don't know if I can. And I had to figure all that stuff out.
And I finally felt, oh, okay, confident that I could dive into that. So once I did, then I started pouring myself into all things Harry Truman. I went to the Truman Library Independence Missouri. I spent days there just cambing through the archives. They let me into the basement and I could look at footage Harry Yeah, what was the trigger for you?
Was there one thing that you said, Oh, no, I understand who he is. Well.
Our script was based on a wonderful book by David McCullough, Big Doorstep Book. I know that was the thing that And what's great about that book is it's not just this sort of dry his oracle thing McCullough writes. So you can read it as as if the truth, as if Truman is a character in an emotional journey, and so there's a lot of emotion in the book and everything. You can really put yourself in this position of somebody who's sort of this reluctant politician who gets swept aloft
into this next thing, next thing. He knows he's the president of the United States, you know. And it was a really interesting journey. But I had to dig in. I had to dig in a lot. I had to work on the accent and the voice, and you know, I learned how to ride horses because he was in the cavalry and World War One, all all this stuff.
We had.
We had an age Harry Truman was one movie and we had that spanned thirty five years of his life.
So the difficulty there, of course, is that.
You know, you don't want it to be sort of the cliffs Notes version of a life, right, but you're trying to tell thirty five years of somebody's life, and Truman just you know it was it was all in submerge yourself into it, and you know it won a bunch of awards and did really well, and you know, think the career was starting to take off at that point.
Tell me, I know there was a big shift after nine to eleven for you, at least in your own mind and heart. But back in nineteen ninety four, Garry, you right after Forrest Gump, you're addressing a group of disabled veterans. Tell me about that moment and what you learned in that moment.
That was Yeah, Forrest Gump came out in on July sixth, nineteen ninety four, thirty years ago.
Wow.
And shortly after that, I received an invitation to come to the National Convention of the Disabled American Veterans Organization, which I was not aware of. Didn't didn't know the organization at all, but they've been around for decades and decades, and so I kind of looked into what is it?
And they at that point they represented about one point five million wounded veterans going back to World War Two, and they wanted to give me an award for playing Lieutenant Dan, a wounded guy, and they thought I did a good job, and they wanted to, you know, kind of bring me out there and kind of give me something.
So I went to their convention that year was in Chicago, and I went to the Conrad Hilton in Chicago in August of ninety four, just maybe six weeks after the movie came out, and I'm standing on stage.
In fact, the.
First pages of my book Grateful American described this moment of walking out on stage and looking out in the crowd and there's you know, two thousand wounded veterans out in this ballroom and they're all cheering for me.
And I was so moved by it. And just kind of the.
Impact that was made by seeing all these wheelchairs and you know, just wounded folks just applauding me for playing this part was profound. And so I stayed in touch with them and started working with them and supporting them over the years. And I think the Tracer's experience of working on that and getting involved with local Vietnam Veterans groups in Chicago ten years later, the Lieutenant an experience
getting involved with our wounded supporting them. Those were just those were seeds that were being planted that would grow into this full on mission after September eleventh, two thousand and one, and I was just I just felt like call to action at that had that point to get involved in a deeper way. Both those things, the tracers experience in the Lieutenant.
Aan acclaim after the film, I mean it was it was a cultural moment. But for the veterans community, they saw themselves in a positive light. And as you mentioned earlier, if you look at the Vietnam films and those stories told before, it always ended horribly for them. Yeah, it was depressing and dark or you just you.
You always wondered, I'm just not sure that Vietnam veterans going to be okay. And after this film is over, Yeah, Like look at the Coming Home.
That's that's what came to mind.
Coming Back and you see Bruce Dern, what's he do. He's so racked with guilt and everything. He takes off his uniform and swims out in the ocean and he's not coming back. You wonder at the end of platoon when Charlie Sheen is flying over the battlefield and he's looking down and he sees all these bodies and you know, the battle is over and every lot of buddies are gone and he's flying off. At the end of that movie, you just wonder that guy's going to have a tough
time going into life casualties of war. The same thing with Michael J. Fox, and then you got, gosh, you got Martin Sheen at the end of your Apocalypse. Now you got look what happens to Chris walk and at the end of Deer Hunt.
These are all dark endings, That's what I mean. They're all dark to semi dark endings. Lieutenant Dan is the only happy ending. That's what was different about it.
And they are still talking about it and watching it today. So after nine to eleven, what happens you start? When do you start the band? The Lieutenant Dan Band?
You know, I was.
Doing I'll tell I'll tell you in nineteen ninety seven. I was in Chicago and I was doing so I'd done Truman and I just finished shooting George Wallace in like old January or February of ninety seven, and then I went to Chicago to play Stanley Kowalski.
In the streetcar named Desire.
And I was on stage in Streetcar and there's a guy who had written the music for Streetcar named Keimo Williams, and Kemo he was a bass player, but he liked to play guitar and he heard I was a bass player, so he said, hey, you know, if you ever want to come over in jam, uh, you know, come on over. And so I was so busy during the run of the show, I could never do it.
I was tired. You know, it's a shark.
I just wanted to get to get through it. And so right at the end we wrapped the show. I got a couple of days before I'm going to fly back to California, and I call and called him up and said, why don't we get some pizza and we'll get some guys and we'll play. And I went over to this house and started playing. So that kind of rekindled some bass stuff in me.
I used to play bass and guitar and everything.
I put it away when I was gotten so busy with Stepping Wolf and everything.
I hadn't really played much, so but playing it it really got me going again. And then I went.
Shortly after that, I went up to uh Atlantic City and then Montreal to do a movie with Nick Cage called Snake Eyes. And when I was up doing Snake Guys in Canada, there was Guys and the crew that played, and so we went and started playing. And I called Chemo up and said, come on up here and play with us. So he flew up to Montreal. We and
we were playing. And then after September eleventh, I wanted to do more for the troops, and I started going on USO tours and handshaking and taking pictures, and I went to the war zones a couple of times. I went to Germany, I went to Italy and went to Walter Reed, I went. You know, I was doing all this stuff in two thousand and three, going one month after another to some military base or something like.
That, just meet and greet. So you got the band, no band, No it was.
It was a series of meet and greets for the for for six or seven months. I was I was going out. Didn't have a job at that time that was keeping me in towns. But I wanted, I wanted to help our troops. You know, we'd you know, we'd been attacked and I wanted to do something, and so I started visiting them and I had, you know, because I had some jammers that I would play with from time to time. I said to the USO, let me take them on a tour, and eventually they said okay.
So I called up Chemo and said, hey, let's let's put some folks together and let's go. And so we we started touring, and that that's what began the lieutenant and band. Kimo left the band after after a while, and you know, we've we've now the band has played Oh gosh, we've played one hundred, five hundred and seventy five concerts on military basis.
Incredible.
I've been I've been to I've been over one hundred and seventy five military bases myself, you know, in hospitals and all that stuff.
Well do you still do it?
Once I started doing it, I could see that it was impactful. It was in a positive way, like it was it was good that I was there. You know, I'd walk into a hospital room and maybe maybe there'd be a wounded soldier service member in the bed completely unconscious, you know, hadn't woken up yet. Family is standing around waiting for that moment, praying.
For that moment.
And I come in and they've been there for weeks just dealing with the issues, and somebody like me comes in and the light faces light up and you know, start taking pictures and it changes the mood, it changes the tone. And I could see that showing up was making a difference. So then I wanted to do it again, and I wanted to do it again after that, and I just kept wanting to do it because I could
see that it was helping. Of course, if I had seen me, if I hadn't felt that it was helping, I wouldn't been out.
Garrisonese Foundation.
How did the foundation start? Tell me about the founding. So you're out doing these USO tours with the band. I know you're also collaborating with other organizations that are building homes for veterans and helping veterans in various ways, and you're donating a lot of the money from these concerts to these partner organizations. But when do you start your own foundation? What was the impetus for that?
Well, you know, when I started making those tours, those early tours, just volunteering to go to the hospitals or you know, go shake hands or something, or you know, now take the band and go play on military bases and whatnot.
One of the things that I also.
Wanted to do was to try to help more people, was to volunteer for a lot of different other organizations. There were a lot of service organizations out there that were supporting veterans and first responders, and I wanted to help veterans and first responders, so I would volunteer to you know, raise money for these organizations, raise awareness for what they were doing by doing PSAs or whatever. So I just started volunteering wherever I could for multiple organizations.
So I learned a lot about all these different needs and organizations were filling this need, you know, you know, we were building homes for our wounded, we were taking care of our Gold Start children, our families of our fallen entertainment, you know, whatever it was. It was a lot of different things, and I support a lot of different organizations.
After doing that for you know, ten years.
Or whatever, it was, it was clear that this was something that was just a big part of my life, and I started thinking, well, you know, I've got to find a way to do this in a different way. And I've seen all these nonprofits pop up, and I've tried to help them all.
Why don't I just start my own.
And at that point, I had been doing it long enough that I had a pretty good reputation with you know, trying to help. And so that's why I put my name on the on the foundation. I called it Gary Sneeze Foundation, because there was already a you know, I already had a relationship with the military family, and I had been raising money for all these other organizations. I was on television, you know, Weekly and CSI New York. So I I just said this, let's do it. I
want to do more. Uh And I think the way to do that is to start raising our own money so that I can hire people to do more.
Uh.
So we started out very small, a couple of people, and now we've got a giant organization.
Now.
You know, Gary reminds us that sometimes you have to do things yourself, and in the doing, the entire world is changed. Such was the case with Henry four and wait until you hear how it ends. Ford was working the night shift at the Edison Illuminating Company in eighteen ninety six. He spent his days trying to build a horseless carriage with a gas powered engine. He finally built
a prototype, which he called the Quadricycle. In the late eighteen nineties, he found backing and opened the Detroit Automotive Company. Ford attempted to streamline his design, but he couldn't quite get it right, and by nineteen oh one, his backers had had enough and they shut the company down. Ford decided to focus on lighter, smaller vehicles, and he went into a new partnership, which he called the Henry Ford Company. But when his partners tried to control his creativity, Ford
left the company which bore his name. He had failed twice in his attempt to create what he called a motor car for the Great multitude? How could he do it cheaply and quickly enough to stay in business? In a moment, How it ends? Welcome back to how it ends. By nineteen oh three, Henry Ford had tried twice to create a car company capable of creating motor cars for the Great multitude, but all his vehicles were too expensive and took way too long to produce. So that year
Ford opened a third enterprise, the Ford Motor Company. Learning from his previous failures, Ford launched the Model A, then the Model N, and later the Model T, a stripped down car with no frills, available in one color black. Inspired by the assembly lines of canneries and slaughterhouses and breweries, he created a mass production assembly line for his cars. By December of nineteen thirteen, he cut production time from twelve hours a car to an hour and a half
in eighty four steps. Each worker added a different piece of machinery or component to the car. In the year nineteen fourteen, Ford was able to produce more than three hundred and eight thousand cars, more than any of his competitors, which only drove down the price of the Model T and ensured Ford's dominance of the industry. Henry Ford's innovation his assembly line would change the way food, furniture, toys,
and yes, vehicles are produced to this day. Now you know how it ends and that sometimes if it doesn't exist, you have to build it yourself. Now back to our conversation with another build it yourself for Gary Sinise, give me a sense, and I won't make you go through every program, but you all do things that I don't see other organizations doing. And I want to hone in on a few of those years ago. I know you took over this Snowball Express program. Tell me about that.
I mean, I've covered it. It's the most it's one of the most moving and I think amazing and important moments at Christmas time.
I think of almost any organization in the country, it's beautiful. It's focused on the children of our fallen heroes. And it was started at Disneyland in two thousand and six by a group of folks that just wanted to help the kids of our fallen heroes and help them through the holidays by taking them to a happy place like Disneyland and letting them play and letting them meet each other, to see that they weren't alone, you know, in their
grief and what they were going through. There was a lot of other kids that have lost a parent in military service, and it was very bonding and healing. I got involved with it the second year they had done one event at Disneyland. I was shooting CSI New York and Studio City. They contacted me and said they wanted to come and show me a video of their first event, and I saw that, I said I wanted to be involved. I volunteered to donate my band the following year to come play.
For the kids.
I did that, then I went back the next year. Then I donated and just kept doing it every year, help helping to raise money or raise awareness or raised spirits by bringing the band and playing for the kids.
I've done it, you know, I don't know.
We're in our eightheenth year. I want Snowballs in its eighteenth year. So in twenty eighteen, having American Airlines is a big, big sponsor of ours with multiple programs, but American had actually gotten very, very involved, and so the event moved from Anaheim and Disneyland after three years to Dallas because that's the hub of American Airlines. Have got a lot of good uh support there. They could do a lot of things for the kids. So it was
there for a number of years. And then I mentioned to the folks that were kind of in charge of it at that time, Hey, you know, I've been narrating this show at Disney World for for you know, a dozen years. Uh, and that's a that's a great place for the kids. I think we should take it take
it there. Uh. Well, it was going to cost a lot of extra money to do that, and That's when we decided to fold Snowball Express into the Garysonese Foundation as one of our programs because we had the ability to raise raise the amount of money to you know, you're taking a thousand kids to Disney World.
You've got to get a lot of hotel rooms and all. You know, I know, it's a logistical and transportation it's a big, big thing.
So American provides all the all the transportation. Uh, you know, multiple arter airplanes that come from all over the country with these kids on board. Uh all you know, all the people that all the flight attendants, all the pilots, everybody volunteers their time. Wow, American donates the airplane planes we get all the kids to these Disney My foundation is the is the you know, it's the Gary Sneze
Foundation program. So we raise all the additional money to do everything, you know, the park passes and the and the hotels and the food.
And every everything like that.
It costs a lot of money, hundreds and hundreds of volunteers and we bring them in for you know, we bring them in on a Saturday and they're there till like Wednesday, and it's it's it's life changed a lot of days of fun and healing for these kids. You know, they make lifelong friendships with somebody with another kid who's who's lost a parent.
Tell me about the Soaring Valet program, which we were talking about the other day, which I I knew I've seen when I'm in and out of airports, particularly down in New Orleans.
I didn't realize the other part of the city.
It's not just veterans of war that you're bringing in on these Soaring Valor trips.
Well, soaring Valor is I have.
That's one that started with my relationship with the National World War Two Museum in New Orleans, and Tom Hanks invited me to. He was helping to make the movie that plays in the theater there called Beyond All Boundaries, and so Tom called some of his palace to do voices in the movie. And I did the voice of Ernie Pyle. And this goes back to two thousand and nine or so. So I did the voice of Ernie Pyle.
And then I sent my uncle there, who was a navigator on a B seventeen bomber over Europe and World War Two, and they re my uncle on video for the archive at the museum and that's one of the programs that they have at the museum where they tried to get as many World War Two veterans to tell their stories on camera, and they preserve them in their
archives and they use these stories throughout the museums. You'll go to an exhibit, you'll hit a thing and an elderly World War Two veteran will come out and start telling his story, and then you see all this stuff there and he's telling the story of what it was like to try to take that bridge or whatever it is. So these You know that after my uncle died, my uncle Jack died in twenty fourteen, I called them and I said, can you send me that video of my
uncle Jack. They sent me the video and I watched it and I was, you know, just tears, and I got so moved by I called them up and I said, you know, I'm so lucky that I have this video of my uncle.
Everyone who has a World War.
Two veteran should have a video of them telling their stories like this. Is there anything I can do to help you get more of these stories, to make sure that we preserve more of these stories, And they said, you know, why don't you fund some of our historians. So I said, great, We'll fund historians to go out around the country and videotape these World War Two veterans.
And here's another thing that I'd like to do. I'm going to approach my friends in American Airlines and I'm going to pitch them an idea to fly World War two veterans down to the National World War Two Museum to see this museum. Because they are all over the country and many of them will never see this museum that was built for them, and so getting them there is super important. So I want to start a program
where we can fly these veterans down there. So we started taking veterans in twenty fifteen, and then in twenty seventeen, I thought, let's add another component to this, and I pitched that to my team at the Foundation and also to American and I said, I want to take high school kids on these trips with the veterans, and pair up a high school student with a World War Two veteran, and they travel together to experience the music, experience the
museum with somebody who lived through the experience. It'll be an education unlike anything they'll ever get. Well, now we've done twenty seven trips something like that, taking World War Two veterans and students down to the National War Two Museum. And you can go on the Garysonese Foundation website and look at our YouTube channel and you'll see a whole bunch of videos of how special it is for these kids to spend this time with these American heroes.
It's beautiful.
It's beautiful, and you're also teaching that generation the cost of their freedom and what there's nothing like being confronted. I remember taking my kids to you know, we're walking through the Marines Museum out in Vietna, Virginia, and as we passed through, there was a retired elderly marine who
had been toy Regima. Well, my kids were just fascinating because we'd just come out of the See Regima exhibit and here was the living embodiment of it and this man he sat with my kids for like a half hour, and you could see the tears rolling down his face because aid they were interested in what he had gone through and b he was passing it along to a
younger generation and they were excited about it. So the wonder of what you're creating there and passing the history along is so critical and important.
It's beautiful Raymond. I mean when you see it time after time. I did the first It's been a while since I've been able to get on a trip, but I did the first twelve to fifteen trips. You know, every one of these trips, you know, you know, helping these veterans get through the museum and watching them interact with the students, and watching the students interact with them, and the students opening.
Their eyes to what it is.
I mean, the cost of freedom is high, and you know they learn from these veterans.
What they did that relates to them today.
R I mean, you know, without this, without us winning that war, the Allies winning that war, the world would have been completely different and they would have grown up in a completely different America.
I remember my son after meeting that it would Gama veteran.
When we were leaving, he said, Dad, he's not that much older than I am now when he went to war. I said, that's right, that's the lesson. These were boys who went off to defend this freedom.
Yeah, it's incredible, It is an incredible sacrifice, and that's a beautiful program.
Yeah, I'll say no, the soaring valor is incredible and all of your program I mean your wellness programs. You have the Rise program which is about giving homes to your to severely disabled. That's I mean, we could spend an afternoon talking about all the programs. You should go to Garrisonese's Foundation website and look at it all. It's
incredible work. I want to talk though, about the string that I see that runs through your life really from the time you're in Step and Well founding the foundation and then in your personal life, and there is this string of sacrifice.
That I see running through it and devotion to others.
In twenty eighteen, your son mac is die noosed with a very rare form of cancer on his spine. It turns into tumors that are popping out that you the doctors can't control. Your wife endured multiple surgeries at the same time she's having her own cancer battle. How did you contend with all this? First of all, what did you think was happening?
Well, it's just like you're getting punched.
You know. When we found out my wife there was you know, she had a mammogram and now we didn't hear anything for a bit, you know, Like so we just assumed, you know, well, maybe everything's okay. Then I don't know, maybe a month later, we get this letter that said, you know, they're you know, we'd like you to come back in for another check.
You know, like a month later, we're like, what what's this?
Yeah, So a month later we go back in, she gets another test. Then they want her to go and see the surgeon and he confirms that she has you know, cancer in her limp nodes and that she's going to need surgery. So they did a lump back to me on my wife, which you know, she didn't have to it's not a mass actomy. She didn't lose her breast. But they did a lump after me. Whether it took out nineteen nodes and then five of them were infected
with cancer. And it was successful surgery according to him, but she was going to need to go through chemo and radiation. You started chemo, she went through you know,
all the chemo treatments, thirty five radiation treatments. And during that time, you know, not too long after she had had her initial surgery, Mac was having trouble with he was just he was in pain when he was sitting down and like his tailbone was hurting him, so we sent him to a Moira's spine surgeon and I get this call that Mac has a has a tumor on his sacrum.
And I'm sitting there with.
Moira talking about her breast cancer. I get a call Max now got cancer. He's and it's something called cordoma, which is a very very rare cancer.
I mean so rare.
You know, when you think of rare, you think in the United States, well, maybe that's five thousand people or something. This is this is three hundred per year, you know, three hundre per year are diagnosed with this kind of tumor. And it starts in the spine. It can start up here, you know, at the top of the spine or at the bottom of the spine. And with Mac, that tumor
was this big wrapped around his sacrum. And it's such a slow growing tumor that it could very possibly have been growing since birth that long because it grows very very slowly to get to that size.
They said that could have been there for a long long time.
And the only way to cure it is to take it out and hopefully the surgeon gets every cell, every bit of it and that can happen successfully about seventy percent of the time, but thirty percent of the time they will take take it out and then it'll come back and spread. And when it comes back and spreads, there's very little it can be done. They try to radiate it, they try any drug, any cancer drug they can.
We found out he had his initial tumor taken out in September of twenty eighteen, and by May of twenty nineteen, we found out that a cancer came back. So then he went into like chemo treatments, radiation stuff, more surgeries because now it was spreading to the neck, right, he had tumors on his neck. He had in fact, see this picture back here, that is five days before he had to go in the hospital and get tumor taken
off his neck. In fact, you know, when he wasn't on camera or getting his picture taken, they gave him a neck brace to wear. When they discovered that there was two more on his neck. They didn't want him to do anything that would you know, screw you know, pop anything, or that tumor was growing there and it could fracture something. So they gave him a neck brace and he was wearing a neck brace until we got into the hospital five days after that picture was taken there.
But and he's also going through chemo and radiation, and you know, they kept he had multiple spine surgeries because he was in a lot of pain and the only thing they could do was try to take the tumors out off his spine. Each time they did that, he became a little more disabled, until finally at the end of twenty twenty, this was twenty twenty, he was in a wheelchair and then he.
Was still able to stand up.
But shortly after that he lost the use of his legs.
I remember coming in.
I would come in and I would stretch his legs out and have him push, you know, his legs. And I came in and I said, okay, lift your leg up, but and he couldn't do it. And he couldn't lift his leg up, and he just looked at me, you know, he couldn't do it, and he took it in stride.
Raymond. I mean, it was like like he's laying there.
I think he knew something was happening because it was getting harder and harder to move his leg. And then when it happened, it was like, can't do it.
Then he was resigned to it. Yeah, you know, it wasn't like he started crying or anything. He was just.
We're in a different world now, you know. Now we're in a we moved to a new place.
We're in another level of what we're going to do.
The amazing thing to me is through all of this. I mean, in twenty twenty one, you lose your father, your wife is still battling cancer. Mac is now battling cancer. But the mission, Max's mission and his love of music never WANs Gary. In fact, I would argue, well you named the album or he did Resurrection and revival it resurrects and revives him.
Yeah, in the last year of his life. Tell me about that, what you saw, the drive you saw in him and the impact it had on you.
Yeah, this record, this is part two of the first record, the first record. In February of twenty twenty three, he'd been fighting cancer and all of that, and he said to me, Dad, there's a piece of music that I wrote that I never finished in college, and I think I'd like to try and finish it. He contacted one of my band members who he'd worked with a little bit on some things and my violin player Dan, and Dan went to work with him on it to help them kind of flesh out the ideas. And then my
piano player went to work on it with him. Ben lewis helping him. Ben would play things for him and then send it back to Mac and he'd make notes and send it back to Ben.
Then Ben would adjust.
And then his buddy Oliver Shnay came into the picture, who he hadn't seen for a while. Oliver went to college with him, yea, and they hadn't seen each other for a long time. And Mac played him this piece of music that he'd been working on, and Oliver went to work on it with him to finish it. They went into the studio in July of twenty twenty three and recorded the piece of Arctic Circles, which is on Maxinese YouTube.
Now, that started the.
Ball rolling for Mac wanting to do an entire album, and that's where Resurrection and Revival came from. I don't know where where he why he decided that that was the title, but named it yeah, oh yeah, Mac Mac did, yeah, he it was it was his project.
Well, clearly it was Resurrection and Revival of his music. But now in the light of what we know and what's happened, it takes on a far greater significance.
Yeah, he was.
It was reviving him, you know, personally, to be to be resurrecting some old pieces of music and bringing him.
To new life.
And you know, even that even that cover right there, he who is this, that's my grandfather and his grave grandfather in World War One.
Who kind of looks like mac I had to say, and a little bit, but he looks he looks a little bit like he does. When I saw it, I thought, oh, he put his face, he super imposed his face.
On an old picture. But it it's not it's a relative.
No.
He he kind of revived that picture.
One of the things he did when he was working at the Foundation was kind of preserved things in archive and he would take, like, I had a lot of these old pictures of my grandfather from World War One, and he took them and kind of lightened them up and fixed them.
Up, made it look better and everything.
And his mom, you know, he's looking for one of those pictures to use on the cover, and he showed his mom one over here, and she said, what about that one.
With Grandpa on the horse. Huh.
And Mac went back and got that and he looked at it and he thought, you're right, Mom, that's that's a great that's a great shot.
I had you on the show on my show on a WTN on Fox and when the first album came out, and as I listened to you, now you said when Mac saw these pictures, he would brighten them up and revive them. But it seems to me, now now you've released the second album of his work, some of which you discovered like hidden treasure in his devices after his death, you are the one who has now brightened and revived and restored.
These works that he left you in many ways.
Yeah, well, finding these musical treasures on his laptop after he died was a blessing because it's given me this project, you know, throughout this first year of our lives without Mac, that has really helped me through quite a bit. It's resurrected me and revived me a bit from this terrible grief that we're going through after losing.
Him, you know, and I'm grateful for that.
You know, not everybody loses somebody and then has you know, a treasure trove of music to produce or something like that messages.
You've told me.
I mean, you were going clearly opening his opening these devices. I'm sure the first impulse wasn't oh, I'm going to go find some more music. You were looking for clues in the sense of what he was going through. I imagine I don't know what I was looking for Raymond.
After he died. I you know, I don't know.
Within days, I just went to his phone and I just opened up his phone. I had his password, and I opened up his phone and I started looking at his text messages with people, and I looked at I found voicemails of people that sent him I mean that called him the day he died, not knowing that he was gone, or shortly after he died, not knowing he was gone. These are friends that I didn't really know
very well. So and I found these voice messages. So I ended up calling these these friends of his and telling them, you know, we lost mac He's you know, I just wanted you to know I found this voicemail that you left. I found text messages from different people. I'm in fact, one of the one of the songs on the record, it's It's.
He calls it quasi love.
It's you know, I know quasi is the pronunciation, but Mac wanted to kind of do something something different with it, his own jazz, his own thing. And uh so I found uh him singing into his phone the melody for this song, uh into his voice message and he was writing a song in his head and he was singing into his song. Then I found the chart for it, and then I found text messages between him and my violin player Dan.
Talking about this song.
And so I went to Dan and said, what what were you were you working on another song with with Mac besides Arctic Circles?
And he said, oh, yeah, Mac had this cool idea and blah blah blah.
And I said, we'll finish that song because we're going to put it on we're doing a second record and I wanted on the record, and so it's on the record. And I just found all kinds of things on his phone, Raymond, that I don't even know what.
I didn't know what I was looking for. I was just.
I was just driven to find things and find what was happening at the end of his life. Who was who was he talking to? And do they know what happened?
You know?
And so I had to let them know. And what's the message.
What did you discover that you didn't know that he was going through at the end of his life.
Gary, through all of this, you know, I never wanted to have that sort of what if conversation with Mac.
Mac.
You know, we're fighting cancer and it's you know, it's tough, and what if this happens were I never wanted to have that conversation with him, you know, do you want me to do this or.
Do you want me to do that?
There was only one time where I asked him about something, what what would you want to happen with your bank account?
Because he'd saved a lot.
Of money, and what would you want to happen?
You know?
And he paid for the first record himself, I mean out of out of his savings and everything.
But he saved a fair.
Amount of money, and so I asked him and he told me what he would want with that. But then I didn't I didn't want to have that conversation with him, because I did. I didn't want him or me to feel like we were we were looking at the end of the road. I was always from the from the get go, trying to find the drug, trying to find the doctor, trying to find the procedure. What can we try, where can we try it? In fact, there was there was mac was getting ready to do another treatment when
he ended up in the hospital the last time. He was scheduled for another treatment and then he ended up going into the arm because his breathing was affected, and we lost him on January January fifth.
What what did he teach you about sacrifice and staying on mission? Did he teach you anything?
Well, yeah, he fought this with such grace and courage that, you know, I can only hope that I'm going to be as graceful and courageous when you know, things get tough, You know, for me, because I watched him knowing that he knew how bad things were for him, and yet he never never stopped smiling through it. You know, if he was not in pain or not feeling sick from the treatments, he was smiling. He was watching the Cubs. He was a big Cubs fan. All this, all through
the summer of twenty twenty three. He was watching the TV with his mom, watching the Cubs. My mom was in there all through Moira, My mom and mac All had their cubnats and they're all watching the cub games. He was smiling through that. He was playing his harmonica. He was working on the music. The entire last year of his life, he was focused on creating this album, and so he was filled with joy and happiness for what he was doing, and it was giving him this
amazing thing to look forward to every day. I'm making a record. I'm going into the studio. He was in the studio in July twenty twenty three. He was back in the studio in November twenty twenty three. The record was finished in December. He heard all the music, he designed the cover, and he saw the final videos that were made. And then a day later he was in
the hospital and we lost him six days later. So that whole last year he was filled with joy and happiness of working on this music and accomplishing this thing that he wanted to do, and this beautiful music.
I mean, it's stunning.
So I watched him just gracefully go through the last year of his life, you know, being paralyzed, being you know, struggling with different things.
Yet Mac never ever looked like he was given up.
Well, I love how you've continued you took the baton from him and in his passing, finished the work. Because now you've gotten two more album I mean, it's really two more albums. I know it's I know it's Resurrection and Revival part two. It's actually part three two. I mean, you've you've got a lot here.
Double double disc. It's a double disc.
I mean, it's a lot of music. It's nineteen tracks, and they're very diverse. There's jazz, there's orchestra, orchestra, there's a beautiful harmonica with strength. I mean, there's the diversity of his musical palette is pretty wide and uh, in fact, kind of fascinating. And I imagine as a father. I mean I listened to it one way, but I'm sure as a dad you listen to it and go wow. I didn't realize that he had that in him, or I didn't know he had he he.
Felt bat because I mean, it's a wash of feeling. That's really what this is. It's an album. It's a wash of feelings.
And yeah, some of the stuff I discovered was I was totally just like.
Wow, why didn't he ever? Why didn't he play that for me? It's so beautiful.
There's a song called just for Now on it that he did all on his computer programs. A lot of the stuff he would write, you know, on his programs, like just for Now. He did everything on his programs. We took the just for Now track that Matt created with the original vocals and everything like that. We added some strings on top of some of it, just.
To give it a little more.
But the track could have been put on the record all by itself because Mack did it. It's just a beautiful song. His friend from college, Lou Roy, sings on it. She's got a beautiful voice. She sings on three of the songs on the record. There's the other music on the record that Mac did all by himself. There's a cover of nature Boy, the old song by Nac and Co.
Yeah.
Mac does a version of nature Boy where he plays all the instruments and he sings, and he recorded everything and.
He had that all in the computer. Where was this that was? That was in his files? Wow? In his file? What do you think he would say if he saw this part two? What would he say to you? What would he say to me? I hope you'd say, let's do part three. He may he may give a g yet, Garry.
Okay, there's a there's a string of questions I ask every I call this my royal grande questionnaire.
So now you're going to be subjected to it.
These are fast, you don't have to spend much time on these, but I'm warning you they are deadly questions.
You're right, who's the person you most admire? Jesus? Hmmm? Who do you most attest? Oh? I can't say it, Come on, I can't. Everybody tries for dodging on that. You right now? Thank you? Yeah for asking that question? You awful person. You What is your best feature? I don't know, Maybe M hard to say. Persistence, maybe persistence? What's your worst? Your worst feature?
Maybe persistence, the double edged sort of persistence. Well, you don't build a foundation and call it the Gary Sineze foundation without a little persistent.
Your favorite meal, Gary, Oh, dear.
Gosh, maybe one of my favorite meals is uh, chicken pacata?
Chicken pacata? Yeah, well, I see, I evade that. I like anything Italian. So my favorite meal is one I get to eat with family or friends.
That's my favorite deal. Well, like the one I had last night with somebody.
But my dad used to make chicken pecata and that's a good man.
But but I like a lot of food. What do you fear? Gary? Failure? Maybe maybe loss?
M your greatest virtue is what? What do you what do you consider the greatest virtue? Not your greatest virtue, but what do you consider the greatest virtue?
Honesty? Maybe honesty? Why?
Well, if you're if you're not honest, you know, and nobody's gonna trust you.
Yeah.
What's that old line? My great grandmother had a line, if you lie, you cheat, If you cheat, you steal. If you steal, you're no good.
I guess that's I guess that's true.
What could you not live without? Mm hmm, Well that's a good answer.
I guess that's that's kind of universal, Gary oxygen. What is your biggest regret? Oh?
Gosh, you know, I've thought about this with regards to Mac and just wishing that I had in those final days, I had asked him if he was afraid and and let him talk to me a little bit more. But neither of us wanted to go there. You know, I don't know if that's my biggest regret, but when I think of it, I wished i'd.
Before he was.
Unable to speak again, you know, because he lost that capacity with what was going on with the his lungs. It went so quickly that I wished that I had spent more time in those last days having you know, having that, having some kind of more in depth conversation with him about his feelings, what he'd been through and what he was going through. But again, like I said, I never wanted to feel like I was given up and.
You were in the fight.
And I would argue, if you'll permit me, you helped fill his last year, and that those last days with great joy and accomplishment for Mac.
I mean I saw.
That from the little piece we did after Christmas, just on the cusp of the new year, the reaction he had to that, and the pride he had in that showing it to other people, and that was all you're doing, so and it was the culmination of his work.
And and yeah, and his mom and his two sisters. He loved them so much, and they loved him so much, and you know, we all pulled together, and they were they were a big part of everything, no question. Without their support, I couldn't have you know, I couldn't have gone gone through everything I was doing, and they were helping Mac in so many ways, so many beautiful ways.
What is the best piece of advice you've ever received?
The one I always I always give this one to like young actors who asked me for advice, and I.
Save your money? Is that the best piece? Gary? Save your money? That's all the broke actors out there.
I know the feeling right saving thing are good today, but they might not be good tomorrow.
Save your money, Okay, I guess it's good advice. If you could not do what you're doing now, what would you like to do? Mmm?
These are these are difficult questions because I I don't I don't ever think about that. You know, I'm I'm fairly at you know, I'm at peace with what I'm doing. I've done a lot of things in my life with a career, and I've got a great family.
My family is it. It's great.
May maybe spend more and more time with my family. You know. I'm still trying to accomplish a lot with the foundation work and the band and supporting the troops, and that takes me away sometimes.
And you know, my wife is just the.
Best person I know, and you know, and I look at how she sacrificed for this mission that I've been on, because she spent a lot of time without me there because I've been going somewhere to do something, and she's she's a real she's a real hero and my biggest champion. You know, her brother served in Vietnam, and she always wanted me to go out there and try to make sure that our service members know they're appreciated because her
brothers didn't get that when they came home. And so she's been backing me up every step in the way.
So just you're spending more time with them and.
That you know, that's that's that's the important thing, and the grandkids and all that.
Final question, what happens when this is over? Not the interview, it's life.
Well, I hope I'll be welcomed and Lord will say good job.
I think you'll not only be welcomed, you'll hear familiar music, music maybe Arctic circles played when you get there.
My friend, So great to see you. God, bless you, thank you, thank you, thank you. Eminen.
Gary Sonise is such an incredible person. His sense of sacrifice and commitment to his art, the veterans and the mission of his son is just It's inspiring and if you haven't heard Maxinie's Resurrection and Revival, go to his YouTube page and order copies at Gary Sinisefoundation dot org. Here's the hole the takeaway. There is so much there to unpack, but I love that line. I had to
find a way to do it differently. I had to build my own Gary built a theater company, an amazing career and one of the most active veteran service organizations in the country.
I hope you'll support his good work and come back next time.
And as I mentioned on every episode, why live a dry, constricted, narrow life when if you fill it with good things, it can flow into a broad, thriving Arroyo Grande.
I'm raving at Arroyo.
Make sure you subscribe like this episode, Thank you for diving in, and we'll see you next time. Arroyo Grande is produced in partnership with iHeart Podcasts and is available on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.