What started out as a fundraiser at a bar for a dog groomer’s pet charity has turned into a standing-room only concert Friday night at the island’s Maison Martinique restaurant.
Washington, DC-based singer-songwriter Tom Goss is returning to Vero for his second appearance for the Blue Ribbon Foundation, with Vero’s own Shamara Knowles as the opening act.
Billed as An Evening in Paris, tickets for the three-hour concert were half sold out less than two weeks after they went on sale. That was three months ago. Since then, organizer Martin Lavender has moved the show from the intimate Havana Nights bar to the spacious restaurant downstairs. Even so, he is warning friends they’ll be giving up their seat to stand along the walls if ticket sales keep up at the current rate.
Goss, whose indie-pop music, all of it original, is in the vein of Jack Johnson, has made music his full-time career. Not so – yet – with Knowles, a home health care nurse who performs on Sundays with Theatre-Go-Round, the musical revues staged by Jon and Marg Putzke.
Lavender, who runs a pet grooming and boarding business, started his pet medical assistance program in 2011. It all began when his client, architect Tony Donadio, racked up a sizeable boarding bill for the family dogs while he was tending to his late wife Margo in hospice. Lavender, whose father was in hospice at the same time, insisted on comping Donadio’s boarding charges. Donadio wouldn’t hear of it and not only paid the bill but wrote a second check to help out someone in greater need than himself.
That summer, Lavender held his new charity’s first fund-raiser at Greenhouse Café, now Osceola Bistro. He hired Tom Goss to sing after a friend insisted he take a look at his music video.
“He’s amazing,” says Lavender. “It was a great song. That was when nobody much knew who he was. He’s grown by leaps and bounds since then.”
“I just kind of stumbled into music my freshman year in college,” says Goss, 33. A high school gymnast and wrestler whose parents owned a gym, he taught himself guitar and piano and for the next five years, “wrote some really bad songs.” That has apparently changed and his catchy tunes and personal lyrics are finding broad appeal.
“My set tends to be a lot of story-telling,” he says. “It’s intimate and it gets fun when people start to get to know me.”
Part of that includes his personal life, and his four-year-marriage to husband Mike. “My political activism is simply having a conversation and creating a sense of normalcy about the situation in which I live.”
Shamara Knowles, too, has a husband – she is formally Shamara Knowles-Turner– as well as three boys, 18, 16, and 11. Last week, she was rushing to a rehearsal for Theatre-Go-Round after dropping her son off at his first day at his first real job. After rehearsal, she was heading for a night shift as caregiver.
Born in Nassau, she credits her father with instilling her with a love of song. “My dad sang to me all the time, I mean, all the time. I was just mesmerized by that, and then he’d ask me to sing along with him. That’s how I learned to sing.”
At 11, she moved to Vero Beach to live with her grandmother, a U.S. citizen. From then on, she sang in her school choruses as well as Fellsmere’s Church of God and Christ, where she was lead singer. In her mid-twenties, she sang with an R &B band in Melbourne, The Touch. She has been in two shows at the Vero Beach Theatre Guild and for years has sung in the John’s Island end-of-season cabaret.
There, she inevitably runs into her high school chorus teacher, Gary Miller. “He still gives me that look, like, get it together. I’m terrified of that man,” she says, with a laugh.
Lavender first came across her at a show he sponsored at the Vero Beach Theatre Guild. “She blew my socks off,” he says. “I saw her after the show and I pulled her aside asked her, ‘Why am I not buying my tickets from Ticketmaster to hear you?’ And she said, ‘You know? Life happened.’ “
He says when he brought her in to test the sound system for Friday’s show, Havana Nights was packed. “She looked gorgeous and she started singing and she sounded so amazing, people were pulling out their phones and recording her.”
The event is Friday, Oct. 17, from 7 p.m. to 11 p.m. Tickets are $25. Call 772-567-2123 or stop by Blue Ribbon Grooming and Boarding at 1525 Tenth Ave., behind the Majestic Theatre.
HAITIAN ART EXHIBIT OPENS SUNDAY: The Vero Beach Museum of Art has already set the season in motion with an exhibit of Kinetic Sculpture: The Poetics of Movement in the Titelman Gallery, and that show has inspired Ballet Vero Beach’s two founders, Adam Schnell and Camilo Rodriguez, to give a performance at the museum next month, Nov. 19, a Wednesday, at 5 p.m.
Meanwhile, in the Holmes Gallery, Restoring the Spirit: Celebrating Haitian Art, opens Sunday, with 40 works from 1940 to the present. The exhibit, that first opened at the Figge Museum of art in Davenport, IA, includes paintings and sculpture. With themes ranging from Roman Catholicism and voodoo to brilliant landscapes and depictions of daily life, the show focuses on the art created through and promoted by the Centre d’Art, opened in 1944 in Port-au-Prince, which brought Haitian art to the world stage.
The museum of art charges $10 admission, with reduced rates for seniors and students, and no charge for children 17 and under, museum members and active military. It is open daily from 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. except for Sunday, when it opens at 1 p.m.
