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  Acclaimed One Man Show Comes to Thursdays from the ULadysmith, WI - On...

  Acclaimed One Man Show Comes to Thursdays from the ULadysmith, WI - On Thursday, November 12, Kevin McMullin will be performing excerpts from his one man show, Into the Black Sea, Stories of Darkness and Light, that will be livestreamed from 12:30-1:30 on Thursday, November 12th as part of the Thursdays from the U Lecture and Performance series. To access this event, visit the webpage at www.uwec.ly/Thursdays at least 5-10 minutes prior. There you will find instructions for joining the live session, as well as the entire fall schedule, news releases for each talk, and archived recordings. Thursdays from the U is sponsored by UWEC-BC Foundation.McMullin’s childhood playgrounds ranged from the housing projects of Chicago to the suburban neighborhoods haunted by Ernest Hemingway and Frank Lloyd Wright. He embellished his somewhat unusual upbringing with an education at Northwestern University where he studied tuba with brass demigod, Arnold Jacobs. He tossed in a couple of years learning old time fiddle with Chicago Barn Dance icons, Mark Gunther and Mark Ritchie. The whole pastiche went with him to Seattle, Washington, where McMullin began playing the Pike Place Market and movie lines. With a somewhat addled sense of career opportunity, he decided to make a home in Sarona, Wisconsin. There he shed his urban ways, added storytelling to his bulging bag of tricks, and launched a trajectory of playing, telling, writing, educating and in general plying a trade for which there is no appropriate box on any federal tax form. Things were going pretty well. He cofounded Duck for the Oyster, one of the hottest folk dance bands in the upper Midwest. He cut a CD with jazz jock, Randy Sabien. He toured Chile. Then Mexico. Then Peru. He was sought after as a teacher and a performer. It all came crashing down in 2015 when he was diagnosed with a vestibular schwannoma, a non-malignant brain tumor that left him deaf in one ear, and struggling with chronic dizziness, tinnitus and fatigue. While he was recovering from the surgery, his father was diagnosed with a rare lymphoma. So McMullin moved to Chicago where he cared for his father until his father’s death 8 months later. “Let’s just say it threw my life into some disarray,” McMullin says. The abilities he lost forced him to do a lot of letting go. “I’d just lost my father. My music career was toast. Playing by myself is hard. Playing with others is not an option. I was grieving and exhausted and I had no idea where to go next.”But those years of illness, recovery and loss were fecund with stories. His own stories as well as the stories of others’. “I realized at some point that I could tell these stories. That I needed to tell these stories,” he says, “Stories of people walking in dark places and finding or making some kind of light in the most unlikely ways. And once I started telling them, I...

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