Barbara Stasiak:  

I started out as a high school English teacher after college and grad school. By way of a long & winding career path, I became a college teacher, free-lance writer and editor, school PR director, and welfare-to-work computer instructor. For the last 13 years of my full-time career, I was the multimedia teacher for the Academy for Visual & Performing Arts at Morris County School of Technology in Denville, NJ, only a 10-minute commute from my home on White Meadow Lake in Rockaway Township, where I've lived since 1971. Multimedia includes graphic design, digital filmmaking, and music technology, plus collaborating with the dance and drama teachers on 6 productions a year. I retired from full-time teaching in June, 2013 but I stayed connected with the school as a production director and as music director for our spring musicals for a year or two. Now I am content to just attend the shows as a guest. My alums are out in the world now, so I don't go to graduation anymore. But thanks to the wonders of Facebook and other social media, I am in touch with most of my alums. At Douglass College, as an 18-year-old freshman, I met the love of my life, Walter Adam Stasiak. Walt and I spent 40 wonderful years together until he died suddenly in 2005. Our sons, Adam and David, are a great comfort and joy. Adam is a software engineer who works for a company in NJ from his home in Black Mountain, NC. He and his wife Melanie built a beautiful earth-friendly home on Black Mountain and had their son, my first grandchild, Lucas in December 2010. Daughter Emilia was born in May of 2016 and had already been to two family weddings before she was a year old. My younger son David finished his masters in music education at Montclair State U in 2010 and now works as the music teacher at Hoboken High School, where he directs two choruses, the marching and concert bands, and runs sound for the musicals. He is an avid rugby player and is also doing a little coaching, plus he composes and produces for two hip-hop groups, and plays bass with Undercover, a cover band in Jersey City. While in grad school, he was living at home with me, which was a delight, especially when the leaves and snow were falling. He moved to NYC and then to Weehawken, 2 blocks from where I spent my childhood years in Union City. He was back home with me for a while, but since his August 2016 wedding to Alexandria Ynoa, a wonderful young woman from Hoboken, they are living just a few blocks from his school. Much of my life is taken up with singing with the Masterwork Chorus (I've sung nearly 200 performances of Handel's Messiah at Carnegie Hall and in NJ). I sing and solo with some other choruses and do some composing and arranging. One of my pieces was performed at a Morris area choral festival in 2009. I am also the music director of Coro d'Italia, a traditional Italian song and dance ensemble in which my parents were very involved during my childhood. Every Thursday I attend Italian class to try to improve my fluency. (By the way, when my boys were born, I started spelling my birth name as it was originally spelled when my grandfather came over from Sicily, so my sons and I use the Castellana Stasiak family name rather than Castellano, as I was known in high school.) It is ironic that when I auditioned for the Melodiers in 9th grade, I did not make it on my first try and then was too afraid of being un-cool to ever try again. I spent way too much time in high school worrying about what other people would think of me. Mr. Lacerte was the only teacher I ever told about going t...Expand for more