Kim Tenreiro’s Christmas Celebration
He has spent the last 18 years perfecting a one-man presentation of ‘A Christmas Carol’ by Charles Dickens. In the process he has raised $163,452 to local charities
By John Addyman
We need a little Christmas …
… and Kim Tenreiro can help light the warmth in your heart.
Some people think Christmas is a reach, an effort, a tradition that requires effort to keep up, a responsibility, a time of year that seems to take so long to arrive and so quickly to disappear.
Not Tenreiro.
To him, Christmas is the busiest part of his year, the most rewarding, the most fulfilling, and the way he addresses it is singular.
He is a pharmacist, software programmer, businessman and community supporter of many causes, and a world traveler.
And for one night, in front of you, he is an actor with many parts.
He has spent the last 18 years developing a one-man presentation of “A Christmas Carol,” Charles Dickens’ book about reclamation, forgiveness, charity and the grace that the holidays can lay on all of us, like a moonlit winter’s snow.
To help us on the path to understanding what Christmas means inside us, Tenreiro and Dickens show us the selfishness and greed and disdain for our fellow man we’re all unfortunately capable of.
In two hours, Tenreiro introduces you to more than 30 characters.
He needs no stage, no set, no props.
He commands the characters by voice inflection and meter and by posture and presence.
Dickens’ words provide the horsepower to embolden the audience’s imagination. As he shifts from character to character, scene to scene, your investment in the story and your ability to see it in your own mind grows.
“When my husband and I saw him in ‘A Christmas Carol,’ we were blown away,” said Mary Therese Friel of Mendon. “He’s fascinating and brilliant: you just get drawn into it.”
Tenreiro doesn’t make a dime on his presentations.
He does it for a local charity or community group that is willing to market the event and guarantee the turnout.
He said each performance nets a charity about $1,200 and in the years he’s done this, the many groups he’s aligned with have taken in a total of precisely $163,452. “I keep close track on that,” he said.
He has two goals for each audience member.
“First, pick any of the many lessons that would make your life better if you paid attention to them,” he said. “Pick one and own it and really get it. Secondly, contribute to the charity I’m working for. At the end of the show Scrooge meets the men who came to the counting house the day before his Christmas adventure. He makes a contribution that includes ‘a great many back payments’ — I remind people that the charity I’m here for is one of the great things in the world and maybe they have a back payment or two the charity would be happy to take off their hands.
“I’m not there for ego. I’m not for the claps. I appreciate that they appreciate what I’ve done. But I’m there for them to come away feeling better somehow. I’m there for them to think about maybe donating more to the charity.”
How did all this start?
Where did this come from? How did he put this together?
He’s 72. He retired in 2011 at age 57, consummating careers as a compounding pharmacist (one who combines or alters a pharmaceutical drug for specific patients), a software programmer in the very early years of pharmacy computers who ended up writing a program that wrote other programs, and he taught system users all over the United States.
As a businessman more recently, he owned and operated three pharmacies and a medical equipment store.
One shop provided animal pharmaceuticals.
“That was a lot of fun,” he said. “Cats and dogs were our bread and butter, but we did exotic animals — snakes and skinks and Seneca Park Zoo was a client, as was the Smithsonian in Washington. I came this close to doing work for Disney supplying pharmaceuticals for their aquarium in Epcot Center. I wanted to be the pharmacy that took care of Nemo.”
Raised in Queens, Tenreiro was in and out of school, finding work as a pharmacy tech when he decided to complete college and become a pharmacist.
He met his wife-to-be, Janet, in a chiropractor’s office. They both had Wednesday morning appointments. “I happened to run into her someplace other than the chiropractor’s office and she said, ‘Well, I guess I’ll see you Wednesday morning.'”
Ever the quick mover, Teneiro asked, “Well, how about Saturday night?”
“We went to my best friend’s engagement party, we started to date and got engaged,” he said. “We got married in 1986. We lived in Farmingdale on Long Island for eight years. We just had our 40th anniversary. We thought about buying a pharmacy. We had a little bit of a war chest and we started looking.”
Janet had been a teacher, sold beepers and pagers back in the day and office furniture. The Tenreiros finally bought The Medicine Shoppe in Canandaigua. Alongside it was a durable medical equipment store, part of the property and Janet went to work in that. They opened a satellite store in Shortsville and bought the animal pharmacy in Rochester, moving it to Canandaigua. They enjoyed 17 successful years in business.
Then retirement. The Tenreiros had been busy as community supporters. Janet was a star in the Canandaigua Rotary and became district governor. Kim was a member of Rochester Geva Theatre’s board for nine years.
When the stores were sold and the Tenreiros retired, they didn’t hesitate to go to the next thing.
“We like to sing,” he said. “We sang in a variety of choral groups. We did the YMCA Review Show. We sang with the Finger Lakes Camerata, the Finger Lakes Chorale and the Oneida Chorale, which went on tour in 2012 – we sang in Italy, Slovenia and Croatia.”
But something was tickling his mind and touching his heart.
“I had seen Patrick Stewart performing his one-man ‘A Christmas Carol’ on Broadway in 1991,” he explained. “He had a completely bare stage, two chairs and a table and he came out in a black suit. It always impressed me — and to this day it does — that magic doesn’t occur so much in what the audience is seeing, the magic occurs in the imagination of your audience.
“To this day, I can see the audience filling in the blanks. Dickens mentions turkeys and geese and game and poultry and great chunks of meat and endless stuff and the audience sees all that in their minds.
“I bought the CD of Stewart’s performance. We had gone to my brother-in-law’s house in Trumansburg for Thanksgiving every year. On the way down, we listened to Act 1 on the CD. On the way back, we listened to Act 2. For years I would say to myself, ‘I can do that. I have a good memory for some things — not people’s names — I can memorize that.’
“The big question was, ‘Why would I do such a foolish thing?’ Why would I pursue such a folly? It occurred to me at some point that if I did it for charity, I could raise more money in aggregate than I could afford to donate. And when I made up my mind to try it, it was full steam ahead. My first performance was on the third floor of the Wood Library in Canandaigua, 18 years ago.”
His version of the one-man play comprises 15,000 words.
That’s a lot of memorization and Tenreiro was not an actor.
Yet.
Find Out Kim Tenreiro’s Upcoming Performances
Kim Tenreiro has a full schedule of presentations in the Rochester-Canandaigua region, starting with a show at 4 p.m. Nov. 15 at the Ontario County Historical Society. Several other shows are scheduled throughout the area.
For a list of his performances, visit https://kimschristmascarol.com.
How does he do it
So how was he going to do this — to memorize 15,000 words?
“How do you eat an elephant?” he asked philosophically. “One bite at a time. I reduced the entire thing to index cards. And every night, I’d work on trying to memorize a paragraph. On some nights, memorizing a sentence was enough. It took me about six months.
“I tried to memorize a paragraph, usually just before bed. I’d read a paragraph, try to memorize it, reproduce it. Then OK, what was the one from yesterday? Let’s try to get those two together. And let me look ahead for the one tomorrow. Basically, you have an image of a string of pearls, trying to string them all together.”
Once he got it, it became a part of his memory, like the times tables in elementary school.
“Typically, I don’t even think about it from December to September. And now [this interview was in September], if I’m in the car on the way home and I have 15 minutes or so, I’ll pick it up and start practicing in the car,” he explained.
“Now, it’s so automatic that my biggest problem is the venue: I never know if there’s going to be a stage or steps…what’s the three-dimensionality of things? The blocking is always on my mind.”
He says 80% of the show is a narrator speaking to the audience. “The audience is often discomfited by the fact that the lights don’t go down,” he added. “We’re not in darkness and the audience is looking straight at me. Oftentimes I’ll walk right out into the audience, too, that’s something that people aren’t expecting.
“It’s fascinating for me to watch the audience. I can tell who’s engaged, I can tell who’s got the Bills’ game on their phone down low and not really paying attention. The first year I did it, a lady burst into tears at the end and I thought I had screwed it up so badly, that she thought it was terrible, but no, she was that moved. I mentioned that to Mark Cuddy, the artistic director at Geva, and he said you have to let the audience have its experience.”
The telling of Scrooge’s rebirth in spirit has favorite messages for Tenreiro. The Ghost of Christmas Present admonishes Scrooge, “Who do you think you are that you should have the power of life and death? It may be that you are more worthless and less fit to live than millions like this poor man’s child.”
“Fred also has some interesting things to say,” Tenreiro added. “When the Ghost of Christmas Present and Scrooge visit nephew Fred’s Christmas party dinner, Fred asks, ‘Who suffers from his ill whims? Himself. Always.’”
Tenreiro has taken that to heart. “I don’t get mad at people who are rude or having a bad day. I’m more compassionate.”
Modeling, acting
His experience with “A Christmas Carol” has recently led Tenreiro into two new adventures — acting and modeling.
Mary Therese Friel and her husband, Kent, own the Mary Therese Friel Modeling Agency and they’ve helped him land a part in a made-for-cable-TV series, “Abilene,” that debuts next year.
“I’m just the guy in the back of the church and the grandfather in one scene with grandkids, part of the crowd,” Tenreiro said — but it’s a start. As far as modeling, that chance is in the offing.
“He’s very down to earth,” Friel said. “A true professional, all those years being a professional in his trade. He takes it very seriously.
“Modeling and acting is something to be taken seriously because some people do it as their first and only career, but when it’s a second career, you go into it with a little less stress because you’ve already proven your success in the world. You literally can give yourself the grace to try it and enjoy it and have fun with it because you’re not depending on it for your livelihood or self-redemption. You say, ‘Hey, let me give it a try and if it works out, great; if it doesn’t, I’m so glad I had the opportunity.’ We’ll go find Kim another job…and another one,” added Friel.
His season for “A Christmas Carol” runs for about a month in November and December.
“It was always said of him that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge,” wrote Dickens.
“May that be truly said of us.”