Joe's Odyssey

24 years ago today, December 5, 2001, I started writing my Odyssey.

As of this year, I've now been singing these songs for half of my life.

That hit me as I was talking to a myth class at UIC after my 387th performance of Joe's Odyssey, my last show of 2025. I mentioned it to the students, as usual an amazing and diverse group. The professor (and my friend) piped up that my piece was older than the students (true) and all of us shared a good laugh as I rolled my eyes. 

24 years. 387 performances. 

These numbers…

This is the tenth year in a row that I've performed for students at UIC. 

I've performed for them in the weird brutalist classrooms that I love for the intimate distance from the audience and how the cinderblock walls absorb (or don't absorb) sound.

I've performed for them over Zoom during the first year of the pandemic and in-person wearing a mask during the second.

I've loved having a great relationship with my hometown Classics program and I've especially loved the discussions that come reliably from one of…

I've played both my Odyssey and The Blues of Achilles on the same day only six times.

Three of those were at NJCL conventions ('23-'25). I also did them both in the same day at University of Kentucky (2022), UC-San Diego (2024), and two different schools (Brock and Toronto) on my Canadian tour in 2024.

Three of the six times I've done the Blues of Achilles first, then the Odyssey, which is the correct chronological order in terms of the events depicted in the Homeric epics: first you fight the war (the Iliad)…

Since my Odyssey shows at the 2024 NJCL Convention, I've played the piece only three times. But for a last minute unexpected (and welcome) booking at Lake Forest Academy this spring, the Odyssey shows at Miami of Ohio for the 2025 NJCL Convention (my 14th straight) could have been my first of the year.

But the lack of Odyssey performances doesn't mean Odysseus has been far from my mind and heart. If anything, the opposite. 

I wrote in my piece about the LFA show that I was wrestling with the idea that 2026…

The day I'm posting this, March 17, 2025, marks exactly 23 years since I played the Odyssey for the first time in front of an audience in my parents' living room in Oak Park.

That's almost half of my life that has been inextricably linked to Odysseus and his story, half my life singing these Muse-inspired songs which after half a life and almost 400 performances don't even seem like something I wrote: they seem like something I've always just known how to do or something I learned from another person. Which…