Please plan to join us as we gather around St. Benedict’s Church and Parish Center to renew old friendships, make new friends, visit with relatives and reminisce about the good ol’ days. We are hoping to see aunts, uncles, cousins and friends whose “roots” are in Benedicta. Mark your calendars and schedule your visit “back home” for this weekend.

We are in the planning stages for this, sure to be, memorable weekend. As our agenda takes shape we will be posting the events, times and locations of activities.

Mark your calendars and schedule your visit “back home” for this weekend.

In the late 1980′s Mark played guitar for Brad for three years on Brad’s solo project, which, in the end, was never released. Nevertheless, Brad later reciprocated by traveling to Maine twice to lend his distinctive voice to many tracks on Mark’s “Whatcha Gonna Do!” CD project. Brad is known as “THE” voice of the band Boston which featured Brad in multiple layered tracks, where he would basically harmonize with himself. While this CD is definitely not a Boston CD, in many ways it is better, in that it shows that you cannot put talent in a box – Brad was just at home singing lead and background harmony to blues and roots, as he was singing multi-track harmonies to pop-rock tunes. Since his tragic death, this will no doubt be one of the last projects showcasing his phenomenal voice that will ever be released.

This project, started in 2000, had more than a few setbacks, the most significant of which was the untimely death of Brad in March of 2007. Mark was very close to Brad, and that death, coupled with multiple other tragedies that year, really took the wind out of Mark’s sails. Mark had been living in Austin, Texas at the time, and returned to the East Coast when he heard about the tragedy. It would turn out to be the first of nine funerals in less than a year he would attend, for friends like Brad and Bill Chinnock, and family like his brother Gale and his “second Mom” Rose Jamo.

By early 2008 Mark, with some help from friends, redesigned the CD and cover, and went back into the studio to finish the mixes he felt were never done properly before. On December 21st – barely in time to have a “Christmas release”, the finished first batch of CD’s arrived. On January 4th it became available through CD Baby as a physical CD, and by January 21st it became available digitally on CD Baby and iTunes.