Tracy Petry

About a year ago I came across this old photo, clipped from the pages of the Ridgefield Press, my old hometown newspaper.  I find interesting little things every time I pack and move.  Mostly I find memories. I grew up in Ridgefield, a small CT town on the NY state line.  I remember most of us kids complaining that there wasn't anything to DO in town.  At least that was our excuse when we got into trouble.  But for me there was always theatre.  When I was a pre-teen I was a member of a group called Spotlight and we met in a little building behind Ballard Park.  Once I hit high school I was able to "graduate" to the teen/adult group in town - Ridgefield Workshop for the Performing Arts. RWPA, for years, had been performing their summer shows on the stage at one of the local schools, and storing sets and props in an old barn on a dead-end street.  My first summer as a member was 1982, right after my freshman year of high school.  That y...

Life rarely seems to pause for anything. Unfortunately the lack of pause means a lack of writing, at least that's what it means for me. A year after the completion of my last book - Cast Down - and I still haven't finished the sequel that I genuinely thought I'd have finished within a month or two. We've moved yet again, in case I hadn't mentioned it. Four times in three years. In September of 2013 we moved from a long time residence in East Haven, CT to Blowing Rock, NC. The winter was just too much for us. Temperatures with wind chills of 30 degrees below zero were not what we were looking for when we moved South, so we came down off the mountain to the city of Gastonia, near Charlotte. We didn't realize when we signed the lease that we were living in the 'hood. The gunshots at night, the drug dealers, the crime... it was an interesting year and we rode out the lease but then we had to go. Our next stop was a pretty little mobile home park in King'...