'Blue Valentine Blues' by Ken Bachtold

Blurb:

When Josh put a blue valentine in the class box for Bobby Prentice in fifth grade, he just wanted to show how much he appreciated his best friend. Years later, both the ridicule he suffered and his unrequited feelings for Bobby have followed him to the university where they both teach. Bobby would like to say many things to his friend, but he doesn’t know if he can find the courage in himself that he admires in Josh.

A part of the "A Valentine Rainbow" set of 14 holiday stories.

Available on Amazon

About the author:

BA & MA from San Francisco State University in Theatre (Acting and Directing) with a minor in Art.

My latest book (All By Myself) was just published by Dreamspinner Press and can be found on Amazon. This followed Dreamspinner’s publication of my last two novels (Seeing The Same Blue and Blue Valentine Blues).

Before that, Outskirts Press published Love Like Lightning – Ten Stories Of Love At First Sight, also on Amazon.

My original play, Starting Over (which I also directed), was just staged as part of the Ninth Annual Fresh Fruit Festival here in New York. Audience reaction was terrific. It was one of nine plays accepted out of 60 submitted. It was an MM romance. The blurb in the brochure for the festival read, "A play about love and loss. Griff has recently lost his longtime partner. Can he find happiness with Ben, the new neighbor down the hall. Supported by his sister and opposed by his widowed mother, now remarried to a homophobic preacher."

I've also written 5 musicals, book, music and lyrics.

Saloon (loosely suggested by the old melodrama The Drunkard) which opened The Gatetway Dinner Theatre in New Jersey to great reviews. It was subsequently optioned by Broadway producer Jerry Schloschberg (who, at the time was, producing the revival of On The Town with Bernadette Peters), but a show sluggishly following the old material opened and closed the same night and he backed off thinking there was now a "stigma" on the material.

The Facts Of Life (a musical about War, Prejudice and Aging, circa the ‘60s) was written at the BMI Music Workshop taught by Broadway orchestra leader Lyman Engle after several auditions before acceptance in the class. It was deemed worthy of a staged reading there.

Boo!, based on the old gothic novel The Castle Spectre was done by several regional theatres.

I was hired to doctor a musical based on Ephigenia At Aulis, called The Winds Of Aulis. I changed the name to Delimma! and wrote a subplot and mostly new lyrics. Although the play was fully backed, it never reached production and I never found out why.

I’ve written and staged numerous night club and cabaret acts and taught singing for the musical stage for 15 years.

See Ken's books on Amazon