In 1985, actor Jeff Daniels starred in Woody Allen's, The Purple Rose of Cairo. Where many actors who encountered success would head straight for the coast, Jeff did just the opposite. He moved back to Michigan from New York City, bought an old bus garage in his hometown of Chelsea (pop 5000), just west of Ann Arbor, Michigan, and began building what he hoped would one day be viewed as the Midwest's answer to the Circle Rep. It was his dream to have a professional theatre company, featuring Midwestern actors, directors, designers, and playwrights situated in the middle of America producing plays about middle America. That dream became The Purple Rose Theatre. Of course, as with any non-profit arts organization, if it's not about the work, it's about the fundraising, and that's where the story of LIVE AND UNPLUGGED begins. Here's the rest of the story in Jeff's words: "A few years ago, I was in New York finishing up the final audio mix of ESCANABA IN DA MOONLIGHT. For those of you who've never mixed sound for a film, it makes watching paint dry interesting. So while Steve Curran, of Harvest Music Sound Design, was slaving over every single sound in our epic tale of deer hunting in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, I sat in the back of the room typing three decades of my musical life into my computer. Like the teacher you never saw coming, I looked up and suddenly he was there. Through weary eyes, he asked me what I thought I was doing. I told him I was organizing my songs, getting ready for this little fundraiser at the Purple Rose Theatre in a couple months. It seems someone had suggested that if we pushed me out onstage with a guitar, people might actually pay money to see what happened. In the non-profit world of fundraising, this is known as a "good idea." Steve stared down at me, the stress of an 18-hour day with no end in sight oozing from his pores, and he said, "You really should record the shows." I told him to turn around and finish tweaking the fart scene. He asked me what I was afraid of. I told him in case he'd forgotten, I made my living as an actor, not an actor who sings. I said, if I put out a CD there's a very good chance I'd be compared to William Shatner, to which Steve replied, "Sounds like a song to me." And then he turned around and said something about adding more bass to that flatulence." So, in yet another desperate attempt to raise money, here it is. Along with the three years of sold out shows from which LIVE AND UNPLUGGED was recorded, all proceeds from what you're about to hear go straight to the Purple Rose Theatre Company in Chelsea, Michigan. **CD #2 Is currently in production with a tentative release date of Nov. 2006