{"id":3222,"date":"2022-08-18T10:18:39","date_gmt":"2022-08-18T14:18:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.syracusewomanmag.com\/?p=3222"},"modified":"2022-08-18T10:18:39","modified_gmt":"2022-08-18T14:18:39","slug":"inspire-diane-bostick-carrying-on-with-creativity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.syracusewomanmag.com\/?p=3222","title":{"rendered":"Inspire: Diane Bostick: Carrying on with creativity"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Jason Klaiber<\/strong><\/p>\n

Though the years of high school saw her dabble with poetry and earn nods for her book reports, it wasn\u2019t until Diane Bostick reached her 30s in the 1980s that her creative streak truly set in, never to let up.<\/p>\n

By that point, the Jamesville-DeWitt grad had won an amateur comedy contest at Wise Guys, taken part in theatrical performances at Salt City Playhouse, written a libretto to an opera with an Austrian composer, and tagged along with the traveling show band Galaxy of Stars as an imitator of Madonna and Cyndi Lauper.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was like another force was coming up in me,\u201d Bostick said. \u201cI was just learning and discovering that I had a big creative side that I needed to satisfy, so I didn\u2019t limit myself.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the early part of the 1990s, she was able to fuse her mixture of skills by starting Zeda Productions, an entertainment production company that put on shows for schools, senior centers, luncheons and nursing homes.<\/p>\n

With a name derived from that of Bostick\u2019s paternal grandmother, Zetta, who purportedly deserted her family and an \u201cunloving marriage\u201d in Texas without so much as a trace, the company was meant to draw a voice from a \u201cmysterious, erased\u201d figure from its founder\u2019s lineage.<\/p>\n

During that time period, Bostick relied on friends who were singers, dancers and even magicians, but she also created a one-woman show for herself called \u201cThe Cookdom of Sara Irene McGee,\u201d which pulled its protagonist\u2019s middle name and the thread of Irish heritage explored throughout from her maternal grandmother.<\/p>\n

Following Bostick\u2019s research into the minimal and sometimes unflattering role of women on the Erie Canal early on, it was her mission to portray a positive, \u201cmulti-faceted\u201d fictional character who works as a cook aboard her father\u2019s boat and marries a doctor from Brockport, one of the vessel\u2019s main stops along the historic waterway.<\/p>\n

Stretching to 40 minutes at its longest, Bostick would often perform the show in excerpts a quarter of that length. What shone through every time, however, was a dose of humor and a tale touching on the importance of hard work and persistence.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat was pleasurable for me, because it wed my first love of writing with my desire to perform,\u201d Bostick said. \u201cAnother person might be nervous or terrified to stage a show by themselves, but I really think I have a fearless performer in me that\u2019s always wanted to be onstage or possibly was in a past life.\u201d<\/p>\n

Around the same time, she learned through a songwriting partnership with Donald Laird, the brother of one of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles co-creators, that she had a knack for thinking up song lyrics. On weekends spent seeing another friend in Oswego, where Laird lived and worked as a Fort Ontario director, Bostick would leave him the words and only hours later he would have a fully composed melody to go along with them.<\/p>\n

About a decade later, she was ready to commit some of the baker\u2019s dozen or so songs written with Laird to CD and cassette, but she was surprised to find out in the process of trying to reconnect with him that he had passed away. Still, with his brother\u2019s permission and the memory of her friend living on, she released a few of those compositions, including one she especially loved called \u201cWhen Mexico Was Mine.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHe was a very kind person, and he had a beautiful tenor singing voice,\u201d Bostick said. \u201cWe had a deep connection musically.\u201d<\/p>\n

In May 2019, Bostick\u2019s older brother, Christopher, died a year to the month after her middle brother David lost his life to Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), both in the same home where their parents had passed on years prior.<\/p>\n

After processing her grief, Bostick summoned the strength to reenter the family\u2019s DeWitt household, a step that led her to uncover her mother\u2019s old poems as well as \u201cfunny and beautiful\u201d letters her parents exchanged while they were going steady, her brother Chris\u2019 artwork, and a collection of her father\u2019s creative writing pieces, some of which were autobiographical in nature.<\/p>\n

Newly inspired, she sorted out her dad\u2019s passel of short stories for children and extracted the ones she liked the most for reworking and eventual publishing.<\/p>\n

So far, Bostick has released three of those, all of them Christmas-related and faith-based despite her father\u2019s disassociation from religion.<\/p>\n

The first in line was \u201cSanta\u2019s Choice,\u201d a book about Santa Claus\u2019 auditions to see which reindeer were best equipped to pull his sleigh. Illustrated by Justin Addison and released in 2021, that one came with a companion piece called \u201cReindeer Training\u201d about seven female reindeer that Kris Kringle prepared for flight.<\/p>\n

The next was \u201cThe Gift of Sun Lee,\u201d a release from earlier in the summer about a young Chinese girl who goes to a Bible school in the United States and returns to post-World War II Shanghai with American customs to share.<\/p>\n

\"\"\"\"<\/p>\n

Her most recently released children\u2019s book, \u201cThe Blessed,\u201d follows suit as the story of the donkey returning to the manger. Like its immediate predecessor, also illustrated by St. Louis artist Cher Jiang, \u201cThe Blessed\u201d features pages to color and addresses in its text the lessons of compassion and humility.<\/p>\n

Links to the purchase pages for those books can be found on mysmallonebooks.com, which takes its name from the sobriquet Bostick\u2019s father had used in correspondence with his petite soon-to-be wife of 52 years.<\/p>\n

In addition to her performance outlets and her writing of children\u2019s books, Bostick has operated an interior home repair company called His & Hers Fix-Its alongside her husband, Magic.<\/p>\n

With her late brother Chris\u2019 art, she put together two posthumous coloring books containing his adult-oriented, comic-style drawings that are available on www.cbsticks.com.<\/p>\n

Bostick will have a stand with her books up for sale at the Westcott Street Cultural Fair in Syracuse on Sunday, Sept. 25, the same day that she\u2019s participating in the \u201cClash of the Comics\u201d competition at Destiny USA\u2019s Funny Bone Comedy Club under the stage name Rennah Rilies.<\/p>\n

A believer that laughter can break through to people, Bostick is hoping to organize an event sometime in the future called \u201cLaughing in the Dark\u201d as a way to raise awareness for mental health and support suicide prevention.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Jason Klaiber Though the years of high school saw her dabble with poetry and earn nods for her book reports, it wasn\u2019t until Diane Bostick reached her 30s in the 1980s that her creative streak truly set in, never to let up. By that point, the Jamesville-DeWitt grad had won an amateur comedy contest…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":3223,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1143],"tags":[1217,1216,1215,157,1218],"class_list":["post-3222","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-inspire","tag-childrens-books","tag-comedy","tag-diane-bostick","tag-inspire","tag-local-author"],"gutentor_comment":0,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.syracusewomanmag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/swm-jk-diane-bostick-pic-2.jpg?fit=885%2C1024&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1091,"url":"https:\/\/www.syracusewomanmag.com\/?p=1091","url_meta":{"origin":3222,"position":0},"title":"Mona Smart & Diane Pluff","author":"Staff","date":"September 29, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"Hope to Hear By Riley Bunch | Photography by Mary Grace Johnson\u00a0 For the first five years of her twin daughters\u2019 lives, Mona Smart had no idea they were living with a hearing disability. 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But for Dianne, who had spent three decades as a registered nurse, it felt like a natural progression. \u201cI had been coaching people through nursing \u2014 coaching patients and families \u2014 all during my nursing career,\u201d\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Featured"","block_context":{"text":"Featured","link":"https:\/\/www.syracusewomanmag.com\/?cat=99"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.syracusewomanmag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/11\/Dianne-Rizzo-0005-RT.jpg?fit=801%2C1200&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.syracusewomanmag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/11\/Dianne-Rizzo-0005-RT.jpg?fit=801%2C1200&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.syracusewomanmag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/11\/Dianne-Rizzo-0005-RT.jpg?fit=801%2C1200&ssl=1&resize=525%2C300 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.syracusewomanmag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/11\/Dianne-Rizzo-0005-RT.jpg?fit=801%2C1200&ssl=1&resize=700%2C400 2x"},"classes":[]},{"id":3227,"url":"https:\/\/www.syracusewomanmag.com\/?p=3227","url_meta":{"origin":3222,"position":3},"title":"Inspire: Judith Hight: Driven to make a difference","author":"Alyssa Dearborn","date":"August 18, 2022","format":false,"excerpt":"By Kate Hanzalik J.S. 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