Turning 30 With Some Help From a Star
Providence Journal
March 14, 2007
By Bob Kerr
OK, maybe it’s a little goofy and corny and star-struck, but I need this one. I need to hear from someone who is actually feeling pretty darned good. You know, like, happy. I can sit down in the bunker with my anger team for only so long.
We’ve all probably heard a small piece of this kind of story. It often spills from the radio in shrieks and “can’t believe its” and “oh, my Gods.”
Somebody is caller number 47 and he or she has been able to name the biggest hit ever by Every Mother’s Son and he or she is going to the big show at the auditorium with front-row seats and — prepare yourself — an opportunity to go backstage and meet the star and take home a memory that will endure through years of less exciting experiences.
But we don’t hear the rest of it. We don’t hear about how much might be wrapped up in the attempt to get close to a star.
So Kerri Letellier, with her long-shot phone call from the highway and her meeting with this truly hot guy at the Dunkin’ Donuts Center last week, was the break in the storm, relief from the minimum daily requirement of anxiety and dread.
Last week, just turned 30 and cancer-free, Letellier met Josh Groban, whose music she calls inspirational.
“I told him, ‘This is my 30th birthday and I’m a miracle to be here.’ ”
I’m not familiar with Josh Groban’s music, which is just one more indication that I’m an old person. But I do remember standing at the stage door of the old Loew’s State, hoping to meet The Kinks. So I can claim some experience with that desire to get close to those who make special music — and thank them for making it.
But Letellier’s story goes way beyond hanging out by the stage door. It is a story about things coming together in a way that it is best not to question, just enjoy. And she didn’t have to wait outside.
She goes to nursing school and works as a senior benefits administrator at Benefit Concepts in East Providence. She was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma in December 2004. It was a long, hard struggle. In January of last year, she underwent stem cell transplant surgery.
The next month, her older brother, Tim, was killed in a car accident in New Mexico.
On June 6 of last year, she was declared cancer-free. And last week, on the morning of her 30th birthday, she says she looked at a picture of her late brother and told him it would be a really, really nice birthday present if he could make it possible for her to meet Groban.
A short while later, she was on Route 195 with Lite105 on the radio and cell phone in hand. And when ticket crunch time came, she was the 12th caller and she did know the names of the three Groban songs from which the station had pulled brief, teasing clips.
So she celebrated the big 3-0 with Josh Groban. In a room at the Dunkin’ Donuts Center before the concert, she told him how she had listened to his music while she was in the hospital. He gave her a hug and a kiss. And during the concert, he called her up from her front-row seat for another hug and kiss.
As she left, people stopped her, and told her what a cool moment that was as she went up to the stage.
“It had me in tears,” she says.
So there. Kerri Letellier had one hell of a good 30th birthday. A true fan, a gracious star and, who knows, maybe something no one can really explain had something to do with it.
She’s still got a Josh Groban hangover, she says.
She’s happy. It can still happen.
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