“We’ve all gone through a lot these last few years,” Antsy says, “Isolation and loss has changed us. And while it’s going to be especially difficult for me to get out on the road again, I see the need for the good mojo our special community gives to people – and this time, I may be in need of it most.”

In September of 2022, Antsy said goodbye to the love of his life, Deana Lynn, after 18 long months of caregiving following her cancer diagnosis. They had made it though the pandemic together, had begun to plan tour dates and travel that would finally take them out of isolation and back to the arms of the tribe they loved so much, the musicians and friends who awaited them on the road. It was not to be. Antsy, once again cancelled the tour dates he and Deana Lynn had painstakingly rescheduled, to see her through the awful ordeal no one should ever have to go through alone.

The friends of Antsy’s music (more than 20 albums to date) call themselves Flamingoheads, after the iconic plastic figurines that have adorned trailer park lawns for decades. They are a caring bunch of people who call themselves cousins, per Antsy’s wishes on social media to not only “friend” him, but “cousin” him, as this all seems too much like family to use any other word. “I am confident that I have more cousins than anyone on Facebook,” Antsy recalls with a smile, “Last count it was in the hundreds. That’s a big family. I’m a lucky man.”

The backdrop for these characters and stories is the semi-fictional mobile home community called Pine View Heights. It was designed after his own upbringing in several Central Ohio trailer parks where he lived with a blue collar family, raised by a truck-driving father and an Avon-selling, stay-at-home Mom. “You can’t make this stuff up,” Antsy recalls, “It’s like the Blues. You gotta live it.”

And live it, he does, honoring those who mentored him with grace and dignity, albeit exposing the foibles and occasional scar tissue that makes us all unique and endearing.