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'Big bald guy' singing a happier song

Entertainer Joe Grauso has battled back from a recurrence of cancer and is performing again with full voice.

By JENNIFER STEWART
Published December 31, 2005

NEW PORT RICHEY - For months, cancer in his left lung had reduced Joe Grauso's singing voice by about 80 percent.

It didn't stop the entertainer known as "that big bald guy" from doing gigs, though. And during the middle of singing a song July 15 at a Curlew Hills Memory Gardens company party, Grauso's voice came back in full.

The crowd at Dunedin Country Club for the performance that night had no idea that he essentially had lost it - or that it had returned.

"I did not know he had cancer. He had a big smile on his face," said partygoer Ann Kilzer, vice president of the Curlew Hills based in Palm Harbor.

The guests might not have noticed, but Grauso and his wife certainly did.

"Was that your voice?" Marge Grauso asked him immediately after the song.

"That was my voice," Joe replied.

The Times wrote about him in April, when the 53-year-old musician was battling a recurrence of cancer that had first been discovered six years earlier when he and his wife lived in Las Vegas.

Marge gave her husband, who's 6 feet 4, 264 pounds, his professional name when they moved to west Pasco a few years ago.

In Las Vegas, a radical mastectomy was performed on Joe's right breast to remove the cancer. Less than 1 percent of all breast cancer cases occur in men.

The recurrence in March was three tumors in his left lung. When it was found, Marge, who also is Joe's manager, scrambled to cancel 30 of his upcoming gigs.

The Grauso's uncertain future included eight rounds of chemotherapy at $6,000 each, Marge said. And the couple are uninsured.

The chemotherapy was so tough on Joe that Marge asked after the sixth treatment whether a chest X-ray could be done to make sure the last two rounds were necessary.

They were, the couple was told.

Those days in April and May were their darkest. "We didn't go anywhere but to chemo," Marge recalled Thursday. "We laid low."

And when he couldn't sleep, which he said was every night during the treatments, Joe started to make things. The results, wooden pink flamingos and yellow ducks, now line the walkway to the couple's Park Lake Estates Home in New Port Richey. "I was at Lowe's so much during that time... they thought I was "Mr. Tool Time' Tim Allen or something," Joe said.

Then, about a month ago, Florida Cancer Institute oncologist Gerald Robbins delivered some good news to the Grausos. The tumors in Joe's lung had shrunk by at least half and they hadn't shown any new growth in over six months. "He's had a great response (to treatment)," Dr. Robbins said. "He is a cancer survivor right now."

Said Joe: "(Dr. Robbins), of course, thought the chemo did it, and I know it was the prayers. Somewhere in the middle is probably the right answer."

Grauso continues to be monitored, and he takes two doses of Tamoxifen, a breast cancer drug, every day. "I'm not naive enough to think that this Tamoxifen will keep this in check forever."

For now, though, the man who once wanted to be a star and the next song people heard on the radio is enjoying his four dogs, music, racquetball and his wife's cooking. "I'm extremely happy with my life right now," Grauso said.

On the financial front, the Grausos successfully applied for drug companies' programs that provide chemo drugs and related prescriptions, like antinausea medications, to uninsured patients at no charge.

Money for his continuous medical expenses, like blood work and chest X-rays, has come from the $11,500 raised last year at local benefits, the turnouts for which overwhelmed Joe. About 450 people showed up, for instance, at the April fundraiser held at the Elks Lodge 2284 in New Port Richey, where Joe is a member. "When I got there, he said, all I could do was sit in the car and cry."

Joe is back at full speed performing, with about 30 gigs lined up through the first week of March. And that's just the way he wants it.

Tonight, he'll play at a New Year's Eve party at the Fraternal Orders of Eagles Lodge 3153.

Rumors about Joe's condition had spread all over the country when seasonal residents traveled back up north shortly after his cancer was reported in the spring.

One woman, Marge said, approached Joe and said, "Oh my gosh, I heard in Michigan that you had died."

"No, I'm here," Joe said, smiling. "Believe me, I'm here."

The Eagles Lodge 3153 is at 5446 Leisure Lane in New Port Richey. Tickets to the New Year's Eve dinner and dance are $45. Call (727) 847-1090.

Jennifer Stewart can be reached in west Pasco at 869-6231. Her e-mail address is jstewart@sptimes.com

[Last modified December 31, 2005, 00:47:16]