Dear Editor:I sent the following to you in an email as well so as to include the photo in the article. My phone number is included here. I wasn’t quite sure which department to send this article to, but thought you could direct it appropriately if you feel it would be of interest to your readers. Perhaps even ‘Letters to the Editor’. There were a couple of writeups on the topic in our local paper, (The Saint John Times Globe,) but I thought this one, which appeared in the Daily Gleaner, particularly touching. There have been so many stories coming out of the tragedy of September 11th. Lives have been touched and changed in far places, and while Saint John is not so far from New York, in neither distance nor spirit, I thought it might provide some comfort to people to know that this talented young man, and people everywhere are doing their bit to help the victims and their families. I thank you for your time and consideration. Joan Hall Hoveyhttp://www.joanhallhovey.com
The Daily Gleaner
WEEKEND
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Saturday, September 29, 2001
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CONCERT FOR TRADE CENTER VICTIMS
Singer to honour roommate
By Heather McLaughlin, The Daily Gleaner Every morning 22-year-old Jordan Zed walks by the closed bedroom door of roommate Thomas Pedicini knowing he will never again see the 30-year-old Cantor Fitzgerald brokerage employee who died in the Sept. 11 World Trade Center terrorist attacks.
Zed, a Saint John native who moved to New York a year ago next month to break into a singer-songwriter career, said it’s still eerily strange not to see his friend stroll in the door, his life frozen in time only by the last material things of the world he touched.
“Everything you see reminds you of him. The TV is his. Everywhere you go, there are things of his. Everywhere.”
“His room is exactly the way it was on Tuesday morning and the door is closed,” Zed said.
When zed searched the bedroom for a tape recording of Pedicini singing and playing the guitar to give to Pedicini’s parents, the bit of muss in the bedroom told him Pedicini was in a hurry to leave the Queen’s apartment which they shared with a third roommate, to catch the train for the half-hour ride to Times Square and then to the 104th floor of the Trade Center.
Zed said he won’t forget the Sept. 11 morning when their roommate Fred Kuang, who works for an LanChile airline, called from his office in midtown Manhattan and told Zed to turn on the television.
“You’re just not going to believe what you’ll see,” Zed recalled the conversation.
As he watched the replays of the United Airlines jet plunging into the World Trade Center, Zed tried to call Pedicini on his cell phone, then on his work line.
All the circuits were busy.
He couldn’t even get Pedicini’s voice mail.
He never heard his voice again. The first frantic telephone call later that day – Pedicini’s mother Nancy from Long Island, NY – resonated with shock and panic.
“Have you heard from my boy?” Zed said she asked.
www.jordanzed.com
submitted photo BIG HEART: Jordan Zed put up a poster of his friend in Union Square in New York recently. “The sound in her voice will stay with me for the rest of my life,” he added.As the day wore on, Pedicini didn’t come home.
Nor did his brother-in-law, Mark Colaio, the father of two elementary school-aged children.
The two men were among the 700 Cantor Fitzgerald employees – the firm’s entire New York office staff – who died that day.
“It was just shock the first day. You thought it was some sick kind of Hollywood movie.
“You were waiting to wake up from it,” Zed remembered.
Pedicini’s friends called the apartment. Pedicini’s parents and his three sisters called all the emergency numbers. Zed did too.
“Nothing. They haven’t found a body. It’s been a horrible experience for the family and his friends.
Even now they don’t have closure. They were a very close family. They always went out together…I feel, at least in one way, that the family has each other.”
Zed tried to console. Tried to find out if there was the faintest hope anyone survived. Gave blood.
But now he’s going to use his musical talent in a tribute called “Friends Never Forgotten” at Saint John’s Imperial Theatre Friday, Nov. 2 and Nov. 3. The show, which iMagicTV is helping to organize, will aid the New York State World Trade Center Relief fund. The shows are nightly at 8 p.m. Tickets are available from the theatre at a cost of $26.50 each.
Zed, who studied at the University of Toronto’s faculty of music and then at Berklee College of Music in Boston, Mass., where he studied song writing, voice and performance, struck out for New York last year where most of his friends felt the opportunities were best.
Zed, who’s musical influences range from Sting to Chopin, writes in a pop music style. His melody-driven style earned him last year’s John Lennon songwriting Scholarship and the Chico Berardi StarTrack Songwriting Scholarship in 1999.
When he landed in the Big Apple, Zed used an Internet message board to find a place to live and linked up with Pedicini.
“I didn’t know anybody in New York and it’s a big city. I looked at the apartment. Met Tom. Right away, he helped to make me feel comfortable.”
Although Pedicini was older, focused on building his career and had a lot of friends in the financial industry, Zed said he enjoyed music and expressed support for Zed’s career goals.
As Zed performed at clubs and benefits around New York, Pedicini would sometimes stop in to watch his roommate perform.
“I always found him really refreshing,” Zed said. “He would sit down and talk about where he saw himself in five years. He had so many plans personally and professionally and he was a very hard worker. He was a good guy. He had goals and dreams like every one of us.”
Zed, who has been doing a lot of writing over the past year, expanding his catalogue and landing a chance to record a few tracks with Mariah Carey’s producer Mike Mason, believes music is part of helping.
“For me, music can be used as a vehicle to bring people together. This is the time more than ever to say something with music that resonates with people. I’ve always turned to music as a way of healing, my form of therapy,” Zed explained. “We have to try to find a way to live normally, to get some semblance of day to day routine back.”
Resuming normal life comes with a caveat to Zed. The terrorist attacks and his friend’s death have altered his perspective.
When something like this happens, a tragedy of this magnitude and this many lives lost and affected, all the problems we have seem insignificant in light of this,” Zed said. “We focus and realize that every single day is so important. It really brings that home.” People far away from New York, even in his boyhood home of Saint John, feel and are touched by the tragic loss of life.
Somehow as difficult as it is, we have to find something positive, a greater awareness of each other and of the time we have.”
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Concert came together fast
By Heather McLaughlin
The Daily Gleaner IMagicTV president and chief officer Marcel Lebrun and his Saint John workforce were transfixed in horror as the 100 televisions in their offices in the Port City captured every second of the New York World Trade Center attacks on Sept. 11.
As the round-the-clock coverage continued, Lebrun was struck when the CEO of a small New York brokerage firm Cantor Fitzgerald wept on air as he talked about how 700 of his 1,000 employees in one of the twin towers – his entire New York staff – were killed as suicidal terrorists plunged commercial jets into each of the towers.
The company executive said he would have been killed along with ev
eryone else had he not been late for work because he wanted to take his son to his first day of kindergarten. But he vowed to do what he could to restart the business to provide for the families left without bread-winners.
“It really touched him, CEO to CEO,” senior iMagicTV director David Alston said of Lebrun’s reaction.
Over the weekend, Lebrun had everyone thinking about how to help Cantor Fitzgerald families.
Alston happened to be reading the Saint John newspaper when he read about a Saint John musician named Jordan Zed who was living in New York and had lost his roommate – a Cantor Fitzgerald worker – in the terrorist attack.
“It really affected him personally because Thomas Pedicini was missing,” Alston said Friday.
Zed said in the article he wanted to do more than offer personal comfort to the family.
“We put two and two together. Jordan did a concert last year in Saint John. It sold out. Saint John loves his music,” Alston said.
Alston e-mailed Zed, offered up the concept of hosting two benefit concerts and the rest is history.
“It’s a way to give back. And it’s a way for New Brunswickers to go to an event and remember what happened and at the same time raise money,” Alston said.
IMagicTV is trying to round up a few additional sponsors to cover off concert expenses so that the maximum amoung of funds can go to the Nov. 2-3 event to be held at Saint John Imperial’s Theatre.
Zed will be joined by special guest, Chloe, an up and coming RCA recording artist. The United States pop artist has been likened to a young Celine Dion and has already been welcomed to the white House for a presidential concert.
The concert has been dubbed Friends Never Forgotten.
Tickets are available from the theatre for $26.50. The performances are at 8 p.m. each of the two evenings. Proceeds go to the newly established New York State World Trade Center Relief Fund.
IMagicTV provides software products and related services that enable telephone companies and other service providers to deliver multichannel digital television and interactive media services to their subscribers over a broadband network infrastructure.
Incorporated in 1997, the firm is Saint John based, but has offices in the U.K., Asia and throughout the United States.
http://www.joanhallhovey.com506-847-3444
