Canandaigua man a many-faceted character

It's one thing to memorize a joke, or maybe a poem or two. Meet someone who has memorized an entire Dickens novella. Kim Tenreiro — inventor, compounding pharmacist, computer whiz, Geva Theatre board member and actor — took on that task to support good causes.

For the past five years, Tenreiro has portrayed Scrooge, Bob Cratchit, Tiny Tim and every other character in a one-man performance of A Christmas Carol. He has done it in conference rooms, on stages, even in the basement of the Ontario County Historical Society. Audiences have been as small as five and as large as 150. It doesn't matter, because he does it for charity. Any group can decide on their designated cause as well as the price of the ticket. Tenreiro doesn't charge for his performances.

Tenreiro says he created his show "as a challenge," after seeing Patrick Stewart perform A Christmas Carol on Broadway. "The show just blew me away," he says. For years, around Thanksgiving, Tenreiro would listen to the CD of the show.

Most people would be content with that tradition. But Tenreiro had grander plans.

"Dickens himself performed this later in his career," he says. "It's a short book, 50 to 60 pages, maybe 25,000 words. I knocked it down to 15,000 and learned 150 words a night over six months."

In a one-man show like this one, the audience becomes a key element. Tenreiro doesn't use complicated sets or costumes, and when he's portraying three or four characters at a time, audience members need to use their imaginations.

"The magic isn't on the stage," Tenreiro says. "It's in between the ears of the audience. You see the story in your mind's eye."

The show would be a surprise to people who know him only from his science career. Tenreiro attended St. John's University's five-year pharmacy program. But before, as a high school student living in Queens, he performed in plays and sang at The Garden School, the small, private high school he attended.

Computers were also a longtime interest. In the early 1980s, living in the New York City area, Tenreiro worked on clinical software packages for hospitals and nursing homes. At the same time, he met the woman he calls "the yin to my yang." He and Janet have been married 27 years.

By 1994, Tenreiro was ready to run his own business. The Tenreiros traveled here to look at a pharmacy for sale, and they felt a quick connection with the community.

"When we moved from Long Island back in 1994, Canandaigua felt like home almost immediately," Janet Tenreiro remembers. "I never looked back — except to breathe a sigh of relief that we didn't have to drive on the Long Island Expressway anymore."

Kim Tenreiro established The Pharmacy Shoppe and The Animal Pharmacy, one of the few compounding animal pharmacies in the nation, working with vets and zoos.

Compounding involves customizing medications in unique dosage forms, whether it's for a person with swallowing difficulties or an orangutan who needs a precise amount of medication disguised in something palatable, like a banana-flavored fruit chewy.

"It solves specific problems, in medicating people or animals," Tenreiro says.

Tenreiro himself has compound hobbies. His self-described "quirky" sense of humor led him to create a humor website, WhosHe.com.

He joined the Finger Lakes Chorale and, this past summer, the Tenreiros toured Croatia, Slovenia and Italy with the Oneida Area Civic Chorale.

He also serves as a vice president on the board of Geva Theatre Center and chairs its Education & Curtain Call committee. Last year, the committee gave away 40,000 free tickets to students so they could see performances and plays at Geva, Tenreiro says.

In 2012, the couple sold their pharmacies — but you can hardly call it retirement. "I'm reinventing myself as a computer programmer-pharmacist," says Tenreiro. He's working with a French firm that has licensed seven of his formulas.

And he continues to work on getting out the true meaning of A Christmas Carol. His hope is to inspire people to extend their own acts of charity — not just in this season of giving, but throughout the year.

Diehl is a Canandaigua-based freelance writer.