Nicholas Cushman of West Windsor competed in the Showstopper Dance Competition held at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania on May 9 — and won a gold first place trophy and medal in the seven-year old solo jazz division and also a silver medal in the overall recreational division with his performance to the Beach Boy’s “Surfin Safari.” Dancing since he was three, he studies at the Dance Corner. He is a second grade student at Dutch Neck School.##M:[more]##
His parents, Kimberly and Michael Cushman, who met in the West Windsor-Plainsboro High School (now South) Marching Band, are not surprised about his love of music since they both come from a musical background. Michael, a trombone player, qualified for All State and Governor’s School, and graduated in 1985. Kimberly Bojarski, an All State winner for marimba and percussion, also plays the piano. She graduated in 1988. Both sing in the choir at St. David the King Church.
According to his mother, Nicholas is a Beatles fanatic, enjoys seeing the Mahoney Brothers and Strawberry Fields, both Beatles cover bands, and plans to enter the song and dance division next year. He sings in the choir and performed in the Christmas pageant at St. David the King Church in West Windsor.
His mother also danced in the Showstopper Dance Competition for many years and won first each time for her tap dancing. “Nicholas would see my many trophies and ask how he could get one,” she says. “I told him lots of hard work and practice. Well, he did it and there is no stopping him now.”
“Both of us went through the WW-P school system and were heavily involved in the music program in high school with concert, marching, jazz, pit, and orchestra,” she says. Their teachers, Anthony Pappalardo and Jean Mauro, are still teaching at High School South.
Her mother, Marilyn Bojarski, who organized the school’s talent show in the 1970s and ‘80s, was also a piano and vocal teacher in West Windsor up until 2006, when she died of pancreatic cancer. She was also in the choir at St. David The King Parish. “You would find her visiting the local nursing homes with her students performing for the residents. Some of her students dedicated a brick in her name located at Dutch Neck School. It says, “In loving memory of Mrs. B, An Angel of Music.”
“Grandmom Bojarski was definitely an influence in Nicholas’s love of music,” Kimberly says. “She would hold him on her lap and sing to him.”
