WhenStacey Habertalks about her life, it sounds like three or four full-time careers running in parallel. She’s amusic lawyer,publisher,Chief Legal Officerto multiple companies, theatre-maker, formerNew York City judge, sample-clearance pioneer, and Fringe regular. At64, instead of slowing down, she’s premiering a new show at theEdinburgh Fringe:Cereal Entrepreneur.
Photographer Adam Hammudeh at Framed Duck Studios
On paper, it’s a comedy about an Alzheimer’s patient who becomes a breakfast cereal mogul. In practice, it’s a deeply personal piece drawn from Stacey’s own family history, her decades in the music industry, and a lifelong obsession with balancing creativity and business.
“Doing the Fringe every year is my vacation,” she says. “I don’t go on holiday. If I travel, it’s always for work. The Fringe is work too, but it’s the kind of enjoyable work I need in order to function.”
The Story
The title came from a throwaway line that wouldn’t leave her alone.
“I have a cousin from Boston who comes and visits about once a year,” Stacey explains. “He said he’d retired, and I asked, ‘What exactly did you retire from?’ He said, ‘I guess you would say I was a serial entrepreneur.’”
The phrase burrowed into her brain. Serial entrepreneur. Cereal entrepreneur. It collided with something far darker and closer to home: her mother’searly-onset Alzheimer’s, which began at50and lasted21 years.
From there, a fictional version of her mother was born.
InCereal Entrepreneur, produced byThe Music Firmin association withQueensboro Bridge Productions, a mother with Alzheimer’s overhears her son-in-law lament being “a serial entrepreneur” rather than the artist he wants to be. Determined to help, she decides to lighten his load by launching her own range of breakfast cereals. She doesn’t stop there; she invents whole brands, creates advertising and artwork, and even composes jingles for her creations. Her daughter and son-in-law are torn between hilarity and heartbreak, working hard to keep her dignity intact while quietly managing the chaos at home.
“Her daughter and son-in-law must keep their laughter hidden and her ramblings confined to the home,” the press notes explain. “Always supportive and loving, it takes a lot of skill to allow Mom to keep her dignity and her quality of life no matter how bizarre that might be.”
It’s funny and absurd at times, but it is rooted in the uncomfortable reality of caring for someone whose mind is slowly fracturing.
A Personal Reckoning with Alzheimer’s
For Stacey, the show is a way of metabolising a lifetime of questions that began with her mother’s diagnosis.
“My mom’s Alzheimer’s presented when she was 50,” she writes in the show text. “Early onset tied to childhood malnutrition. How is that even a thing? That was the first of a million questions and things that didn’t make sense.”
Her father and sister cared for her mother at home throughout the entire illness, navigating anger, confusion, sadness, depression, delusion and accusations on a daily basis. All of that, Stacey says, left almost no space for them to process their own grief and loss.
Doctors gave her mother three to five years. She lived more than two decades. That longevity was largely down to Stacey’s father, who kept her at home and treated her with relentless dignity.
“She never had a bed sore until the 21st year when she had pneumonia and had to go into hospital,” Stacey recalls. “So the show is part tribute to my dad, part tribute to my cousin, but mostly it’s for my friends.”
Many of Stacey’s peers are now dealing with parents and relatives with dementia. They don’t want to be lectured; they’re exhausted, frightened, and often too overwhelmed to seek help properly.
“They don’t want me to sit them down and give them a lecture, even though my experiences might help,” she says. “So this show is a gift: an hour away from caring, wrapped in laughter.”
Writing Fast
You might assume that turning this kind of material into comedy would be agonising, but Stacey saysCereal Entrepreneurwas the fastest thing she’s ever written.
“The stories were already there,” she says. “They’d been collecting in my head for years.”
The show, produced byThe Music Firmand now in itssixth season with C ARTS (C venues), carries Stacey’s fingerprints in every department. It is written and produced by her for The Music Firm, in association with Queensboro Bridge Productions, and directed by her as well. Onstage, she appears alongsideJack LeeandMaddy May Devine, while the visual identity is created with designerDavid Hofberg, who collaborates with her on the posters.
The “co-writers” she often talks about are not formal scriptwriters, but a constellation of family and friends whose stories and ideas are woven through the piece. At a wedding, she sat at a table with her close friend and long‑time business partnerDeborah Mannis‑Gardner, Deborah’s sister, and Deborah’s son, a bug specialist at the Smithsonian. Stacey told them about the show and simply said, “Help me think up the cereals.” Deborah’s son fed in entomological inspiration, which became the creepy‑crawly thread in the script. Deborah’s sister, a poet, helped shape one of the jingles. Stacey’s own sister contributed anecdotes about their mother from the years she moved home to help care for her.
“So the show is stitched together from all these people I love,” Stacey says. “Hopefully it gives them some credit and even some royalties one day too.”
The Music Lawyer Who Never Retires
Stacey’s creative work at the Fringe doesn’t exist in isolation. It runs alongside a ferociously busy legal and business life that would flatten most people.
“There have been catastrophic events in my life,” she says calmly. “They’ve all combined to show me I’m never going to retire. I can’t. I need to do everything I would have done in retirement now.”
Her mother, she explains, spent a lifetime saying, “Someday I’ll do this,” and “Someday I’ll do that,” only to see that “someday” swallowed by illness and healthcare costs.
“I’m living the retirement life beside the working life,” Stacey says. “The working life pays for the retirement, and the creative work. They go hand in hand and complement each other.”
Herneurodivergenceis central to how she manages the juggling act. She describes needing a constant balance between creative and business activity: when ideas come, she has to “brain‑dump” them immediately or she can’t function; when they don’t, the legal and business work flows more easily. Instead of fighting that rhythm, she has learned to ride it.
She is also fiercely selective about who she works with. Stacey is self‑employed by design, because she wants only to work with people she’d happily cook for or let sleep on her couch. If a potential client doesn’t come through someone she already trusts and cares about, she is unlikely to take them on. “I’ve earned the right to be picky,” she says.
From Record Labels to the Bench to Artist Champion
One of Stacey’s most striking stories is how she ended up as aNew York City judge. It came not from networking luncheons, but from getting a weekend waitressing job.
“I knew I was going to be fired for insubordination from the record company I worked for,” she says. “They were truly vile—deliberately cheating artists on royalties, not paying people because ‘they can’t afford to sue us.’ So I got a waitressing job at night and on weekends to prepare for the inevitable.”
One of her regular customers always had a whiskey sour waiting on the table before he sat down. He turned out to be a judge. They chatted, he recommended her to the mayor’s office, a letter arrived, she applied, and she was appointed.
“I’m good at going with the flow,” she shrugs. “I’m also very good at saying no now, which I never used to be. I fire clients all the time.”
Her boundaries are uncompromising. There are no drugs allowed in her world, and if she catches someone “eating a lie,” as she puts it, even a small one, the relationship ends. The domino effect of dishonesty, she believes, is too dangerous to risk. That ethical clarity runs deep into her work in themusic industry, especially aroundintellectual property,sampling, and nowAI.
When Music and Law Collide
Stacey and Deborah Mannis‑Gardner were part of the early crew that built the modern sample‑clearance system for rap and hip hop in the late 1980s and early 1990s. She has watched the industry evolve through sampling, through streaming, and now through AI, and she insists the legal fundamentals have not changed as much as people think.
“There will always be something new—technology, a genre,” she says. “We figure out how to license it properly. Then the majors buy it up and throw money at it. Then we figure out the next indie step.”
On AI, she is blunt. To her, it’s just another form of using someone else’s intellectual property, no different in principle from sampling: you get a licence and you share royalties.
The bigger problem, in her view, is that governments are more interested in attracting tech companies than in protecting creators. They hand out tax breaks and then, she argues, try to give platforms de facto “law breaks” by letting them operate as if copyright doesn’t quite apply. “They’re undermining their own legislation,” she says. “It’s insane.”
InCereal Entrepreneur, music and Alzheimer’s meet head‑on. People with dementia often retain song lyrics long after other memories fade, and Stacey wanted that to be part of the emotional fabric of the show. Initially she tried to license songs from her son, who records asSwimmingly. He refused and told her, half‑teasing and half‑serious, that there were tools available and she could do it herself.
He taught her to use an AI music platform. Stacey ring‑fenced the process: she wrote the lyrics, melodies and vocal lines, and used the tool simply as an advanced synthesiser and auto‑tuner. Even so, she imposed strict limits. Her label and publishing company will not release or register works created by AI, and only consider AI‑assisted material on a cautious, case‑by‑case basis. The tracks made forCereal Entrepreneurexist to serve the show, not as commercial product.
“I’m not an AI abuser,” she says. “I’m not an IP abuser. I champion artists every day.”
When a Fringe reviewer refused to cover the show because the poster artist had used AI tools in the design process, Stacey didn’t pick a fight. She explained her record and principles, then carried on sharing and supporting the reviewer’s coverage of other shows anyway. “I want everyone at the Fringe to be successful,” she says. “If the Fringe dies, I lose my creative home.”
Puzzles, Protein and Presence
Given her family history, Stacey treats her own cognitive health as non‑negotiable. Her mornings begin with news and online puzzles, shared with her middle son as a simple check that she is awake, responsive and mentally present. She takes ginkgo biloba, coconut oil and turmeric, focuses on eating plenty of protein and staying active, echoing some of the approaches used with her mother but beginning decades earlier.
She also plays deliberately with brain plasticity. Some days she writes or draws with her non‑dominant hand, or fills in crossword answers backwards to force her mind to work differently. She chooses puzzles that are just beyond her current comfort level. There are days when she stares at a grid and realises she has “not a clue,” and steps away. The important thing, she says, is not to turn that into stress or self‑reproach.
She even volunteered for a clinical trial focused on her mother’s specific strain of Alzheimer’s and discovered she does not carry that gene. “If I get Alzheimer’s, it won’t be the same one she had,” she says. That knowledge gives her some room to focus on prevention, awareness and quality of life rather than living in constant fear.
The Edinburgh Experience
For younger creatives looking atCereal Entrepreneurand thinking, “I want to do what Stacey’s doing,” she offers a mix of encouragement and unvarnished financial realism. The Fringe, she points out, provides detailed checklists and guidance, but the real starting point is a stubborn desire to be there and an honest look at your budget.
Accommodation alone for a week can easily run to several thousand pounds. Venue hire will swallow several thousand more. If you are paying actors properly under Equity agreements, that adds another layer of cost. Stacey is frank about the numbers but still insists it is worth it if you plan and save over time.
Her other piece of advice is to never underestimate a solo show. If all your money has to go on housing and a room, she suggests putting it there and building a one‑person piece around what you can sustain. “The Fringe has so many terrible shows you genuinely can’t be worse,” she says with a grin. “You can’t get it wrong.”
Showing Up: Where and When
Cereal Entrepreneurruns atC ARTS | C aquilaon Johnston Terrace, by Edinburgh Castle, as part of Stacey’s sixth season withC ARTS (C venues), the company she describes as her “creative home.” It plays5–9 Augustat12:40pm. Tickets are available from the C ARTS box office atwww.CtheArts.comor +44 (0)131 581 5555, via direct booking atres.cthearts.com/event/34:5320/, or through the main Fringe box office atwww.edfringe.comor +44 (0)131 226 0000.
The show is written and produced by Stacey forThe Music Firm, in association withQueensboro Bridge Productions, directed by Stacey, and performed byJack Lee,Maddy May Devineand Stacey herself, with poster designs byDavid Hofberg and Stacey.
In the end,Cereal Entrepreneuris what happens when someone refuses to postpone their life to “someday,” and instead mixes comedy, law, trauma and cereal boxes into a single hour that asks how we keep people’s dignity intact when their memories unravel. Stacey’s answer, as always, is to work hard, laugh loudly, and never stop creating.
Listen to the full chat here: