Tonight the old Mott gym will be filled with music played to the sound people make when they swallow a lump in their throat.

It's the first of two performances of the community's annual and much-loved Cafe Concert, but it's the last for the music man who's made it happen for this and 31 years before.

Mark Suelzle, a teacher like few others, is retiring.

The Cafe Concert is an annual pull-out-the-stops musical variety show by Mott (and now Regent) High School kids who face such stiff competition for the stage, they have to audition for a solo spot.

Tickets sell out within hours of going on sale, but there might be a few left for tonight's 7:30 show.

These are no lame, reluctant music students, not by a long stretch.

They are the latest in a long music tradition that's generated thousands of music awards for individuals, groups, bands, choirs in Suelzle's tenure and before. And boys, too, twice as many boys as girls in this particular mix and they're uninhibited boys, willing to actually sing, he said.

"Music is what they remember about Mott," says superintendent Myron Schweitzer of other school officials around the state.

Suelzle's final Cafe Concert will be attended by his own high school music teacher, Bruce Schwartz of Watford City, a Mott alumni who in his own day was a student of Urben Gratz, of Mott, who started the Cafe Concert 46 years ago.

Tonight and Saturday's shows will begin like they always have. The house lights will go dark and the jazz band will swing in to the old standard, "I Could Have Danced All Night."

Suelzle said he guards that aging sheet music like gold because it's not available anymore. Lose the saxophone part and it's lost forever, he said.

Suelzle hopes the Cafe Concert tradition is not lost after he leaves for a new life adventure still unknown to him.

"I know they haven't hired a new teacher, but it'll be his or her decision," he said.

Over the years, Suelzle has had to do more with less. There were 224 high school kids when he started back in 1977. Today there are 79, but of those, about 60 are in band and choir.

He's planning a few surprises and will take the stage tonight and Saturday, something he's never done before.

It wouldn't be fair to spoil it, but one "fiery" surprise will reveal a talent that only very few people might know he has.

He already knows his final concert will be one he never forgets.

He's told himself, "If I cry, it's OK."

There'll be more than one pair of wet eyes in the house as the community says "goodbye" to a man who's devoted his life to helping kids find the music inside themselves and knocks himself out to put it on stage every spring.

"We'll never replace him; there'll never be another Mr. Suelzle," said Schweitzer.

(Reach reporter Lauren Donovan at 701-748-5511 or lauren@westriv.com)