Preparing for "Death Knocks" Bay High School, 1984
The first time I ever stepped onto a stage was my freshman year in high school (You Can't Take It With You by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart). My character appeared at the very end of the first scene. I remember the moment. We’d rehearsed, I had my lines cold, very prepared, familiar with the entire ensemble – making a mistake was not a concern, I hadn’t even thought of saying or doing anything wrong, that’s how well-rehearsed we were.
And yet, just before I moved from backstage, unseen, hidden behind a fake door, to onstage, into the action, under the light, entirely visible to the audience, I was struck with one thought, shockingly vivid to me, even to this day:
“Who said you had the right to do this?”
Who said that? What voice was it? Was that my mother’s voice, she who I had embarrassed so many times with my pranks and shenanigans? Why do you have to attract attention to yourself in this way?
Maurice Adams, Brian Pedaci "The Vampyres" Dobama's Night Kitchen, 1997
Two years later, when I directed a short scene for an evening of one acts (Death Knocksby Woody Allen) I heard the same voice, right before I entered through an open window that was part of the set, only the voice in my head was a little louder. Because this time I was not merely a participant, I choice this piece. I was responsible for it happening.
When I drew a somewhat controversial comic strip for the university newspaper (if you believe being inscrutable as controversial) my college roommate asked the same question, suggesting as my mother would have; you could just draw these things and put them on the wall of our dorm, why do you have to put them out into the world?
Once more, when I was twenty-eight, this time sitting in the audience, as the lights came down and the music came up on opening night of my first full-length play (The Vampyres). I’d been working on the script for over two years, all my friends were involved in the production; directing, acting, designing the set, the mural, the costume, the lights, the sound – Oh! The sound!
We had a full house, everyone was very excited, and in the darkness, before the protagonist spoke his first word, I heard a voice say, “Who said you had the right to do this?”
"I Hate This (a play without the baby)" Staged Reading Dobama Theatre, 2002
Well, obviously, I did. I told myself that.
My wife thinks it is strange that I would even think this; after all, who has the "right" to do anything? And what entity provides that right? God? Society? My mother?
I do not always feel this way. Call it Imposter Syndrome if you like. But usually I rise above it. What is the difference, though? Confidence, I imagine. In myself, in the work. When I performed my first monodrama (I Hate This) I didn’t think, “Who said I had the right to do this?” No, I thought, I have a story to tell, and these folks came here to hear me tell it.
And it’s that last part, that people came here to see this, and that they are counting on me, and on you, baby, to do our best.
I applied to two schools. One accepted me. And so I matriculated into the Ohio University School of Theatre. I had no idea the school was in flux at that time. A sudden transition of leadership. I wasn’t even asked to audition.
Why did I want to study theater? Why wasn’t I an English major? Because acting was play and writing was work. There was an instant gratification in doing a play, and none for writing – I did not see how writing could get me attention, at least not positive attention (that is a story for another day) and attention had always been what I craved.
I am a 57 year-old man who keeps a blog. Of course I crave attention.
Erin Cameron, Steven Pack "Living Together" by Alan Ayckbourn Bay High School, 1986
I tried my hand at directing a two-act play (Living Together by Alan Ayckbourn) my senior year in high school. I had no idea what I was doing. Tell a bunch of my friends to move about on stage and there would be a play. No thought about costumes, or a set – I knew there were odd furniture pieces stored backstage, we’d use those – and light? To me, light was the invisible art. Surely, you just turn them on at the beginning and fade them out at the end.
I wasn’t just inexperienced with design, I was ignorant of design. I had never noticed it. It did not exist.
And that was who I was and how I started my undergraduate theater experience. I knew nothing. I would soon be trying everything.
My brother tells a story; fifty years ago, on November 9 (also a Sunday) it was unseasonably warm, so warm that he recalls that mother took me to the beach. I was seven, this was an unremarkable occasion for me, but he was fourteen and would remember how the temperature plummeted the next day, and how soon he and the nation would be rapt by the haunting mystery of the disappearance of the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald.
Last night, we invited a small ensemble of friends to have an informal, private reading of the play Ten November by Steven Dietz, with song lyrics by Eric Peltoniemi. Commissioned by the Actors Theatre of St. Paul, the play premiered at Wisdom Bridge Theatre in Chicago in 1987. It is a fast-paced, harrowing tale of the disaster and its aftermath, and also an examination of how, as Blue Öyster Cult put it, “History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of men.”
My desire was to invite a number of friends to gather around a fire in the backyard, to spin this yarn on a cool, fall evening, but the weather turned, as weather will, and we seventeen crammed into our beloved, tiny house. An unrehearsed ensemble, reading for ourselves, to mark this historic occasion. Five of us were alive when the Fitzgerald went down. It was an education for most. Folks familiar with the Lightfoot song – and this is a common refrain, which I have heard many times before – often don’t even know it’s a true story, or even that it happened during the twentieth century – let alone the late twentieth century.
Fifty years is a long time for a human. It’s not a long time for history.
Sarah Blubaugh and Scott Hanna interpreted the lyrics, which really elevated the experience, the assembled rewarded them with snaps after each melody as I pressed forward with the stage directions. Everyone who attended was provided a speaking role, it was a marvelous and varied chorus of voices.
It is a script that weaves together a variety of tales to provide context to the mystery. The fact that it was written before we had even visited the ship at the bottom of Lake Superior, before the bell was recovered in 1995, the site designated a grave site, not to be disturbed, actually serves the work. It illustrates the confusion and the frustrating search for solutions in the aftermath of tragedy which are often not to be found.
My grandfather was a merchant marine, and before he settled down to raise children, he piloted freighters like the Fitzgerald, though none as large. One of my recent discoveries in the effects I kept from my parent’s home was the old man’s personal logbook. An illustration he drew of the Steamship Robert Fulton was on display during the reading. Twenty-nine men died in a sudden storm on the Great Lakes on an evening fifty years ago, any man of them like my grandfather.
As the assembled departed last evening, the rain had turned to snow. Not exactly the blizzard we were promised. Sometimes, nature is kind, or so we perceive her to be.
Last week I was running the track at the Rec Center, and a song came on that I knew but I could not place from where. A bombastic anthem of nostalgia and regret with an all-encompassing theme of acceptance.
A quick search reminded me that this song, It’s Not Over (‘Til It’s Over and Done) by Bleu McAuley was the song that played over the closing credits of the Netflix series Sandman, based on the comics series of the same name.
When I was a teenager, I yearned for something which was not yet possible; that a TV show or movie might be successfully adapted from the genre materials that I loved so dear. Not just comics, but also books like Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. When such attempts were made they suffered from a lack of technology and funding (see the BBC’s TV series for HHGTTG) or the inability to transfer what was essential about the material to the project (see Howard the Duck).
As I was never a DC fan, I had no strong emotional ties to either Superman or Batman, so while those movies (1978 and 1989, respectively) were important, to me they were only weigh stations to something that mattered. When X-Men (2000) was released I was a giddy 32 year old and mostly satisfied.
Sandman was an epic, 75-issue fantasy series which focused on the personification of dreams, sometimes called the Sandman – but not really, he was more often called Morpheus or often just Dream, and his primary function was managing that place we all go when we fall asleep.
I loved this comic because it was literate, transgressive, and Goth – Goth in that it was dark and moody and brooding and romantic. It also owes a lot of its imagery to familiar musical acts; Dream appears like Peter Murphy or Trent Reznor, Lucifer like Bowie. Word has it Delirium was modeled after Tori Amos, and Desire, of course, looks like the cover of Duran Duran’s album Rio(Patrick Nagel, RIP). My ex-wife Diana introduced me to the book, which started publication in 1988, and we read them issue by issue. Later, I bought the bound reprint books.
The other night I asked my wife Toni why Sandman has been so important to her (yes, I married two women who love Sandman, quelle surprise) and she reflected to me how expansive it is, and immersive. When she thinks of it, she doesn’t see the panels, the specific artwork, she sees worlds.
When it was announced in 2019 that Sandman would be a series on Netflix, I was excited about that. In the past, such announcements came with a certain amount of dread, like the feel you get every time they announce a new Fantastic Four movie. I love the IP, they are going to fuck it up. The thing about comics, for example, is that they are episodic, and most superhero movies prior to The Avengers (2012) would spend half the movie on the origin story. Even when there was a reboot, they would tell the origin story again.
Then there is the idea of cramming years of potential narrative into one two hour feature. It loses nuance, even when it looks spectacular. There will be nothing unique or interesting. And then there is casting. There were plans for a potential Sandman film in the early 90s that was to star Arnold Schwarzenegger.
But mostly, it is the adaptation of one thing into another thing. Comics are one particular thing, and movies a total other. Comics are cheap and movies are expensive, so comics can do so much more because it is only ink on paper and relatively few are reading them, whereas movies are practical and have to make money.
Martin Freeman (Arthur), Sam Rockwell (Zaphod) "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (2005)
This is where Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (2005) failed. The source material is a science fiction satire, with the emphasis on satire, not science fiction. To wit; it is veddy British. In the original, a bunch of weird things would happen in the service of a dry, witty punchline, and the film kept the set-up but cut the punchline. The film gives us spectacular visuals and gags presented by writers and directors who did not understand or care why it was popular in the first place.
But now it is the 2020s and not only can you make almost anything look real, popular culture is so fragmented that the idea of a comic book with an enormous – and intergenerational – cult following being turned into not a single feature film but an anthology series makes total sense.
I will not describe the allegations here, except in how they relate to the subject at hand. Let us state what was and what is. Neil Gaiman was once a model figure for those who feel outside of the mainstream; he not merely wrote the works that made them feel seen – adult fantasy fiction like Sandman, and also children’s books like Coraline – but was a constant presence in public and on social media who defended the right for people to be different. His tweets were a protection against the trolling of J.K. Rowling.
At the same time, in his personal life, he was a serial abuser, a monster and a creep.
The second season of Sandman dropped this past July, with little notice or fanfare. I didn’t even discover that it had for a month after. The first season encompassed (more or less) the first twenty issues of a seventy-five issue series. They could have easily made three or even four seasons from the remaining fifty-five books, but chose to cram them all into this final, second series. Even the most lauded issue of Sandman, the World Fantasy Award winning story about Morpheus commissioning Shakespeare to write A Midsummer Night’s Dream is briefly shoehorned into a different episode. It is as though the folks at Netflix said, all right, let’s get this shitshow over with.
I chose to watch, even though I was conflicted about doing so. I mean, so many artists contributed to making this show a reality, that’s the thing about artistic collaboration. So I wanted to see it, I wanted to see them. But I was wondering how it would feel, knowing what we know. As it happened, I had my second bout of Covid in late summer, which was an opportune moment to binge the second season while in my own private delirium.
"It had been her own fault." Sandman #17: Calliope (1990) Pencils: Kelley Jones Inker: Malcolm Jones III
Knowing what we know, certain storylines pop with dread. To quote a meme, “Mister Police. You could have saved her. I gave you all the clues.” One, Calliope, is about Richard Madoc, a famous author with writer’s block who takes action to harbor the actual muse of epic poetry – essentially, he has trafficked her – to spur his creative output.
Dream arrives to free her from the author, something he does not actually have the power to do. The author must freely release her. But Morpheus can torture Madoc, and does so by flooding his mind with so many original ideas he goes nearly insane. When the writer announces Calliope is free, his torment ends, but he can no longer think of anything new or original.
Not arrested, not pursued by other supernatural entities, Madoc simply remains creatively empty, which we are free to assume is something Gaiman believes to be the worst punishment imaginable. (It isn’t.)
Witnessing the second season, released post-allegation, themes of remorse, regret, and atonement are pushed to the forefront. To be honest, they were always there in the text, but are so much more apparent now. Dream had committed an unforgivable act, and in the process of making it right was compelled to do something which (literally) brought the Furies down upon him.
In the end, all the chaos, pain, and anguish, the sum of a lifetime of poor decisions, are wiped away as the entity that was Dream is eliminated and replaced by someone new. End of story.
But reality is much more complicated. Morpheus apologized, repented, and took responsibility for his actions. To date, his creator has not.
As if the media hasn’t always been saturated by the overstated concerns of the Baby Boom generation, in the early 90s there was a talk show on WHK called The Fabulous Boomer Boys. Three guys, Stuart Fenton, Bruce Bogart and Bob Snyder, friends since childhood, had their own show to address issues which they felt had been overlooked.
It was called “the first radio show dedicated to the Baby Boomer generation” which was utter nonsense. Since 1946 absolutely everything that exists has been dedicated to the Baby Boomer generation.
However, they were pretty fun guys. Imagine Car Talk except with Cleveland accents and the topic was, well, themselves. Lots of camaraderie, self-effacing humor and laughing at their own jokes.
Just after we openedThe Taming of the Shrew, Guerrilla was invited to participate. Bruce Bogart met Beemer while she was working at Dillard’s at Westgate and asked about her Guerrilla pin. He was truly interested in our theater company, even more so when he learned that Boomers were often the focus of our abuse.
Bruce: Well we’re lucky this evening, we’ve got in our studio Torque —
Torque: Hi.
Bruce: — Tower —
Tower: Hello.
Bruce: — and Beemer —
Beemer: Hello.
Bruce: — of the Guerrilla Theater Company. These guys have a theater company — where is it located?
Torque: It’s located downtown, in funky up-and-coming Tremont — it’s right next to The Flats.
Bruce: And it’s a safe neighborhood, right?
Torque: Uh no.
Beemer: It’s getting there.
Bruce: It’s getting there, and one of the reasons it’s getting there is because of the Guerrilla Theater. What they do is, they have this show, and what Torque told me is that they poke fun at our generation with their theatrical productions.
Torque: That’s right.
Bruce: For those of you at home, these people are 24 years old, they’re not exactly Baby Boomers, and they have the audacity to poke fun at our generation.
Tower: Sometimes all you Boomer folks act as though we don’t have any brains at all. You use tactics like the “Just Say No” campaign. Rather than explaining a problem and how it might affect us, you just tell us not to do it. Political correctness is another example.
Torque: You come up with no solutions, just knee-jerk decisions and you want everyone to abide by the decision that you make.
Beemer: You know what you want the end product to be but you don’t want to take the time to reach it so you just think up a catch phrase like “Just Say No” and that’s supposed to take care of it.
Bob: Do you think there are any Baby Boomers like me who “live for today” instead of people like Stuart who like to plan their life?
Torque: Yes, I do, and I respect them, and most of them come to see Guerrilla Theater Company, which brings up another subject which is that we are currently putting up our production of "The Taming of the Shrew" and that runs every Friday and Saturday night sat 8 o’clock and Sundays at 3 o’clock.
Bruce: Okay, you guys come here, you put down my generation, you put down our basic listening audience, I wanna know what you guys would do to make this a better world.
Torque: You mean, as opposed to “making love, not war”?
Bruce: Whatever.
Bob: That slogan I like, forget the “just say no to drugs.”
Bruce: “Make love, not war,” that’s not your generation’s slogan.
Tower: No, our generation says “Make love, not divorce.”
(General groans from the Boomer Boys.)
Bob: That’s a touchy subject for our generation.
Bruce: But I’m not hearing any solutions, I’m hearing slogans from you, too.
Torque: That’s the point, instead of the quick solutions, like divorce, we’re talking about working things out, about working our problems out, not the sound bite kind of answers you get on radio, but going ahead and taking some responsibility.
Bob: Are you married?
Torque: Me? No.
Bob: Then how can you talk like that?
Tower: I’m married.
Stuart: Tower is married, he said before the show he’s been married for six months, and you call yourself a househusband, right?
Tower: Right.
Stuart: Your wife supports you, makes the money, you take care of the house — how long is that going to last?
Tower: How long is that going to last?
Bob: Househusband, isn’t that a Baby Boomer idea anyway?
Tower: Oh you wish.
Bob: Thanks to the Baby Boomers, Tower, someone like you can let their wife go out to work —
Tower: I don’t have to let her do anything, we have this wonderful relationship, it’s not what I give her permission to do.
Bruce: What does she do?
Tower: She’s a systems designer.
Bruce: What’s that in English?
Tower: She makes computer programs.
Bob: Computers, another thing the Boomers created.
Tower: Shyeah, but you don’t understand them.
Stuart: My turn, to talk about sex, with Beemer.
Torque: You want to talk about sex with Beemer?
Stuart: What about sex in your plays, do you talk about the Sexual Revolution?
Beemer: Do you mean gender issues?
Stuart: I mean about how Baby Boomers made sex free, and accessible to all people, and how it’s looked about differently now.
Beemer: You mean “Free Love” and “Expressing Yourself”?
Tower: Done that.
Stuart: Aren’t you glad the Baby Boomers opened that up for you?
Beemer: Yeah, but there’s a difference between free love and having a hundred million different partners and having free love with your own personal sexuality.
Torque: We’ve got diseases now, you gave us Free Love, thanks, now we’ve got all these things to worry about, we’re trying to figure out how to come up with one partner when all of our role models say hey, it’s okay to have as many partners as you want, there’s no need to be anything but promiscuous.
Stuart: Woo!
Bruce: You guys are really down on us!
Tower: We’re getting the big thumbs up from the slackers in the control booth.
Bruce: You people are fascinating to me because I see in you a lot of my thoughts twenty years ago when I looked at my father’s generation. And I wonder what makes you think that twenty years from now someone isn’t gonna laugh at you and say, you people think you have all the answers, you don’t.
Torque: I hope they do laugh at us.
Beemer: I think that’s the difference between our generations — you had the same thoughts that we do now, but we have the drive to carry them on as we grow and do the work, so that our children will be even more motivated to continue that.
Bruce: You think we didn’t have the same determination twenty years ago?
On the first leg of my flight to Portland last month, I had a window seat. On the aisle, a very chatty white woman, about my age. Between us, in the middle seat, a younger man, on his way to Kashmir. He was concerned he might miss his connection in Philly, a non-stop to Qatar.
The woman was fascinated by the idea of his globe-spanning journey, and had many, many questions. Where? Why? What? Where was he from? What is Kashmir? Isn’t that place dangerous? He was very patient, and generous. I felt for him.
The word “halal” was introduced into the conversation and she didn’t know that word, know what that was. This is where we are in America today, your average Midwestern white lady doesn’t know what halal means.
So, as a matter of course he was revealed to be Muslim, and she became even more fascinated! An outside observer might think this was a pleasant conversation, but in spite of my efforts to keep things banal. She wanted the history of the partition of Kashmir, of Pakistan and India, all the while making sure she reinforced her open-mindedness about things, while successfully cramming the Iraq and Afghan Wars into the conversation.
He was on his way to Kashmir to see his brother whose wife had recently suffered a stillbirth. The white woman asked more than once how the baby died, so soon before the due date. He said he didn’t really know. She suggested twice that the baby was probably strangled by the umbilical cord.
I thought he must have either planned this journey weeks or months ago, intending to play uncle to a happily expected child, or last-minute due to the tragedy, I didn’t ask. I told him I was glad he was going, his brother would be very happy to see him, and that I was very sorry for his loss.
As soon as it was convenient and appropriate, I put in my earbuds to watch a movie. I could no longer deal with this mostly one-sided conversation and wanted to duck about before she brought up 9/11, which in its way brings me to my most recent read, One Day, Everyone Will Have Been Against This by Omar El Akkad, a concise and scathing take-down of Western Liberalism, specifically in the face of the ongoing atrocities perpetuated daily by the state of Israel against the Palestinian people of Gaza.
I read this book last summer, sitting on a deck on the coast in Maine. I pulled it off the shelf from a bookstore in Damariscotta and bought it without knowing one thing about it. I didn’t know what others had to say about it, if it was any good, but I was fairly certain I knew what it was about, based on the image on the cover, and on the title. Based on that title alone, I bought this book.
Just this past weekend, our elder child and I were discussing reading and I mentioned El Akkad’s book. They said they should read that and I said, “I don’t think it was written for you, it was written for me.” And by that I meant my child, both of our children, know what the book has to say. It is a lecture (lecture n. an educational talk to an audience) for the Western Liberal about the Western Liberal, and it asks one question quite plainly and directly, “What do you stand for?” Because it is evident that when presented with the unnecessary and entirely avoidable pain, suffering, and death of children, the Liberal will do nothing.
I know this, I have known it for some time. It has been almost thirteen years since Sandy Hook. That we could face the horror of that day, and do nothing. If the children of Palestine knew how we responded to the slaughter of twenty small children and six of their minders, each of whom were our fellow citizens, with weak words and absolute impotence, they should not be surprised that we wouldn’t do a thing to help them. Care about your children? We don’t care about our own.
At this late date, it is apparent those who lead the Democratic Party believe it will be enough at the mid-terms to say, “We aren’t him.” Not even we aren’t them, the Republicans, it will just be about the guy. And they believe this is all it will take to win seats, and perhaps they may. But having run on nothing, they can keep on keeping on. Because to stand for something is a risk to power. Yes, it is said and I have repeated it, you cannot do anything if you aren’t in the room.
But then they never do anything. We never do anything. About Gaza. About guns. About rights. About justice. There are things we believe. But as a man said, "Belief without action is dead."
One month ago, Poochu’s Productions produced my play, I Hate This (A True Story), at the Alliance Française de Madras in Chennai, India. Directed by Denver Anthony Nicholas and performed by Karthik TMK (and also by Abinaya R, more on her in a moment) this was not the first time these two men have presented this play about my experiences with stillbirth.
Four years ago, Denver, Karthik and I had a few email conversations about their producing the play in Spring 2021. They asked for a number of perfectly reasonable changes. The production would be performed in English (once referred to as India’s "subsidiary official language") and take place in America, but there were certain passages which would not be understood, culturally. Also, some of the names were unusual – a woman named Toni, for example – and could those be changed.
Most significantly, in my opinion, they asked if the several characters who I would traditionally have performed myself be performed instead by another performer, a woman. When we adapted the play into an audio drama in 2005 – was that really twenty years ago? I digress – I felt it would be easier to understand if every character had their own voice. But I always thought of it as strictly a solo performance.
Abinaya R
But that’s me. Theater is nothing if not an expansive art form. I was intrigued. And why not? They know best how to present this play to their audience, and I don’t. For this most recent production they cast Abinaya R, with whom they had most recently worked with in a production of Doubt by John Patrick Shanley.
Part of the design concept for this production of I Hate This was to emphasize the idea that while Karthik is telling the story now, today, Abinaya represents the past. He wears colors, she is monochromatic, dressed in black, her face and hands made white and gray. He looks at her, she never sees him. I was struck by this upon her first reveal, as the mother on the phone. She appears in a pool of light, far upstage. She looks so small compared to him in that scene, almost as though she is in a thought bubble.
When Denver and Karthik first produced this work, I was asked if they could change the title. This title, I HATE THIS, is the original sin of this particular work, as far back as 2002 it was suggested to me that the phrase might present a barrier to attendance. I took the risk. They were right, but I do not regret my decision. The show needs a content advisory and I believe the title serves that purpose.
Karthik TMK
As they strove to return to live performance following the first wave of COVID-19 infections, Denver felt that the original title would alienate audiences, and we agreed upon the much more digestible title What Happened. In the play that is asked as a question, as presented here it is simply a statement. This is what happened. For this new production, they decided it was now acceptable to use the original title, with the subtitle "a true story."
I have my own reasons for having written this piece, and why I keep returning to it. I am grateful to Playhouse Square and University Hospitals for producing the film (starring James Alexander Rankin) which continues to be used as an educational tool and an instrument of comfort for the bereaved. However, those few times (so far) that companies or individuals have inquired about producing the piece independently, I am always deeply curious as to their interest, or intentions.
Abinaya R
For Karthik, it is the opportunity to play something dramatic. Most solo performances for men are comic (I have heard this before, even from high school students seeking something different to perform for competitions) and he was looking for something which would allow him to be vulnerable on stage, and tell a story that would move people.
Denver told me about the first performances of What Happened/I Hate This, four years ago, when a young woman who saw the show was inconsolable and sobbing following the performance. A few years later, Denver’s company was holding one of their monthly Enter Stage events, a kind of open mic for artists to perform their own monologues. A young woman told a powerful and personal story of having suffered a miscarriage. When she was asked about this after her presentation, she said that it was her who had been so emotionally overwhelmed by my play, because of her own loss – and that the experience had inspired her to tell her story on stage, something she may not have done otherwise.
Director Denver Anthony Nicholas (center) with Karthik and Abinaya
I have written several plays which have been published, rights for production handled by others without my participation. There’s a production of Sherlock Holmes Meets the Bully of Baker Street next weekend in Louisiana. It's going to be dinner theater and if the photos are any indication, I would love to get there for the food alone. I Hate This is not currently published, so there have been far fewer independent productions.
But when they come, when artists have found the script and reach to inquire about production, it means that our story, mine and my wife’s story of how we incorporated loss into our lives, that it is being told to an entirely new audience. And the fact that that story might have an impact on someone who lives and loves and grieves on the other side of the earth, that is truly remarkable.
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