The email came the Monday morning after my June 14th show at Joe’s Pub in New York—New Yorker writer Nathan Heller asking if I’d like to do an interview for a Talk of the Town piece on my work. For a New Yorker Nerd like myself—who reveres and reads the magazine every week— it was the easiest yes of my life.

Part of the ask was to get an insight into the process. So the question was: where should I take Nathan to do some Journalism of Hanging Out (JOHO)? On Saturday my friend and fellow JOHO boho Andy and I had rambled around Brooklyn Bridge park. I was wearing my Ken Griffey Jr. line-sketch T-Shirt. And we were using it as a conversation piece—asking strangers if they could identify who the drawing depicted. We met a Brazilian World Cup superfan, an Irish photographer trying to “get some good content” for the gram, a Chinese gay artist who grew up in a rural village and made his way to New York in the turbulent 1990s. It was a rich cross-section of humanity.

That was on a Saturday though. On a Tuesday early afternoon, I knew the pickings might be slimmer. And I really wanted to take Nathan up to the old neighborhood in the Bronx, where we lived when we moved to New York in 2013. We spent two and a half years there, in the Melrose neighborhood on Courtlandt Ave, living in the second and then third floor of the Bronx Documentary Center (BDC) as it launched. In 2015, we started our family there with the birth of our son.

Old friend Mike Kamber—we met in Nigeria when I was a Fulbright Scholar and he was a photographer for The New York Times—founded the BDC in a refurbished Bauhaus-era building with huge ceilings on the second floor from it’s days as a saloon. Mike had gut-renovated it and turned into a community center and arts-hub for documentary film and video. The neighborhood was rugged. It was not a gentrified and revamped playground for creatives (we later moved to Bed-Stuy in 2016, it was night and day different). There were four tragic murders on our block when we lived there. It was in the poorest congressional district in the country. There were no sushi or cute coffee shops within a long mile.

And yet the BDC was an anchor in the community. Everyone respected and appreciated it as a place of education and enrichment. Eddie, who presided over the corner from a milk crate, jovial and buoyant in the morning and then raging drunk by the evening, knew everyone and protected the block as best he could. Charlie, a sweet former 1970s numbers-runner and gangster, with the blown-out voice of an ex-addict, would check in all the time.

The parties for exhibition openings were joyous mashups of the local community and photographers and journalists. One night hosted the reissue of the seminal book Subway Art by Henry Chalfant and Martha Cooper. Old school New York graffiti writers from the 1970s and 1980s—now chunky Uncs and graying grandpas—descended for an electric evening. No one wanted to go home, spilling out into the street and signing each other’s books like they were teenagers again.

One night a group from Save our Streets South Bronx came through, and I met Danny Barber. He lived in the Melrose Housing Projects, and I spent many afternoons talking to residents and doing the journalism of hanging out there. I met Larry, a charismatic custodian and shrewd analyst of the neighborhood who became the basis for a character in my show Border People. We later had the full-circle moment of Larry coming to the show in Manhattan on official opening night. He sat in the front row and I could see his jaw drop when I launched into his story. At curtain call, he gave me a big hug as I left the stage and said, “My man!” The show then went back to the Bronx and I performed at the BDC as part of the subsequent boroughs tour. (I’ve written about performing stories back to people featured in the show in New York here and Charleston, South Carolina here and Nigeria here.)

Another night the youth empowerment group United Playaz came to the BDC. I got invited to attend meetings, which were two blocks away. When I walked in and explained I was an actor/playwright/journalist who creates journalistic theater Jahar “Pop” Simmons looked me straight in the eye and said, “I could work with you.”

I began spending afternoons up on his block on Clay Ave and in the Webster Projects, where his grandfather lived. Pop loved the immersive nature of the process, how I would embed and take notes and sometimes record audio, but often just hang out and soak it up. There was a fun dance of showing respect at all times, embedding as fully as possible, and also acknowledging the limits.

I wasn’t sure if the Bronx was the right place to bring Nathan, but The Bronx is New York’s most overlooked borough, and I wanted to visit anyway, so I decided to go for it. I made plans to meet Nathan at a Dunkin’ on 167th street, and when I arrived Nathan was happily nursing a coffee and a old-fashioned, a dapper reporter excited to explore new terrain. The plan was to chat there and then stroll around. Since I’d last visited, they took out the few tables and chairs in the Dunkin’ though, so we had nowhere to sit. The Dominican restaurant across the street was blaring music. So we followed suit from a couple other guys on the block and sat on the seats of a line of parked Citi bikes. That’s where Nathan’s New Yorker piece picks up.

It was great fun to introduce him to Pop, and we had a nice conversation with Carlee and Ro, who I hadn’t known. It’s always a different interaction when someone is profiling me while I do the Journalism of Hanging Out. I’ve begun experimenting with photographer Peter Prato in trying to document the process in Oakland and Las Vegas. In a way photography is easier, as people are used to it as a form of documentation. Having a writer observe a writer observing people is a whole new level. Nathan is a wildly talented writer and journalist, and he was unerringly kind, curious and humble, as all the best reporters are. Carlee and Ro weren’t familiar with The New Yorker and asked if Nathan had done any “front-page stories.” I assured them Nathan was one of the best journalists in the country. Having to vouch for the bonafides of a New Yorker magazine writer revealed the length of the cultural bridge from the midtown Manhattan to the South Bronx.

We hung out for awhile, and then I had to get down to Penn Station to take a train to D.C. for a show the next night. We didn’t get to spend as long as I would have liked, so I was worried the piece wouldn’t make it into the issue, but sure enough later in the summer I got a call from a New Yorker fact-checker. It was a bit of a pinch-me moment. (The fact-checker informed me there are New Yorker sweatshirts that simply say “Vaunted” in reference to their legendary fact-checking department.)

It certainly was thorough. I got a good sense of what the article would cover from every fact that was confirmed, and also a sense of some lines that got cut from the final piece due to space.

Nathan’s piece honored the complexity of my work in all it’s many dimensions. And it highlighted the stories of the people who I talk to. They didn’t appear as props, but as central characters in the mini-play that unfolded that afternoon in the Bronx, thus truly honoring the essence of journalistic theater.

P.S. I’m performing my show Takes All Kinds around the country this fall. For dates and details on shows in San Francisco, Atlanta, Sacramento, Chicago, and D.C., please visit my website here.

My Mom dropped me off on Natoma Street outside the Green Tortoise Bus boarding area on a foggy San Francisco night, in late June, 1997. I had a backpack with my journal, camera, and a newly purchased audio recorder. Victor, a joyous viber in his early 50s, saw that I had come solo. “Just you?” he asked.

I nodded. He flashed a big grin and let out a small howl. “Oh brother, I’m feeling sooo fine in sooo many ways!” He turned to my Mom and said, “I’ll keep an eye on him. Any kid that’s signed up to take a two-week bus trip with a busload of strangers, that’s my guy!”

I climbed the steps of the converted school bus/rolling counter-culture sleeper coach. For the next two weeks it would take our cast of characters around almost a dozen National Parks and remote campgrounds in the western states. We were like a huge touring band that only played campgrounds.

There was Tony, a shy, mid-40s coder with a stutter from Manchester, England who’d found his place in U.K. rave culture. A trio of rawkus Polish teenage siblings and their lone chaperone Dad. Twenty-something besties from Tokyo who didn’t speak much English but enjoyed my physical comedy. A surly septuagenarian Aussie who took epic naps at all hours of the day. A hippie couple from Portland, Oregon who recognized their younger renegade selves in me and would “ hold church” on a riverbank on a variety of topics. A soft-spoken pair of retirees from small-town North Carolina—he a Vietnam Vet who at my age was humping through jungle “just trying to save my brothers’ ass.” Laurent, a suave, brooding Frenchman and Yolanda, a spunky Swiss cutie who inevitably became a couple.

There was order. Our drivers Raul and Jimmy would drive us at night as we slept on Tetris’d-in foam mattresses in the back of the bus. We’d wake up on a gorgeous overlook in a remote part of a National Park. Other times we slept out under the stars (I don’t recall tents). There was drinking at the campsites some nights but not on the bus. Everyone had to help with meal prep and cleaning. And head driver Raul Halfworth (“cause they only pay me half of what I’m worth”) would regulate if anyone got whiny. Victor passed out whistles in case of emergency, and they became a totem of our crew.

There was also chaos. Personal items could get lost and be in “bus orbit” for days at a time—a favorite t-shirt would resurface after days of marinating in sweat at the bottom of the wrong bag.

I was one of only a few who had come alone, and I was the youngest solo traveler. So I joined with Victor’s little tribe— his adopted son JimmySon and their friend Marshall. They were all avid runners and Frisbee tossers and I was pretty good at that. What drew me to Victor though was his huge charisma and that he too, like Tony, the British coder/raver, was an audiophile.

Victor recorded an audio journal every night. I’d drift off to sleep hearing his froggy-voiced recounting of the day. He traveled with a collection of past recordings. He’d listen to the recording from exactly a year ago as an anniversary audio postcard. If it brought him joy, he’d keep it. If not, he’d record over it with that day’s stories and reflections (this was the analogue era of finite space). He invited me to record the day together several times, and played me recordings from the previous year. They weren’t revelatory, but they were evocative and transporting.

Tony recorded ambient audio and snippets of conversation from the characters on the bus. He later sent me a mix tape that was a mash up of his favorite underground U.K. rave tracks with ambient noise and conversations from the trip.

My Dad had a big clunky audio recorder that we used as kids to create audio stories. We’d make our own sound effects—a creaky door opening, chains pulled across a heating grate to simulate a ghost’s walk.

But I’d sprung for my personal audio recorder after watching the film Leaving Las Vegas, in which Nicolas Cage stumbles around Vegas drinking himself to death and recording his thoughts on a tape recorder. It’s a despondent movie, but my sixteen year old takeaway was: I need to buy an audio recorder! So I did.

I took Tony’s approach, recording ambient noises and conversations with whoever would talk to me. I took that tape recorder to Northwestern University and started walking around Chicago’s street late at night looking for strangers to talk to. A gigolo pimp in a Dunkin Donuts lectured me on the benefits of “benevolent dictatorship.” A senior citizen salsa dancing class took me in one night. I sat on the porch of a halfway house for Iraq War vets, sharing cigarettes and stories.

At Northwestern I found the Performance Studies department and learned the ethics and professional practices of ethnography and witness-participant research. I leveled up and bought a mini-disk recorder in 2002 when I traveled around the world for my first show Circumnavigator, and then in 2008 I went digital and got an Edirol recorder that I’ve used ever since.

Yet in the last decade, video has completely taken over as the dominant mode of media. When I tell people what I do, they ask if I perform on Youtube. Chatting with a Bhutanese day-trader/Lyft driver in Oakland, he mentioned an article he’d “read recently,” and then corrected himself to say “I mean it was a video stream.”

I created a whole show, Each and Every Thing, about how we experience the world in the digital/social media age in 2014. Being in New York for the Knicks championship triumph last week it felt like we’ve reached a whole new level of video ubiquity. Social media clips of previous Knicks street watch parties had made attending one the thing to do in New York.

It was fun. Fun to see New York’s diversity, both cosmopolitan and working class, on full display, on a warm June night in Brooklyn. We rambled and found standing room only crowds on almost every street corner. Finally we found a projection in a community garden across from Fort Greene park, and talked our way into it with the promise of olives. It was the perfect place to watch the game, and a great moment of shared communal experience.

When the Knicks staged another improbable comeback, I pulled out my phone to dutifully record the moment. What I got was a clip of everyone recording everyone else. People were celebrating, but all with their phones up and on, pointed at each other in a sort of video laser tag.

I was just like everyone else, infected by that cynical calculus that pervades public life now—is this worth recording? Is this “good content?” Are there followers to be won, or at least engaged?

I turned to my friend Andy, who had recently gone viral with a 26 second video he’d posted of people haggling in a Sicilian fish market. “Where is this all going?” I asked. “Data centers. Filling up data centers in Montana.”

Driving through Montana late night in 1997 on the Green Tortoise, it was open and barren. We’d look out the window and Tony would tell stories about all-night parties in Manchester, and all night coding sessions building the internet. Or Victor would tell the story of how he’d adopted JimmySon, trying to be the father he didn’t have. Or Raul, our driver, would tell us stories of what Green Tortoise trips were like in the ‘70s when it started. Or Yolanda would talk about au pair life, or Laurent would give his ratings on different parts of American life—”Sierra Nevada is ze best beer you av.” I loved listening.

There was also a ton of jokes and comedy. John, from Portland, started calling me Danimal, and one night I debuted a character called Ze Danimal. He emerged one night fully formed, with a quasi-German accent and wild dance moves. He was essentially an over-excited Arnold Schwarzenegger in the body of a skinny seventeen year-old in baggy shorts. I remember belting out the phrase, “Ze Danimal only runs on petroleum fuel!” and ferociously biting a role of Toilet Paper and the group exploding in laughter. Highly context-dependent humor, for sure.

The next day, we took a walk around a lake in the Grand Tetons. I got separated from the different groups of Green Tortoisers and walked it on my own, feeling so at peace, another blissful high-summer moment of adventure. 1985: walking around the back of the Pickle Family Circus backdrop, shirtless, in Bermuda shorts. 1990: boarding a bus to my first overnight summer camp, knowing no one, my parents wondering how this little guy with big glasses was going to make friends. 2008: heading out on a full moon night in a camper van I’d bought for $3,500 to travel through small-town and rural America for three months. 2023: arriving in Tampa, Florida and driving to a campground in a rental car for the first week of rambling and research for what became my new show Takes All Kinds.

In summer, we open up and stretch out. I sometimes wonder if the massive pivot to video has taken all that outdoors, in-person, endless-days-and-possibilities energy and shrunk it to our pocket-sized screens. Listening to audio recordings though—the low buzz of prop planes in Alaska, the din of motorbikes in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, the ratchet of cicadas in Texas, the murmur of voices at the coffeehouse in Kolkata, India— that’s when I’m most transported. Sight is our dominant sense, but it’s also our most inundated, and increasingly overwhelmed.

So here’s to summer. To days long enough to engage with our other four senses that might be our most evocative. And they will only be recorded by you, for the data center of your mind, that you can always access, and will never be hacked.

I’ve never done this before, but to make sure you caught my latest essay, published in Mother Jones over the weekend, I wanted to link it here. Mother Jones Essay on Journalism of Hanging out and What Americans Really Think In These Troubled Times.

It featured a behind-the-scenes look at how my shows are created. And had photos by longtime collaborator and great photographer Peter Prato.

We were trying to capture the Journalism of Hanging Out process. I went back to the barbershop in Las Vegas that’s featured in Takes All Kinds. And also met some interesting new people. There was a Demolition Derby happening in the parking lot of my hotel.

And so we talked with folks who’d come in from Wyoming, Utah, and Kansas to “wreck cars and make memories.”

The essay also describes the experience of going back to Charleston, South Carolina to perform Takes All Kinds for Polly Sheppard and Margaret Seidler, two incredible women whose stories are featured in the show. The experience of performing for them and their communities was, as I write in the piece in Mother Jones, “surreal and profound.”

Check out the piece in Mother Jones here, and please tell your friends about my upcoming shows around the country this month in New York, Washington D.C., San Francisco and Sacramento. All those details are on my website danhoyle.com

Thank you for all your support over the years of this lifelong project of creating journalistic theater that moves, entertains, and inspires audiences to live with a little less fear of one another and a little more curiosity, joy, and wonder about who we truly are.

At Duffy’s Bar and Grill in outer West Palm Beach, next to the Tropical Smoothie Café and the Luxury Foot Spa, I immediately fall into conversation with the trio next to me: Jon-Ross with a thick Jamaican accent, newly moved to Florida. His girlfriend Tori-Ann, Jamaican by heritage, but a native of West Palm Beach. And Jon-Ross’s younger brother Ricardo, originally from Jamaica, but in Florida since he was seven years old.

Tori Ann has the spicy comments. She orders a busy cocktail and says, “Going to a bar and ordering a beer, that’s some serial killer shit. Quietly drinkin’ a beer, why would you go out to do that?”

Tori-Ann is burnt out from years as a social services case-worker. She wants to “live in her purpose” but is ground down from navigating the harrowing lives of those trapped in poverty. Ricardo is on leave as a low-enlisted private in the Army. He’s a CRBN—he detects and dismantles chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons. He’s non-plussed about the war in Iran. He hopes to deploy and collect the bonuses and overtime that would amount to over ten thousand dollars and help him tackle his debt.

It’s easy to fall into conversation with strangers in South Florida. As different as it is from California, the beach has a common mellowing effect. The huge boulevards and never-ending strip malls seem hatched from a New Jersey developer’s playbook. But Florida’s entrepreneurial, immigrant enclaves make it perhaps the truest slice of 21^st century Americana. And so many people are from somewhere else, come to Florida to be someone else.

Wipe away the caricature of Florida as retirees pruning up in golf carts. It’s out-of-date, or incomplete. South Florida is a magnet for talent and ambition from the Caribbean and those exhausted by the Northeast corridor. When I teach a workshop at the Alexander Dreyfoos School of the Arts in downtown West Palm, I’m impressed. It’s a diverse group of students who are skilled, curious, and adventurous.

That night I meet Ryan, a 27 year old financial services advisor originally from Philly. He relocated to West Palm because he says, “West Palm has become the Wall Street of the South.” He’s not wrong—financial firms fleeing higher taxes in New York have flocked to South Florida. And it’s not all crypto bros. “I’m from Philly, I’m a Northeast guy,” he says through a lispy Philly accent. “I put my surfboard, my golf clubs, and my espresso machine in my car, took the car train down to visit for a month, and got a job downtown. There’s thirty other financial services firms within a chipshot of my office.”

Once he learns I’m in town performing, he starts showing me different edgy content creators he follows on Instagram. (When I tell people what I do lately, their main portal into character-based performance is through the socials.) He shows me a short, chiseled guy who posts videos of himself roaming the streets shirtless, failing to pick up girls, interspersed with clips of him losing on online gaming apps. It’s on the line between grim reality and soft-parody.

Ryan says influencers come in and pose with their photo crew at his local pool hall. “It’s weird, they come in, pose awkwardly and are like, ‘clip that Chad,” he says. “And I’m shooting pool, like, what? What was there to clip? Nothing happened.” (Another Looksmaxxer named Clavicular collapsed from an overdose and was accused of assault by a female influencer the day after Ryan showed me his profile.)

Ryan’s drinking buddy for the night is a bitter property manager from Long Island who wants to get into making content. “I’m one of those guys who people always said, ‘you should have your own show,’” he says, which is always an ominous sign. He’s lately taken to going into bars and filming for future reels. He doesn’t ask for permission, claiming it’s a public space. He’s at least as old as me, so I remind him of what used to be protocol for taking photos of strangers—1) asking them directly or 2) making eye contact, holding up your camera, and raising your eyebrows in a visual ask. “There’s cameras everywhere now, there’s security cameras filming us right now.” It’s a weak argument, but it’s the prevailing sentiment.

On the day after my show, I look for the locals swimhole, my favorite place to soak up culture. The ocean beaches and water have been inundated with a thick and raspy seaweed that can have sea lice. “If you don’t shower quickly, it can burrow into you,” one surfer advises. When I confer with a new-agey woman with a small dog, she smiles and says, “It’s a worthwhile risk. I find the seaweed quite exfoliating.”

I demure and find a county park under a bridge overpass—an inlet swimhole. After three days of battling through the seaweed and rip current, the clear blue water and windless ease feels like nirvana. And there’s local vibes all over.

“Florida’s just a big island, bro” says Brett, 29, who’s nursing a beverage out of a giant foam Wawa cup. He’s thin and shirtless, with a fluffy pink bucket hat, his phone in a protective waterproof case hanging from a neck lanyard. He’s got four kids and works as a sous chef at Rocco’s Tacos. He dreams of going back to selling vacation packages that were lures into time-share contracts. He’s Italian-American with New York roots who slid down the East Coast like so many have and ended up in Palm Beach Shores. He lived in Pacifica, California for four years, so he has a slight Cali overlay.

“You gotta remember, sales is selling yourself, not your product. I talk to people like I’m talking to you now, and I offer them a free vacation package just to listen to a time-share presentation,” he says. “And honestly it’s a crazy good deal, as long as you’re not stupid. You just have to sit through the time share presentation and then say no and you get a three night stay in a resort for free. As long as you can say no, you’re good. But all the company needs is one person to say yes and they make their money. During high-season, I could make so many sales bro, I was making six figures. But if you don’t make 9 or 14 conversions (sales) a week, they’ll let you go.”

I’ve started to consider making my next piece about the modern economy, all the hustles that so many Americans are now engaged in as capitalism gets ever more efficient.

Three young women come in from a float on a paddle board. I had seen them all out on the water, heads glued to their phones. As if life were just a series of locations to be doing the main event—scrolling on your phone. I try to make a point of talking to women. It can be easy for me to just talk to men, but then my sources are skewed. Summer, Hailey and Erin are work friends in their twenties. Summer has an elaborate leg tattoo that so far has cost her $6,000. “It’s an eagle and an osprey battling it out, to the death,” she explains.

They are taking photos of themselves and I offer to take one of them. They say thanks and I tell them I’m capturing Florida vibes and ask if I can take their picture and Summer says, “what you’ve never seen a BBL?” I confess I don’t even know what a BBL is. She chuckles and says, “You seriously don’t know what a BBL is? Brazilian Butt Lift. You seem super married, bro.”

“I am super married,” I say, with two kids. I forget that young women in South Florida are getting hit on all the time, and that I look younger than I am, so they assume that’s what I’m doing. I explain I’m an actor and playwright and that I’m fascinated by Florida. And that I’m forty-six. They snap their heads back in shock. “You’re forty-six? You’re good bro, I just like talking shit,” says Summer.

Getting back out on the road I’m always amazed by how most Americans are not paying much attention to politics. Or they don’t want to let it into their lives too much. They are trying to find a life hack. And so they are ever less connected to institutions and traditional careers. In Las Vegas last month I met Hatter, a street magician who said he makes between two hundred and four hundred dollars a day getting tips doing magic on the streets. He said he works four days a week and is able to support his wife and four kids. Doing some quick math, I asked him, how do you pay the bills? “Who said anything about a mortgage?” says Hatter. He lives in a mobile home, which he bought for $25,000, so he only pays a monthly lot fee of $400.

I revisited the barbershop that’s the basis for the barbershop scene in Takes All Kinds. Danny, the main Trump proponent, was quick to explain away Trump’s fumbles. On the War in Iran: “If I have to pay a couple more dollars for gas so we don’t get nuked, I’m good, homie. On the ICE Raids: “Targeting brown people and Hispanic people? That’s nothing new, dude.”

Next to my hotel in Vegas was a Demolition Derby National Event. I wandered through the parking lot and fell into conversation with a pair of cousins, Ben and Mario, from small-town Kansas. They were both Trump supporters and like his support for oil and gas production, which helps their industries (Mario at a power plant, Ben in agriculture). Their workplaces leaned heavily conservative. But even there they had agreed to stop talking politics. “People get too heated,’ says Mario, nursing a Coors Light. They say the fissures between those who liked Trump and those even more conservative than Trump became workplace incidents.

Mario finally had enough, and cut off all social media and moved to Texas. “I was tired of everything, people asking for loans, for me to help them with their credit, chirping about politics. I deleted everything and moved states, even changed my phone number. Got off all the group chats. And I’m at peace.”

It seems no coincidence that the explosion of social media, the memefication of culture, has happened during Trump’s ascendance. He is a never-ending meme—always surprising, outraged, and ostentatious. And my sense is that Americans are tired of politics. There are a lot of folks who consider themselves broke, but not poor. They don’t want anyone to get a free ride, as they are working hard, but could use a little help. And whoever can capture this demographic—who can do politics, without seeming “too political”—is going to capture the next election cycle.

******** SOME CONTEXT: I’ve been commissioned to write a new play loosely connected to Bay Area in the 1960s. It’s part of an event/project that will hopefully take over San Francisco for a few weeks in the summer of 2027. I’m one of over a dozen playwrights with close connections to the Bay who’s been commissioned. But I thought I’d write about San Francisco in the Nineties. Specifically 1992-1996, when it felt like everything shifted. So I started by writing this essay as en exploration.********

A typical Saturday night for me in Spring 1992, aka 6^th grade: Guzzling soda. Watching Saturday Night Live. Doing bad impressions behind tortoise-shell glasses of SNL characters with one friend and his kooky/cool divorced Dad.

A typical Saturday night in 1993, aka 7th grade: running to a party, or down a hill from a hilltop party, or for a bus to a party at someone’s house whose single Mom was out of town for the weekend. A party filled with people who felt like young adults—who had style, who made knowing jokes and knew exactly what they looked like when they laughed. And had haircuts I couldn’t get from the local Great Cuts (to be fair it was eight bucks for a Great Cut. The greatness was mostly in the price).

Or we’d be shooting a terrible movie with a friend’s camcorder. Or doing bad impressions of Bill Clinton because a friend’s hair looked like his when he took off his beanie (but at least we were doing our own impressions). Or making plans to sneak out after our parents went to sleep and meet up with some girls on Billy Goat Hill. Sure, there might be some wrestling matches in the living room. Maybe we’d play some music with whoever stopped by. (And there was so much freestyle rapping.) But there was always a sense that we wanted to be out roaming the city, meeting up with other kids from all over.

Several things had happened in 1992/1993. I got contact lenses. I let my hair grow long. I started hanging out with kids a year or two older than me, and who didn’t go to my school. Friends of friends parents would go away for the weekend, there would be unsupervised houseparties. I got my ear pierced, and had baggy pants and there were people in rooms who were making out. Not to perform making out, as we had in 5^th grade spin-the-bottle games, but fueled by hormones that could lead to other things I really didn’t know about.

But what made this era different from the usual upper-lip fuzz phase nostalgia, I’d like to propose, was that we had San Francisco in the early 1990s as our playground.

The inheritance of the Sixties/Seventies counter-culture was so baked into the place we didn’t know we were the extreme counter-culture in America. I’m guessing all over the country teenagers discovered stashes of their parents weed, and some of it wasn’t old and moldy. What was different was that so many of our friends’ parents in San Francisco were artists and activists and labor organizers and teachers and had somehow continued the values of Sixties/Seventies into the Eighties and Nineties. (And that inheritance had been informed by San Francisco’s history as a progressive labor town from the 1930s.) Perhaps bludgeoned by Reaganism, but still largely intact. The theater scene thrived, documentary filmmakers abounded, former Civil Rights and environmental activists and Black Panthers and SDSers moved into electoral politics and opened law firms and started NGOs. And it was all so normal.

There were pockets of pushback. There was the Dan White types in the Excelsior and mass incarceration and Rush Limbaugh boomed on KNBR before Giants games on weekend mornings. Pacific Heights and St. Francis Woods had rich people who wore suits to work. But those people were doctors and lawyers and being rich meant making six figures.

When I went to someone’s house, their parents usually had some poster or book or story that let you know they valued arts and activism, if they weren’t active practioners. And crucially it didn’t cost as much to live in SF then, so they had the time and energy to pursue those things. When we lived on a funky street on the south side of Potrero Hill a block away from the Potrero Hill Housing Projects in the late ‘80s, those values penetrated there too. Our neighbors’ Dad’s loved WWF and Hulk Hogan but were also strong union guys and hated Reagan.

So in the early ‘90s the clouds of Reagan/Bush 1 had parted and we emerged into a rebirth of Hippie Eden in the place that had been the original birthplace. (Though most of the adults I grew up around recoiled at the word hippie and preferred radical or lefty or anything but hippie. Even though in a national context they were all seen as hippies).

And we were independent, and the city was small, you could ride your bike, or take the bus, or run from neighborhood to neighborhood. We’ could go to Haight Street and talk to runaway kids from Oregon. Or to the Castro on Halloween and innocently ask a bare-chested man about his long tongue piercing. And he’d flash a chesire grin, lean in, and say, “The more to rim you with, my dear!” and throw his head back in laughter. Or we’d sit in a living room in The Mission watching Carnival strut below on an endless sunny afternoon.

When I was 10 and 11 and 12 I’d sometimes get jumped by three or four dudes, always the littlest guy in front, cocking his head to the side and snarling: “Break yo’self fool! Come out your pockets.” And we had to hand over whatever money we had in our pockets. After the first time we learned to keep the big bills in our socks, and no one had phones or wallets, so it wasn’t that bad. The humiliation was that sometimes I knew one of the dudes from pickup basketball— we’d had triumphs together and shared real joy. That part was confusing, but also instructive in the world’s complexities and contradictions.

But by the time I was 14 and 15, the jumpings tapered off, and mostly there was immense idealism. At the WOMAD concert in Golden Gate park in Fall 1993, my friend Mike and I, buzzed on beadie cigarettes, the fog not rolled in, Third World or Peter Gabriel belting out their tunes…anything felt possible. Or at 15, dancing to Reggae in the Park, a small, free benefit concert for Global Exchange (the pioneering Human Rights non-profit, which promoted international understanding through cross-cultural exchange) before hustling back on the bus to babysit for the neighbor’s kid. (These festivals came and went fast enough that they never got crowded like Hardly, Strictly or Outside Lands.)

There was a fluidity to the social scene, an innocent curiosity and openness around racial and ethnic background. An early question in flirtation was: what’s your ethnicity? And it was not of the hostile “where are you from?” or “what are you?” ethos. It was the ‘90s version of asking someone what’s your sign? I would share that I was English, Irish and Russian. One of my first girlfriends—when I was barely busting five feet tall as a 13 year-old—was Athena, who was Greek, Black and Mexican, and a full half foot taller than me. It didn’t matter. We were curious and interested in learning about each other. Dating meant talking on the phone a lot and making out a couple times in the shadows of a driveway somewhere.

It is so on-brand of San Francisco in the early ‘90s as to sound hopelessly cringe and cliché. And I would go out into the world and find it to be much more complicated. When I went to investigate sweatshop labor practices on my first big grant in college, I got to talk to the workers and ask them, “did they appreciate The Gap’s efforts to limited their workweek to 54 or 60 (!) hours?” I was shocked to hear that no, many of the workers liked the other factories better; they could work 72 (!!!) hours a week and save enough to buy a motorcycle to impress their future wives.

We had no idea what was looming, that tech would take over San Francisco and social media would warp social relations in a profound way we still don’t totally understand. I remember the glimmers of it in the late ‘90s, being on the N-Judah and thinking who are all these young people in suits? But it wasn’t until the post-2008 recovery when then mayor Ed Lee gave Twitter tax breaks to move onto Market that Sillicon Valley’s hub shifted to S.F.

Maybe it wouldn’t have mattered if we knew it was coming. Maybe we were too attuned to music festivals and too enamored with the promise of cross-cultural exchange to realize that the K-shaped economy, grievance-based politics, and the collapse of business models for culture and media would swallow this place and this inheritance almost wholly. (The latest casualty was the abrupt closing of The Mission Cultural Center, another 1970s indie institution).

For the last few years I’ve been asking myself: how did we let this happen? Maybe that’s not fair. For nobody seems happy about it, or really wanted it to happen.

At the playground recently in Oakland, I fell into a conversation with another family who had four kids. (I assumed they were Mormon at first—who else has/can afford four kids in the Bay Area these days? Turns out the Dad was from Montana and just had an eccentric hat.)

He worked for Meta in ad auctions and said it’s grinding down his soul. He said there’s very little collaboration because everyone wants to take sole responsibility for every small improvement they make in the software because it’s all tracked and translates into large bonuses and promotions. That his co-workers work twelve hours a day, putting their kids to bed and logging back online to work from 9:30pm to 1am. And that there’s terrible job insecurity, but he has four kids and the money is good and so he keeps on chugging. I hear stories like this all the time. And I hear from old tech heads who came to the Bay in the 1990s for the culture and politics, and they can’t believe what’s happened either.

The point is not to wallow in nostalgia, but to value what made that time special, and to figure out a way to rekindle those values, and most crucially the socio-economic landscape that made those values possible. As Liam O’Donoghue writes in a recent East Bay Yesterday piece, nostalgia can be a galvanizing force for action, to reclaim what has been lost. It’s mostly weaponized by the Right, but it doesn’t have to be.

Sure, my memories are drenched in nostalgia, but undeniably the socio-economics and culture of San Francisco and The Bay have changed so much. And is there a way out/back/forward/through?

I’ve performed enough times at Joe’s Pub to know it’s a game within a game. I need to be present and relaxed and inside my characters. I also have to navigate the noises. It’s a fancy venue at The Public Theater (the closest we have to a National Theater in America). It’s also a club.

Plates of salmon are served feet from where I’m inhabiting a character spitting tobacco juice into a cup in front of a school board meeting in Florida. White wine glasses clink while I conjure up a trio of barbers in a barbershop in Las Vegas talking about how many guns they have. A cocktail is shaken at an impressively loud volume in the back of the room as Ok, yes I become a grizzled bartender and former Blackwater mercenary unspooling his misadventures in Iraq. It’s a closer match, but the bar I bring to life onstage is a Dive Bar in the South, not lush Joe’s Pub in New York City.

I say this not to complain. I am very grateful for Joe’s Pub. They can keep their ticket prices relatively low--$36 including fees for my show, which for New York is cheap, because they have a food and drink minimum. This in turn allows for good box office splits to performing artists like myself. So I can make enough money to fly across the country for a show. (I book flights with miles, stay at friend’s apartments in New York, and have an excellent stage manager I can hire for the day. Thank you all!)

As a performer, I have to surf the clinks and the ice shakes, the waiters dodging in to clear plates and place checks. When folks order fries and beers and do it early when doors open, it’s smooth sailing. Last week, doors opened late, and people came for dinner, so the first fifteen minutes of the show was a whole lot of clattering going on. Once people had scarfed their food we settled into a lovely rhythm. (For a solo show, the audience is my scene partner.)

Joe’s Pub is a lovely, intimate room—I’ve had some of the most electric performing nights of my life there. But after this most recent show, I did get a note from someone who loved the show, found it moving and powerful and funny, etc, but felt I should be in a venue where there aren’t all those distractions.

And yet would they be willing to spend $50 or $60 a ticket? As that is what Joe’s Pub is able to take in per customer. And, because it’s a club, and has the sumptuous lighting and crackling atmosphere of a lounge, it makes theater cool. Everyone who goes out in New York knows Joe’s Pub. Music lovers. Cabaret fans. Alt-comedy people. Nuovo-burlesque enthusiasts. It’s not stuffy, yet you can dress up for it. It’s unpredictable. It feels like what theater should want people to think theater is.

When I ask young acting students in the Bay Area what kind of theater they go to, they say they mostly go to theater in New York, and to Broadway, because, “that’s a thing to do there.”

It didn’t always use to be like this. We all know the pandemic completely rearranged people’s relationship to their phones (more), going out (less), their rigidness around their own boundaries and self-care (more) and their willingness to be flexible with them (less). And believe me, as a Dad (who wants to be a good one) and performing artist who also teaches who is married to a full-time teacher, I know it’s hard to get out. I feel guilt at not putting my kids to bed on a night I’m not working.

What I’d like to suggest is that getting out of the house and seeing art IS a part of self-care. It will actually make you feel better. When people come to my show, which goes to the heart of what’s happening politically and culturally in this country, they talk about feeling oddly hopeful. That although it dives deep, it’s also very funny, because it spotlights these complex and imperfect and surprising people who are navigating it all themselves too. People feel less alone. They laugh, they cry, they feel all the feels.

This year Tuesday has become my movie night. Not at home, where by the time the kids are in bed, the kitchen is clean (enough, depending on exhaustion level) it’s past 9pm. But at a theater. At the Grand Lake Theater in Oakland, tickets are six bucks on Tuesday. Six bucks! And as the lights go down for showtime, snuck-in beers getting cracked ripples throughout the auditorium, it has a college crew vibe.

And here’s the kicker for those for whom self-care is your religion: since I started tracking my sleep in an effort to recover from injuries, I see every night how much deep and REM sleep I get. And on the nights I go out to see a movie or play, my REM sleep is usually twice as much as normal. Boom! Art is not a luxury, it’s medicine. Not just spiritual medicine, but actual physical medicine.

I grew up in a household where art--creating it, experiencing it, talking about it--was the closest thing we had to a spiritual practice. And yet it was so normal it was not rarefied. As little kids we’d take afternoon naps on the nights we’d attend the openings of my Dad’s shows. And then we’d load ourselves up with cookies and Sprite (if we were lucky) at the post-show party and suck the helium out of the balloons and talk in funny voices.

And yet when I tell other parents at our kids school’s I’m an actor and playwright and I’d love for them to come check out my show, it’s as though I’m inviting them to my garage jug band recital. Or some frightening, archaic art form that should just die an ignoble death already. Handing out a postcard for my show used to have the excitement of a secret pass to an underground rave. Now the usual response is to smile politely and try to switch the subject. Part of it is there are just much fewer artists in the Bay Area. Almost everyone who’s moved here in the last fifteen years is not coming to make art, they are coming to make apps and now AI.

And yet! The audience reception of my work is as strong as it’s ever been. I get more emails and truly moved people coming up after the show afterwards then I ever have. Why the dichotomy?

A couple weeks ago, thanks to grandparent childcare, my wife and I on a whim whipped off to see Hamnet, the new Chloe Zhao movie. The final twenty minutes moved me so much I sat stunned as the credits rolled, unable to move, not wanting to move. It was the best depiction of live theater’s power I’ve ever seen onscreen. It showed the way it can alchemize emotions, move a crowd of strangers, and connect us to our humanity. To do the thing we want in our lives. When the audience reaches out to touch the actors, I lost it. I’ve been on the other side of that stage, feeling that connection with an audience, being held up by them, holding up a character’s story so that it becomes a form of collective witness, or church.

I wept because I can’t understand why the thing we need so much is so hard to get audiences to come to. That we will spend hours scrolling, searching for something to fill us up. And theater is there, faded so far into the background noise of our culture we barely even know it exists, or think to even seek it out.

Part of the trouble is that theater is too expensive, and it also can’t charge enough. I believe a theater ticket should be available for $30. And that those who can afford to pay $50 and $100 should pay that and more. For the true cost of creating high-quality art is way beyond that.

People say they just want to feel numb, and they know the spectacle will take their minds off the grindhouse horror film of our politics. I’ve felt this urge too. But I’ve realized that its effects are fleeting. The numbness wears off. What I really want is transcendence. I want inspiration. I want the alchemy of lived experience into beauty that is great art. So I’ve been making a point of attending to great art this year. For numbness will not innoculate us from the horrors of creeping fascism. Seeking sanctuary in spectacle is actually a hallmark of fascism. What we need is a balm and a salve, a place where our humanity is reaffirmed and fortified.

Every time I perform at Joe’s Pub it feels like an event. A theatrical one, and also a communal and human one. We are all pressed up against each other eating, and slurping, and laughing and sometimes crying, and it’s raucous and rowdy and unpredictable. And because it’s such a flurry of activity, it is always a thrill, even if it’s imperfect at times. It’s going to be a long three more years. We are going to need to fortify ourselves with the salve that is transcendent art, communal gathering, ritualized affirmation of our humanity, and a rollicking good time. See you out there.

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It started as a rallying cry: “Staycay!” I cheered as I dance stepped through the living room, second cup of tea in hand, on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. Our four year old Juniper rolled her eyes and said, “Dadda, you keep saying that!” (She was using bubble wrap to make a hat, arm armor, and a thumb holder.) Our ten year old Winston looked up briefly from his graphic novel, and then went back to reading. By the end of the day, it would be a full fam rallying cry.

In Chris Hayes’ new book Siren’s Call, he details our current malaise of being forever distracted and half-present, our attention fracked by our phones, our lower brain-stem seduced every second by an army of data engineers’ most potent concoctions. If we don’t tie our eyeballs down a la Odysseus on his raft, he argues, we are destined for wreckage on the rocks of the siren call of the internet and social media.

“The days are long but the years are short” is the reigning truism/cliche of parenting. Screens are the complicating factor. They offer a check out/offramp at every moment. You think it’s hard not burrowing into the safety and serenity of your phone? Try barring a ten-year-old who’s just discovered free video games online.

Every summer we take a weeks-long camping ramble. For days, sometimes a week at a time, we have no internet service. It’s a grand return to that mythical way of experiencing the world called 2007. Before smart phones, pre-social media.

But how to do that in the winter? Around Thanksgiving in the Bay Area, the gavel slams hard on our delayed late-summer warmth. The temperature drops from the low ‘70s to the (shock, horror!) low 50s. The sun’s appearances are like a shy cat, fleeting and unpredictable. It’s hard to road ramble when it gets dark at five o’clock. It’s a great time to hole up in the evening, sing songs, light candles, enter deep food comas, tell stories that defy science and reason. Rekindle our faith in God/humanity/Jahweh. Everybody does it, someway, somehow.

It can also devolve into long homebound days of endless requests for shows and screentime from the littles. So this year, we decided to—you guessed it—“Staycay!”

Every good ramble starts with an intended destination, yet is also imminently flexible. We thought we’d go to the Japanese Tea Garden in San Francisco, a nostalgia piece from my ‘80s childhood. But a friend called to say he was staying at the Claremont hotel in Oakland, and invited us to hit the pool that morning. So we packed up our swim gear, and we were off.

“Dadda, are you sure we’re allowed?” Winston asked as we traipsed onto the lush grounds of the famed Claremont Hotel. We had eschewed the thirty dollar valet parking for a spot on the street right outside the gates. I’ve never sat in a seat at a baseball game I couldn’t sneak down a few more rows from, so I had to laugh. I guess your kids always rebel. “It’s fine, people do it all the time,” I assured him. Then I smiled at the groundskeepers with what I imagined to be the inner-peace of a man who had slept on the Claremont’s high-thread count sheets. Sneaking into exclusive experiences is a deeply American practice. Twain would approve.

It was cold, but we swam. There were palm trees. There was sunshine. There was historic white walls and solid dark brown wood beams. There were tanned Dads with the kind of glowing skin that screams “high net-worth individual!” There is no more satisfying luxury than free luxury.

And then, necessity being the mother of invention, we pivoted from our original plan to go into San Francisco and set out to grab food somewhere local, in the exotic locale known as North Oakland. Elmwood, specifically. Which is ten minutes from our house. But we’d never been as a family. This is one of the main keys to a family Staycay Ramble: any neighborhood is fair game provided you have have high-end caffeine and freshly-prepared calories your kids will devour.

We gorged. Juniper picked a dessert with copious marshmallows and chocolate. She was so overcome when chomping it she closed her eyes and raised her hands, dancing to a secret rhythm. “Staycay!” she shouted and then dissolved into giggles. By lunch it was a family meme. We watched a young couple flirt and entangle their limbs. A mother drop off lunch to her daughter working the counter. Marveled at the amount of workout gear people dress in as high fashion.

The beauty of discovery and exploration is that it captures your attention. That is the internet’s glory: it is infinite and always new. Yet, as Chris Hayes so eloquently explains, our attention is constantly being mined. And it is our most precious asset.

Deep attention is the foundation of so much that is sublime in our world. True love, true friendship, the gift of an immersive artistic experience. To give someone your full attention is one of our highest forms of respect and love. As a director, actors are wanting to know you are paying attention to what they are doing. If they try something new and you don’t notice, they lose faith and confidence. Young children need close attention in such high doses it feels only fair to enlist as many childcare providers and friends as possible. It’s impossible to be as fully present as a child is all day. Our brains are pulled by emails and texts we need to return, avenues to pursue in our jobs, groceries we need to buy.

Our deep dive was just a couple blocks in North Oakland, but the intentionality allows a vacation from those thoughts of Things I Need To Do. Instead, we dove into our immediate environment. We went full real life rabbit hole. The knitting store. (Start up sowing kit for Juniper? Yes! “Hot Mom” and “Dad Bod” socks for us? Ah…no.) We checked out a dozen toys we didn’t buy. We stumbled into the vintage Levi’s store and got transported back to 1999. We only bought a few things, but we touched a lot of items. In-person retail browsing can be a tactile museum-like experience.

And then we needed to move. So we wandered toward what appeared to be green space on our maps (you could take away every app besides Maps and Shazam and I’d be fine), and found the requisite coffee shop loaded with plants, buttery pastries, and loose-leaf tea. And then we walked among the wide streets, carefully tended creeks, expansive trees and Baby Boomers getting their steps in.

In winter, one has to meet and celebrate the sun when it shines brightest. For even on cold days in California, if you hit it right around 2pm, and place yourself in direct sun, you can be warmed. You can be tended to by the sun’s glorious rays. It’s California winter’s daily benediction, and if you can, you must revel in it for a moment. I lay down in a quasi dog park in North Oakland, our kids climbed rocks. It was the ecstatic tea party moment of summer camping, but ten minutes from home. We found a palm frond and a dog-chewed tennis ball and played some baseball. Joy is shared close attention, no matter where it presents itself.

Over Winter Break, we were back on the road, but we held close the lessons of the local ramble, and were guided by the sun’s appearances. We road-tripped down the California Coast. We caught the few days it didn’t rain for some camping, near Santa Barbara and Malibu and their exclusive glory. The sun came out, we unrolled our blanket, and the million dollar views were ours too. We jumped off sand dune cliffs and made diving catches. We played the game we used to call “Get Dad Down” but Juniper calls Matador, with her as the baby bull trying to pin me to the sand.

The sun set, a blue light filled the sky. We thought about going out to eat, but we popped out our camping stove and made soup and grilled cheese under the parking lot lightpole. A pair of joggers went by so slow slowly, I was mesmerized. I challenged everyone to try to recreate their slow jog. And so one by one, under the parking lot lights, we had a little street theater, as first Lyra, then Winston, then Juniper, then I tried to recreate the slowest joggers in Malibu. We all dissolved into giggles every time. We had spent the day immersed in experiences with each other, our attention captured by the world. It was the best possible show we could imagine, for a very captive audience of four.

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On a cold December night in Salamanca, Spain in 2000, the trio of young Spanish men didn’t know I was satirizing American obliviousness when I jumped onto the rim of a fountain in their hometown. They didn’t know I was ashamed of my fellow American students’ inability to integrate into Spanish society. They didn’t know I had been fastidious in doing so—joining a club basketball team, a student theater troupe, and a Humanist political cadre that “published” (photocopied) a monthly zine called Alternativas.

They didn’t know I had read Las Venas Abiertas de America Latina, the pro-forma critique of American power that every politically-minded Spanish student demanded I read. That I’d made good friends with a group of Mexican, Argentine, and Colombian students I met in Humanist circles. Among them was Sergio, a Marxist law student from Hermosillo who loved baseball, quoting Rousseau, and serenading women on his cheap guitar. Humberto, a zen-like intellectual flirting with priesthood from Tijuana. Marcella, a soft-spoken wallflower from Salta, Argentina. And Laura, an indie rocker gordita from Mexico City.

All they saw was a puckish gringo, with long hair and leather jacket (I really was trying to blend in), jump onto the edge of one of their town’s fountains and shout something that other Americans were laughing at. I had made it a point to not hang out with the other Americans mostly. But it was their last night in Salamanca after their fall semester study abroad. I had been taking classes with them—a ridiculous exercise in low-level academics to hungover twenty year-olds. I realized I could withdraw from Northwestern, save two quarters of financial aid ability, and enroll directly in the famous University of Salamanca for $500 for the spring semester. I was staying for another six months. I thought I’d send off the American students in my group with a thrill (I was, I humbly submit, a pretty fun dude to hang out with).

But now one of the Spanish guys was yelling at me: “Pero que haces gillipollas?!” (What are you doing asshole?) I tried to explain that I was making a joke about us obnoxious Americans. But they were drunk, I had been drinking too. It was not a recipe for mutual understanding. They weren’t big tough dudes, they were about my size. And in a Spanish college town in 2000, it didn’t even cross my mind that they might have a gun or even a knife. So when I couldn’t explain the backstory, I thought, screw it, you only live once, let’s see how you do. I at first insisted I fight one of them, shouting, “Solo tu y yo! Tu y yo!” (Just me and you! Me and you!) Which is hilarious. Was I thinking they would abide by some romantic notion of the honor of a fair fight?

No, they were not going to send out one of their three dudes to fight me, they were going to try to kick my ass and teach me a lesson. So it was them against me and another pacifist, artistic-minded kid from Berkeley who was also not a fighter. I don’t remember much after that except it was a full-on brawl, punches were thrown on all sides, I was on the ground at one point with a boot closing in on my chin, and I might have got knocked out for a moment. It did not last long. I certainly did not win.

But I was fine. I was mostly upset that I wasn’t able to talk them down. And explain the context. Of course I didn’t have the time or space to do that then, and the optics were just too bad. The story wasn’t over yet though.

That fall I had been living with a salty Argentine widow of a Spanish bullfighter named MC (short for Mary Carmen). She made fatty dinners and slim breakfasts and I rented a room from her. She was a hoot, and a true original, and even helped me make sure I didn’t get ripped off when I bought my leather jacket. But when I enrolled directly in the University, I wanted more independence, and found a room for $125 a month. The main roommate was a deeply boring engineering student who loved what he called “el cine Americano.” He did not mean Spike Lee and the Coen Brothers. He watched Michael Bay and Mel Gibson action movies at loud volume and once a month his conservative buddies would gather and get staggeringly drunk in the living room.

The other roommate I didn’t meet in my first visit. He wasn’t a college student—he worked a construction job and was gone early in the morning and ate at his parent’s house. But when I signed the lease, he was there, and we both did a double-take. It looked dead-on like one of the guys who I had fought with a month earlier. Now he was wearing a sweater and watching TV and a big smile lit up his face. We couldn’t directly acknowledge the fight, it would have been too weird.

And we were both not entirely sure we had the right person. But he said, “So you like going out and partying a lot?” (Oye te gusta salir por la noche, eh?) We exchanged a bemused smile, like could this really be?

I chuckled and said, no, I don’t actually go out that much. Though there was one night I regret in December. There was no way to explain everything then. I had been in the wrong. I had been an idiot. He didn’t have the context of what was happening, or who I was. And that was the lesson. I didn’t get to control the context. The context for him was that these damn study abroad students flooded his hometown, and were disrespectful. I was trying to satirize it, by doing a grossly performative version of it. But all he saw was the worst version of me, with none of the context.

This story came to mind as I’ve been mulling how do we Make the Democrats Cool Again. Though neither party is wildly popular, the Democratic Party is at historic lows in popularity. Yes, I know the November election results were a resounding victory for Democrats. But they are still out of power in all three branches of government (President, Congress, Supreme Court). And there’s many states they used to be competitive in that they aren’t anymore (Florida, Ohio, Iowa, West Virginia, to name a few).

And Democrats are in some way in a similar position as I was on that frigid night. If they could just get a fair hearing, they might be able to make their case. The problem is right now, it’s hard to even get a hearing. Many of the disaffected and angry voters who voted in Trump are getting quick clips on social media. They see the 2025 American politics version of a guy standing on their town fountain, with no context, and they think “I hate those people.”

At least I was able to (improbably) see my Salamanca sparring partner again and make my case. When I walked into the apartment I saw first his shock and then sheepish admiration that I would scrap that night and then show up a month later looking to rent a room. Of course I had no idea til I walked into the living room to sign the lease that it would be him, but still. And there I tried in a roundabout way to give some context to the events of that night. I told him, yeah I actually can’t stand how loud Americans can be (though Spaniards were super loud too), how it must be annoying when they carouse and don’t show respect. And that his work in construction must be hard, much harder than us students who got to spend our time in books. He agreed, and we swapped grins. He wasn’t around the apartment much, but we got on well together when he was. He went to bed incredibly early by Spanish standards (before 10pm) his lunch-pail packed and ready to grab before dawn.

The difficulty for Democrats is that they don’t get a chance to have a reconciliation with everyone they’ve rubbed the wrong way. But what Democrats do have control over is at least admitting they can be wrong and annoying. Traveling around the country after Covid, I learned how school shut-downs drove a huge amount of voter anger. Democrats didn’t know it at the time, but it’s now widely understood that shutting down schools for as long as we did was not only unpopular but had really negative effects on student health. Or the way the extended closure of businesses hurt people’s abilities to provide for their families. Democratic Senator Ruben Gallego thinks this led directly to abandonment of Democrats and revenge votes for Republicans among Latino men in 2024 who felt “betrayed by Democrats, the people who are supposed to have our backs.” Said Gallego on the Pod Save America podcast, “Latino men—they always meet a challenge by working harder. Get another job, work more.” And they felt they weren’t allowed to do that. I heard this echoed in talking to Latino voters in Nevada and Arizona.

The tricky thing is even getting a message out to folks now in the most crowded, noisy, overstimulated world that is the internet. Where there is little-to-no context. And you are competing against dance crazes and comedy clips. And so the task is to be funny and engaging and accessible while also bringing the urgency of fending off creeping authoritarianism.

It feels like we may be reaching a tipping point with social media. I’ve heard more and more people say it’s not the solution. That we have to build an alternative ecosystem. That it’s crowding out context, and nuance, and humanization. People who haven’t seen my new piece Takes All Kinds often ask, does it show that we actually have more in common with each other than we don’t? And I demure, as that’s a little neat. What it shows is that the disagreements are real and big, but the show humanizes people, so that even if you don’t agree with them, you like them. There’s not the revulsion of online discourse. There is the joy of human connection, so difference is a cause for curiosity and revelation.

And because the show is looking at how people change and the people who make change, the bulk of the show is portraits of people who are doing the hard work of persuading, in hostile environments, person to person. The road back to popularity is through humility, and listening, but also the courage to go into difficult spaces and not back down from a disagreement but relish the work of persuasion. I was an idiot standing on the fountain, and that isn’t a place to persuade anyone. But when I didn’t back down from a fight, and then later admitted to my mistakes, I was given the grace of an explanation.

He gave me grace because it was an isolated moment in time. And because it was pre-social media/cameraphones, there was no permanent record. Social media presents itself as a collection of casual toss-off musings. Yet it has the permanence and distribution of what we used to call a newspaper of record. If my sparring had happened today, it would have been filmed and posted online, and defined our relationship. There would be no moving on, there would be no grace.

I started the research process of Takes All Kinds looking at reconciliation. That changed when so many people I encountered felt they weren’t ready for that. That the stakes were too high, the disagreements too great. Grace is different. It doesn’t demand what might feel like a pat and easy peace on heated issues. Grace asks for a suspension of full judgement, it opens up further windows of context. If Democrats are going to return to power, we have to find a way to give grace to each other first and foremost. It’s clear the purity politics that defined the post-Obama era has led to a dwindling, overly-cautious, and backbiting coalition. We have to make room for those we squabble with, and cannot live in a forever-internet world of bad faith and grudge-holding over grace.

Thanksgiving is a complicated and overwhelming time for a lot of people. There’s a sense of needing to have reconciliation with family and friends you might have lingering resentment towards. In college I never came home for Thanksgiving—it was too much money to fly home for Chicago for only a few days. So I was always taken in by a family who worked at Northwestern, a Professor or administrator. I was the rando at some other family’s Thanksgiving, got to meet a completely new wacky family. There was one time when the patriarch was an eccentric Professor Emeritus who disagreed with pretty much everything I said, and would begin his rebuttal with a high-pitched, “Well…” before launching into a kind yet thorough dismantling of my inchoate politics. It was full of curiosity and kindness. He disagreed but he showed me grace. If the Democrats are going to get back to power, this has to be their North Star. We need to get back to hosting a come-as-you-are big Thanksgiving table, where every straggler and heckler and rando is not on the edge of banishment but worthy of further questioning.

A couple weeks ago in Charleston, South Carolina I had the surreal and ecstatic experience of embodying Margaret Seidler and Polly Shepherd for them and their community at PURE Theater in my show Takes All Kinds. Margaret and Polly came both nights.

The two monologues I crafted from hours of hanging out with them is more than just a retelling of their stories. It is a record of the forging of a relationship. My presence, through jokes and comments the characters make about me, is always reflected in the piece portrayed onstage. It’s a melding of their story and my experience of it and the meeting of those worlds. When reflected back to a roomful of people who know and revere these people, it is the closest experience I know of the divine.

I get glimpses of this possibility during the research process, when I am sitting with someone and hearing their story and hanging out with them. I’m hyper-attuned to how they shake their head, or raise up their eyebrows, or suck their teeth, or push out their lower lip or force a smile through the pain of a revelation, or throw their head back in laughter. Their honesty and vulnerability is a gift they give. And I know in that moment that this might be a gift I can give to thousands of people. It takes months to find the right way to transpose it through my voice and body, and sometimes I can’t. (And I feel sadness when I can’t.) But having done this work for twenty years, I know instinctively when I am experiencing something that is stage-worthy, or even stage-essential.

This connection is one-to-one though. In the performing of it, it becomes one to many. The goal is for every audience member to experience what it was to be me when receiving that gift. When this reflecting back is then done for that person, and they are surrounded by their community, it becomes something else. The audience recognizes this person, so there is astonishment, and laughter. But there is also tremendous stillness. Collective witness is often understood in the religious or biblical sense, but it also means the making of meaning of an often traumatic or painful event. Through the transformation and elevation of it to the stage, the portrayal of even painful stories can become beautiful, funny, even joyous.

For a story like Polly’s, of surviving the Mother Emmanuel church massacre, which happened a mile from where I was performing, I struggled immensely with the question: who am I to tell this story? What gives me the right to tell it? I was introduced to her by Margaret, and I was daunted by these questions.

Everyone insisted I go talk to Polly, and when I arrived at her house in April 2023, she welcomed me in and we sat and talked for several hours. I came back in September and again we talked, and joked, and I learned her whole back story too. Of picking cotton all day as a teenager in the summer for spending money, stopping only to eat a moon pie for lunch. Of marrying and having four boys and then moving to New York and raising them on her own. Of becoming a nurse and working full-time, and living in The Bronx, as I did for several years. And of her love of theater—seeing Paul Robeson and The Wiz on Broadway. And her belief that you gotta tell the story.

Given her blessing, and with the enormity of her story, the question became for me and my many collaborators on this show, how could we not tell this story? How could we not honor the gift she gave in sharing it? How can we not share the experience of her fortitude in surviving that terrible evening in the basement of an iconic church in a city freighted with American history?

We tried many versions in workshops, but we ended up presenting it as plainly as she did, through my voice and body. And many nights we have felt audiences draw close and still and gasp in awe at this woman and her story.

Yet to perform it for her and many members of her close community at the show was an even higher bar. And it just so happened that two pastors who know her well from two prominent churches in Charleston, one Black, one white, were directly in my line of my sight while embodying her. And though I was trying to be completely committed to the embodiment, I could feel the power of human beings to collectively make meaning out of our experience. (It is this ability to make meaning that defines us as humans, that separates us from our forebears, our previous iterations that fell by the wayside.)

And then three minutes later I’m embodying Margaret, who through a random DNA test found out her fourth great-grandfather was one of the biggest slave-traders in Charleston. And then became a crusader for talking about Charleston’s history so the deeply segregated city can come together across the racial divide. (Both my director Aldo and I felt that the most integrated place we were during our time in Charleston was at that theater.) And this time, I can tell I’m looking directly at Margaret while I’m embodying her.

I couldn’t see the tears that were streaming down her cheeks (her husband Bob told me after the show). I knew it was her because I heard her delightful peal of laughter earlier in the show. And she is sitting right in my line of sight when I’m embodying her. So I’m looking at her, but really I’m not. It’s Margaret looking at Dan. We have momentarily been transposed through the power of our collective imagination. And again this tremendous stillness, with laughter of recognition, a gasp or two. It felt like the audience and I were all laid open, emotionally naked.

I have felt a similar feeling of nakedness before God when I go to Black Baptist churches. I usually end up crying at some point. Especially when the choir is good. At some point I am overwhelmed and awestruck by the tenacity and beauty of hundreds of years of culture coming through the music. And I am reduced to tears. Afterwards I express my profound gratitude. And sometimes have to assure church regulars I’m not a recovering addict having a come-to-Jesus moment.

Performing these stories back in Charleston felt a little like church. I didn’t grow up in a faith tradition. I am a humanist above all, which lately feels like a quixotic torch to bear. But having a communal experience like that, of making meaning, of bearing witness, of an unreal level of connection, and all while having moments of huge laughter, it is hard to come down off that high.

After the show Margaret said “it wasn’t just like you were telling my story, it was like you were living it right there with me.” Polly said, “I was curious to see if you got the story right, cause a lot of people haven’t. You got it right to a T.” We did the show the next night, and it was an even warmer reception. We recorded testimonials of audience and participant reactions. You can watch them here.

Someone approached Aldo and I after the show and said he was so moved he’d like to underwrite the presentation of the show in another city where people can come see their story onstage. We have targeted Atlanta, so the voting rights organizers I profiled there can come see the show. So I’m back to the grind of hustling to try to find a theater in Atlanta that will present the show.

Margaret has written a book about her story, accompanied by beautiful illustrations by artist John W. Jones that are imagined portraits of enslaved people Margaret’s 4th great grandfather sold. The people appear fully humanized, usually engaged in their special skills as were identified from the historical bills of sale. It is beautiful and stunning, and you can check it out and buy the book here. Polly has a documentary coming out about her story called Be Still And Know that is premiering Oct. 17th at the AfroSouth Film Festival.

Good stories are meant to be told as widely as possible. The version I present in my show doesn’t block other versions, it is a force-multiplier. As Margaret said after seeing the show, “Your play is giving our stories access to this country in ways Polly and I couldn’t imagine.” When I texted Polly to thank her again for participating in the talkback, she texted back simply: “We must do it again.”

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He was gliding me home at midnight through the back roads in Oakland, our faces flickering in slatted shadows through the taxi confessional glances of his rear view mirror. He had worked in construction and then shifted to Lyft when it began and drivers were lured by good rates and sign-up bonuses. Then Lyft changed the payment system, and his earnings plummeted.

His use of convenience to describe so much wasn’t lost in translation, it illuminated a central truth of our age. Disruptive tech has provided maximum convenience. We no longer need to find a taxi. Or arrive on time to see a movie. Or call up a restaurant and wait on hold before placing a dinner order. Or go to a store to buy a book. We can summon a personal party in twenty minutes, delivering cocktails and cannabis, fine dining and flowers with a handful of clicks on our phone. It’s an astounding time.

And yet on this Labor Day weekend, I can’t help but think of the past, present, and future of work. I am at heart, a hustler. I made 50 cents an hour when I was 8 years old playing with toddlers at Paula’s playgroup. At 11, I made $35 a week delivering the San Francisco Examiner newspaper. I started babysitting at 12, made $4.25 an hour working for SF Park and Rec when I was 15, and made $600 (plus room and board) at St. Dorothy’s Rest summer camp, scrubbing dishes and bathrooms when I was 16. By 18, I was vending at all the ballparks in the Bay Area. I had two work-study jobs in college. When I graduated, I worked as an IATSE stagehand. I painted houses long enough to know how hard that is, and then built a niche as a solo performer/practioner of journalistic theater.

So I appreciate all the hustlers. And so many of us are running several gigs at once. My barber is going to culinary school so she can cook and cut hair. My friend Pop in the Bronx works two full-time jobs: he’s an orderly at Montefiore hospital on the night shift, and then works for an agency that places veterans in affordable housing during the day. This year I’ve been performing my new show, have taught at two different colleges, two high schools, and work for the Formerly Incarcerated People’s Performance Project.

Disruption has always been a feature of capitalism, but now it can happen at a snap. A change in the algorithm at one of the big social media sites, and an online news magazine sees its traffic completely disappear.

Lyft is the receptacle for those displaced and disrupted by the modern economy. There was Fernando in Brooklyn (via Ecuador) on the drive to JFK, who had made a good living as a jeweler in New Jersey, and bought a house there, before the pandemic disrupted the in-person jewelry business. Tony in Oakland (via Vietnam) who had to shutter the family restaurant when diners started doordashing, and his profit margins shrunk.

When I created the show Each And Every Thing eleven years ago, it was a rollicking and rueful look at the dangers of becoming addicted to our phones. (Including a satirical song Phone Zombies which we made into a ridiculous music video. It doesn’t age well artistically but is a funny moment in time.) There was a line one of the socially awkward Digital Detox retreat attendees says in that show: “we are trading awkwardness for shallowness.” He was talking about the way we interact with each other, and in the eleven years since that show came out, that essential trade has exploded. I’d tweak it slightly to say we’ve traded catharsis and culture for convenience.

In 2014, I was more concerned about what our attention habits were doing to our social fabric. It was only the beginning of a force that would blast holes in our cultural economy, our attention spans, and the health of our democracy. I knew it was coming for my art form too, but not as relentlessly as it has. I’ve been creating art that relies on the joy, comedy, and catharsis of deep humanization. I do it only for live audiences, and for twenty years I’ve enjoyed the miracle of making a living doing it (with side-hustles like teaching, and Substacking filling in the gaps).

When I got in the cab with Wagner at the Oakland airport, I had just flown back from performing an absolutely rocking show of TAKES ALL KINDS at Joe’s Pub in New York. My craft is as good as it’s ever been. The audience and critical response has been as strong as I’ve ever experienced. And yet it’s harder than ever to let people know my art form even exists, let alone why and how they will love it.

Live theater attendance has dropped precipitously since the pandemic. The double whammy is that social media has not just gobbled up our time and attention, it has usurped traditional media. “Earned media” (press coverage) as opposed to “paid media” (ads) used to be the pillar on which indie art could prosper. Now artists are forced to create our own media and disseminate it ourselves online. Which is a whole other job (any twenty year-olds out there want to be my intern and run my social media?) And puts us in the awkward position of doing endless self-promotion. Twenty years ago, it was considered gauche to be constantly self-promoting. Now, it’s mandatory.

The difficulty of selling theater is that there is no online version which is anywhere as good as the in-person version. Stand-up comedy has tripled its ticket sales revenue in the last decade. Because stand-up transfers really well to film. It doesn’t engage the audience in a collective act of imagination, it’s a person talking directly to an audience as themself. Watching a stand-up comedian tell a couple jokes on Instagram makes a lot of sense. Watching a clip of a play feels weird, like the people pretending to be all these other people were caught on camera doing this bizarre, extended role-play. The context is not baked-in.

That the dominance of video and images is happening as we take an authoritarian turn isn’t a coincidence. Cultural critics from Walter Benjamin to Chris Hedges have warned that a society that largely looks to images instead of words to define and make meaning of itself is vulnerable to fascism.

I’m on a quixotic quest to Make Theater Cool Again. Michael Socrates Moran, one of the developers of Takes All Kinds and the artistic director of Oakland Theater Project, is writing some brilliant pieces about how he believes theater can save us, not merely how we can save theater.

He begins by reminding us that “The word “theater” comes from the Greek theatron: “the seeing place.” And then goes on to say:

“One of the utilities of art theatre is that it can reveal what resides behind our perception of utility…” he writes. When people from different backgrounds experience a play together, and share physical space together “they begin not only to experience the space differently, but to experience each other differently…..The underlying philosophy is this: experience is embodied, and shared experience is different than information. We are awash in data about one another yet bereft of shared experience.”

My life’s work has been dedicated to having shared experiences with people from wildly different backgrounds, and then translating those experiences, in an entertaining form, to a roomful of strangers. The power of that initial shared experience grows exponentially. It ripples out and stays with people as they then move through the world. Maybe it even enlarges their ability and curiosity to have shared experiences with people they never would. It’s a terrible business model, as it’s based on human presence at a time when more and more people are cultivating their community online. I still believe it’s essential nourishment and medicine, and it’s the greatest honor and privilege to have it be my life’s labor. It’s hard to know if this gig of a lifetime will be up in two years or twenty. In the meantime, I’m gonna keep hustling.

I’ve told the story before, but it keeps growing, so it’s worth telling again. In 2003 I lived in Roger’s Park in Chicago. It was my last two quarters at Northwestern University and I got a studio apartment two blocks from Lake Michigan for $500 a month. Living alone with no housemates for the first time was heaven. I kept Spanish hours, cooking up oily dinners at 9pm and studying til 1am or 2am. I’d take walks around the frozen tundra of the Lakeshore, the clack of the giant blocks of ice knocking in the water, stark blues, and whites, and nobody else there except an old Eastern European couple.

When I graduated Northwestern in June, I decided to stay in Chicago. I got cast in an esoteric movement-theater ensemble, so I had a nominal reason to stay. Really I just didn’t want to leave. Life was too sweet. Rent was too cheap. I wore shorts every day and had a steel frame bike I’d bought at the police bike auction. I could mash around Chicago’s Northside neighborhoods, or to vend at Wrigley Field, where I sold hot dogs and beers. My friend Pratim would drive down from Evanston in his seemingly luxurious sedan (was it an Acura?) and we’d slide thru Chicago’s neighborhood at night after a rainstorm. Or we’d meet up with Adriana and Eva and Kostas and Geoffrey, international students I’d befriended from the International Playaz theater group I’d started.

But often I had evenings to myself. I no longer had to study for hours at night. I didn’t have internet at my apartment. And in summer, Chicago blooms. I’d walk to the beach at night, swim out far in the lake alone. I met other people at the lake, or at a block party, and we’d start hanging out. Tasha from the Southside. Sabriyah from Atlanta. Mike from Indiana—who had enlisted in the National Guard—until he got called up to fight in Iraq.

At the end of my block on Pratt Blvd was a 7-11. And right around there congregated a handful of young Black guys I could tell were my age. They served nickle and dimebags to students at nearby Loyola University. They were also having fun, cracking jokes, laughing. I had just graduated with a degree in Performance Studies with a specialty in doing ethnographic research. I had travelled around the world on a Circumnavigator’s Club grant talking to factory workers, surfers, union organizers, entrepreneurs, hundreds of people in eight different countries (this would become my first show, Circumnavigator). I had created a ten-minute performance piece while at Northwestern based on a basketball court on Howard street where I was the only white guy. But this was different, as I had no real reason to introduce myself. And yet I was curious about their lives and wanted to connect. So one night I walked up to the guy who seemed most open and said I want to know what your life is like.

He said his name was Endo and I could ride with him no problem. So that night, and many nights after, I walked up and down Sheridan Ave, hearing some of his story, but mostly just hanging out. There was SeeKnow, the trenchantly funny and croaky-throated wise sage of the group. There was Gusto, the youngest, who had a penchant for eating a big Gyro and going home to sleep early. And there was Coco, who had a silky smooth voice, sported a black doo-rag, and said upon meeting me, “Wassup Moe, I think I remember you from the slave ships.” He was kidding, but the point was made. They were Black men from the Southside with no college education. I was a middle-class white kid from San Francisco who’d just graduated from Northwestern University. The privilege gap was huge.

But we were all single young men living within a few blocks of each other in the summer of our twenty-third or twenty-fourth year. In Nigeria, you hang out with your age mates. It’s natural. You’ve been shaped by world and local events in a similar way during your upbringing. You’re in the same stage of life. Though Coco and SeeKnow knew each other from grammar school, Gusto and Endo were just living in the area and had met up the same way I had. They just wanted to kick it, make some money, and enjoy Chicago’s summer. And my audio recorder was a thrill. They loved to put in the headphones and hear the crystal clear sound of the recording being made.

“The 7-11, that’s where the party was at,” says SeeKnow, 22 years later as we slide to get burritos in Coco’s Nissan Sentra when we meet up again earlier this month. We order steak burritos and catch up. I repeat the line Coco said upon meeting me, and we all crack up laughing.

In 2003, my studio apartment at The Seville was the crash spot. SeeKnow and Endo crashed on the couch regularly, and we’d fall asleep telling stories about our lives. Endo liked to party and had a reckless nihilistic streak. SeeKnow was the most vulnerable, and told me about his rough childhood. Of a mother griped by drug addiction, a younger sister who had developmental disabilities. At thirteen he moved out and moved in with a childhood acquaintance three years older than him who lived in Rogers Park. One night a dispute with another group of guys turned violent. SeeKnow got beaten up so bad he was put into a coma.

SeeKnow was a survivor with a big heart. We picked up odd hustler jobs together through a fellow vendor from the Cubs games. On Fourth of July we were selling glow sticks downtown in Grant Park. We were supposed to sell them for $2 a piece, but no one was buying. So we knocked it down to one dollar each. Street corner hustlers know their customers well, and will sometimes accept a Short—8 or 9 dollars for what’s usually 10—in a show of compassion and customer loyalty. SeeKnow started doing the same with the glowsticks, giving two-for-ones for single Moms he knew couldn’t afford to be spending all that money on a day-glo green stick.

I brought them up to a Northwestern party at the international students dorm. Another time they scored an invite to a Loyola party further south in Chicago. We’d show up as this motley crew. Endo, always ready to keep the party going, SeeKnow analyzing all the ways he didn’t fit in, and Coco scheming on how he could come up and get rich. And then me, the ultimate oddball, with my glasses and baggy shorts and usually my audio recorder in my pocket.

Other times we’d go explore a new neighborhood, Belmont or Andersonville or one time Rush Street, the polo shirts and white-backwards-cap frat-boy apotheosis. SeeKnow was my wingman on a double date when I took a girl to a poetry slam at the Green Mill. It didn’t go great, and afterwards SeeKnow had good advice. “Dan, you need to take a girl bowling, some kind of activity, wrap your arm around her, show her how you do it.”

Towards the end of the summer, after the esoteric theater group performed our piece of movement theater with little impact, I got offered an internship with a small stipend at a youth news website in San Francisco. I decided I would go back to the Bay for the winter. I planned to come back to Chicago in the spring, storing my bike at a friend’s place.

On a night in mid-September, I had plans to meet up with SeeKnow further down in Chicago. He said he was playing dice but to come meet up with him later. I didn’t hear from him again that night, and a couple days later found out SeeKnow got locked up. Pratim and I visited him in the Cook County jail. I called his lawyer and tried to testify on SeeKnow’s behalf, using my Northwestern white boy privilege for whatever it might be worth. I moved back to San Francisco, but we exchanged letters when he was in prison. Then I went to Nigeria for a year. I let go of my old Chicago cell phone number. He got out of prison. We lost touch.

Until 2015, when the story of getting to know SeeKnow and Coco in summer 2003 was a small piece of my show Each And Every Thing. I tried to get back in touch. I tried old phone numbers but none worked. My wife looked him up on Facebook, and sure enough he was there. We caught up over the phone, and I visited Chicago in Spring of 2017.

He’d become Candyman, selling snacks and candy to kids on the South Side of Chicago after school. He’d pull up in his two-door sedan, bust out a folding table from the back of his car right when the schools let out and do a brisk trade. He was also painting landscapes and portraits and burning mix CDs for sale.

He was hanging with a charismatic, short, comedic hustler named Sniper, and we spent a couple days together, going out to lunch at Daley’s, the famous Southside soul food diner, driving out to the ritzy suburbs, making the afternoon Candyman rounds. Coco came too one afternoon, and as he dropped into a monologue about the National Security Agency and SeeKnow was giving some kid a quarter off on his bag of chips, it was like nothing had changed.

A month or so later SeeKnow’s car got impounded cause Sniper was driving it with a suspended license. SeeKnow fell behind on rent, lost his apartment, and had mental health struggles. I visited him again in September 2017 and he was in a psych ward. I talked to the nurses and gave him some background on what he’d been through. I did a fundraiser after a run of shows and got him three thousand dollars to help with his housing insecurity. And he eventually got in a program that gives him monthly housing assistance along with disability and medicare. He had to spend some weeks at a halfway house and we’d talk. He said he sometimes wondered how much longer he can make it. I told him “SeeKnow I want to know you when we’re old men.”

When I walked up to see him on a warm Sunday this month, it feels like that day of us being old men has already halfway come. He looks older, with grays seeping in. He’s on Medicare, but is worried that his benefits are going to get cut. “Trump already signed it,” he says, shaking his head. I have hip arthritis. When Coco comes up from the South Side, he looks young and slim but discloses he has kidney disease. “I look like I lost weight, right?” Coco asks. “Yeah, kidney disease will do that to you.” He says he’s on the kidney donor list and goes for dialysis regularly. His Mom, who worked at Loyola for thirty years, bought a building in Englewood on the South Side, so there’s a unit for her and a unit for Coco.

At least SeeKnow and Coco are surviving. Endo passed away from an overdose ten years ago. Gusto is serving a 25 years to life sentence for a murder charge. Sniper, who I only met for a couple days in 2017, got shot in the head and died in 2019. And then there’s me, the white boy with a top-tier college education, a hustling artist doing reasonably well, a third of the way through a 30 year mortgage on a house in Oakland. The story of America’s racial and class divide couldn’t be more clear.

The only thing unusual is we’ve kept up a friendship that has bridged these divides, and so rather than read about it, we see it up close and personal. As the radio journalist and writer Al Letson puts it, “listening deeply is an act of love.” To pay attention to someone closely is an act of devotion. And when you are doing that, you inevitably appreciate and enjoy each other’s company.

And so hanging with SeeKnow and Coco 22 years after the summer we first met, we’re just hanging as friends. We’re three middle-aged men. There are still stark divides in the worlds we live in, and we offer windows into those worlds. These types of friendships are rare in America. And I believe it plays a role in our country’s fundamental unraveling.

I feel unending gratitude for everybody I’ve met who’s opened up to me and showed me kindness. But Coco and SeeKnow, as the two members of that summer of 2003, who are still alive and free, there’s something extra. That summer gave me confidence to approach anybody. I could bridge the biggest divides there are—of race, class, education, and do it with joy and vulnerability. I learned a ton that summer, about the difference between walking on boulevards and alleys, of how to tailor one’s demeanor based on the situation, but principally that if I come with real respect and curiosity, most human beings will recognize that and reciprocate that. As SeeKnow says, “I get respect because I give it.”

We go get burritos and then drive around the neighborhood, shaking our heads at some of the new condos that have risen up on Howard Street. We go to the Lakeshore. The weather turns from the usual hot and humid July to windy and cool. We talk in the blustery wind, about the buildings Coco wants to buy, and the years he drove Uber and Lyft, of dealing with drunk drivers, or people seeming so unhinged as to be violent. Then we go back to SeeKnow’s apartment and talk some more on wooden stools in his living room.

They get to talking about guys they hung out with when they had some business in Quincy, Illinois, down by St. Louis a few years before we met. Names get thrown around. Two Tone. Kool-Aid. What were Two Tone and Kool Aid up to now I ask? “I really have no idea,” says Coco. “They were just guys we hung out with that summer.” It goes unsaid that I very well might have been just a guy they hung out with in another summer. As we laugh and talk and catch up, it feels both completely normal and a small miracle we are still in touch.

Coco has to get going—he has a zoom meeting for a Master Gardener program he’s taking. He and his Mom already own one vacant lot and he wants to start growing and selling vegetables. “They accept link card, you know food stamps, at farmers markets. There’s money there,” Coco says. Plus with his kidney disease, he wants to start eating better.

I sit in my rental car, processing it all. I realize I didn’t get to say a proper goodbye to SeeKnow. And then I see SeeKnow come around the corner to say a real good bye. We hug, and I surprise myself when I say, “I love you bro. Stay up.” He squeezes me close for a moment and I’m again overwhelmed by gratitude at the connection I’m still able to have with him.

I go back to the Lakeshore, walk on the block where I lived in 2003. It’s a longer block than I remember, and my hips hurt. I realize I’m exhausted having only slept a few hours the previous night. So I look to go lay down on a bench in the little park by the lake.

As I plod to a promising bench, a middle-aged woman with a West African accent walks up to me and asks if I can help her with something. She’s a home health aide and is trying to reply to an email on her phone to a potential employer, but doesn’t know how. I say I’m happy to help. So she dictates her response and I tap it out on her phone, and sign it with her name, Doreen. We chat a bit afterward. She’s from Accra, Ghana and has been living in the U.S. for twenty plus years, fourteen in Chicago. I tell her I’ve been to Accra, and she says she likes it better there, and plans to go home soon. She says everyone works all the time in America, and so they’re always getting sick. I think about SeeKnow and the millions of others who will be losing their healthcare, the cruelty and crassness of it.

I get to my bench, lay down on my back, and look at the tree rustling in the wind above me. Roger’s Park is still one of the most diverse neighborhoods in the country, as it was when I lived there. It’s what still makes it great. It was the place I landed after college, and it opened up its arms to me that summer. More specifically, Coco and SeeKnow and Endo looked back into my eyes when I reached out, and they said sure you can hang out, why not? We’re just human beings, all young men on this block for the summer. And I wonder how many young men in this next generation will look for and be met with that same kindness and openness?

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I was eleven years old when I came to the plate in my Little League playoffs at foggy Parkside Field in San Francisco, with my team trailing by two runs in the last inning. I was scrawny, and scrappy. A solid fielder and pitcher, but not a good hitter. My coach pulled me aside as I went to bat and said, “Danny, crowd the plate, and don’t swing. Just try to get a walk.”

He was a jerk ‘80s coach out of a John Hughes movie. His name was Rich. He had feathered hair, drove a Red Porsche, and always played his son over more talented players. He took over the team midway through the season, when Mark, our lovably rowdy, working-class main coach, got transferred to another Rec Center.

I leaned over the plate and crouched down my already small frame, making a difficult strike zone for the pitcher. He pitched three straight balls as I stood motionless. The, umpire, perhaps sensing my strategy, called a borderline pitch strike one. And then strike two. And then strike three. I walked back to the dugout and started crying. Not because I had struck out, but because Coach Rich had zero confidence in me. (We ended up winning in a walk off hit by Shane, our slugger, on a ball he grounded up the middle and through the center fielder’s legs for a three-run-homer.)

The next Spring, at tryouts, Rich was there with a stopwatch, timing us as we ran from base to base. He had taken over the team as a full time coach. I was speedy, and did the first day of tryouts and running drills, but felt completely uninterested in this version of the team. I didn’t come back for the second day, and never played Little League again.

I played for the Glen Park Rec Center team, and in the ‘80s and ‘90s the Rec Centers in San Francisco always had a director, usually African-American, who was a pillar in the community. Glen Park had Keith. Upper Noe Rec had Marcus. At a time when the crack epidemic was ravaging families, and divorce rates were peaking, they were an extra support for young boys.

Keith always had a kind word for his players, especially the scrappy ones like me. (Upper Noe Rec Center was more rag-tag, with a group of alcoholic middle-aged men who drank nightly behind the gym on a small patio.) At Glen Park, there was none of that. Keith’s office was always lively and orderly, a place to joke and talk smack, and get a snack if needed. (I later worked at Upper Noe Rec Center making $4.25 an hour when I was 15 years old).

Keith coached the older team at Glen Park that year, so my team—the 11 and 12-year-olds—got Mark. He gave me number 1, after Billie Martin, because I had a temper and a big heart, and played second base. I pitched too. I couldn’t throw that hard, but had enough accuracy from years of playing strikeouts. Mark gave me confidence; he believed in encouraging the kids. He cared, and he wore his heart on his sleeve. One time, he got ejected by the umpire for arguing too much. So he walked off the diamond at Parkside Field, stepped off the curb into the street and started rooting our team on from there.

I became addicted to sports from a young age. After we moved from Potrero Hill, we lived across the street from Upper Noe Rec Center, and my brother and I played there constantly. One day while walking up 30th Street alone, I got jumped by four kids, two of whom I knew from the park—Guillermo and Ricky. I only had two dollars on me, but the paltry amount of money made it all the more humiliating.

In middle school, there were epic three-on-three games I played with two of my best friends Brendan and Lars. We were three middle-class white boys from the neighborhood playing Ben, a silky smooth Fillipino guard, and Dexter and William, two Black kids from the Bernal Hill Projects. We played over and over, and they would generally beat us in close games (though we finally beat them one night, and ran it back and beat them again in a memorable triumph).

Dexter was short, scrappy, and had a temper like me. We also played against each other in pickup football, and were bitter rivals. The difference is he knew how to fight, and I didn’t. One time, in a scramble for a loose ball in a close pickup basketball game, he punched me in the ear. I didn’t back down, but I knew not to escalate.

A couple years later I switched from playing for Glen Park to Upper Noe, and both Ricky and Dexter were on my team. Ricky and I never talked about the fact he had jumped me. He was a bit of a ball hog, but he still had to pass to me. Dexter was brash as always, but was all about the team. In a timeout towards the end of a close game, as we huddled around the coach, Dexter draped his arm around me in a show of solidarity. Our past didn’t matter, we were on the same team. He had my back.

These lessons of solidarity, of negotiating differences in background, of living with the nuance of playing with kids who might have bullied you in the past, were hugely formative to me.

My son Winston has now started playing basketball and baseball. The basketball league is run by Oakland Park and Rec, and it’s great. It’s $50 to play. The two coaches play the kids equally. They are positive, and make practices fun. It’s a diverse group of kids from all over Oakland. Our team routinely gets smoked by hyper-skilled AAU teams that play year-round and dip into this local rec league to get extra reps.

The baseball team is run by Nol/Sol, a volunteer run organization, and most of the kids’ parents drive nice cars and live in the hills. There’s some aggro Sports Dad energy, and at times I’ve struggled with how competitive it is. A couple years ago, a coach on a previous team berated the team of 7-year-olds for not being ready before every pitch, saying, “Fernando Tatis just signed a three-hundred-million dollar contract. Cause he’s ready every play!” Before a recent game, another coach asked his players what’s the most important thing today and one answered, “to have fun?” “No, we want to win,” said the coach. “If you play hard and win then you will have fun.”

I told my friend Algiin, who grew up in the Fillmore District in the 1960s, and was a three sport athlete for San Francisco Polytechnic High School, about all this. He said, “It’s a product of today’s culture, which always asks, what can you accomplish? and what can you get out of this?” He said. “Not, what is your joy?”

Little league participation has decreased, and the lower on the income ladder a family is, the less likely they are to participate. While volunteer-run leagues have dwindled, “travel teams”— which are private for-profit businesses often run by former college players—have boomed into a $19.2 billion business. These teams often cost up to $2,500 or up to $10,000 a season.

The $250 Nol/Sol fee, which also allows scholarships, seems rootsy in comparison. (Meanwhile, sports gambling has exploded since it was widely legalized in 2018, going from $440 million in revenue in 2018 to $13.7 billion last year.) So kids are playing way less Little League baseball, and their parents are addicted to sports gambling.

I’ve been addicted to sports since I was a kid. I learned to read from the Sporting Green in the San Francisco Chronicle. But the introduction of widespread gambling threatens to tear apart the thing that makes sports great. At the Bay Bridge series over the weekend, Winston, my brother and I reveled in the centerfield bleachers that reminded me of old Candlestick Park days. The meager A’s fans gamely belted out “Let’s Go Oakland!” chants. Just before first pitch, one of the hard core Giants fans yelled out, “Bay Bridge Series Let’s Go!” There was rivalry, but we were united.

We later realized we were sitting a few rows back from friends, and one let us know of his parlay bet he had made on the game. He needed one more hit from Jung Hoo Lee to win. Sure enough, every time Jung Hoo Lee came to bat, there was a part of me rooting for him to score a run to complete his parlay bet. The thunderous chants of Jung Hoo Lee when he made a galloping catch in deep center had been the gallant play of the day. Now I couldn’t just enjoy the merriment. The parlay bet had wormed it’s way into my brain. Gambling pulls our focus from the theatrics and humanity. NBA players, in a recent survey, said their DMs are flooded every night with fans cursing them out and threatening violence for messing up their bets.

Over the last week, we had the Nol/Sol playoffs, and our kids have played a head-spinning six games in seven nights. I’ve spent more time over the last week with this random group of parents then I have with most of my friends the past year. I’ve gotten to enjoy the parents as a cast of characters.

There’s the fast-talking New Yorican in sales, a Theater Major in college who hits me with new Dad jokes every night. A union electrician who grew up in the Excelsior District in SF in the ‘80s and has four kids and a hard-nosed attitude. The mild-mannered tech startup CEO who brings an iPad and sits next to me in the outfield while I do my physical therapy exercises. The Mom who scores every game for us (it’s mandatory, and there’s full stats online after every game), whose son emerged as the star of the team. Multiple times parents have had to be umpires when the paid umps didn’t show up.

I told my last Little League at-bat story to a Dad on the team, a steady father of four who works for the City of Oakland and he said, “Yeah, well, coaches being a jerk is a way to get kids off the team.” I had nursed that story as a prime example of the toxicity of youth sports for years. Maybe I was more of an emotional handful than I realized. Maybe I wasn’t willing to change and adapt. Sure the coach was a jerk, but maybe it was a lesson in maintaining self-belief.

Being on the sidelines with my son’s team this last week, it’s been a magical run of snack coordination and cheering and nail-biting and late-game drama. In a must-win game earlier in the week, Winston was brought in to close out the game. He allowed two runs, and the other team had the tying run on second in the last inning with two outs. Winston had the count two balls and two strikes, and walked him on two close pitches. I told myself whatever happens to the next batter, I have to tell him he did great. But Lord, I really wanted him to get the confidence boost of succeeding. With the encouragement of his teammates, Winston struck out the final batter on three pitches and the team mobbed him.

Last night was the championship game, and my spot in the outfield was crowded with dozens of parents of the opposing team. Every close call was met with a flurry of objections from middle-aged parents in lawnchairs.

Our team rolled early, and heading into the last inning we were up by 12 runs. Teams are limited to scoring five runs per inning, so the game was already decided. The opposing coach came over before his team’s last at bat, shook our coach’s hands in congratulations, and gave him the case of Martinelli’s Apple Cider he had brought for their hoped-for celebration.

Our pitcher walked in four runs. Winston was brought in to close out the game with the bases loaded. He got one out, and then went up no balls, two strikes on the final batter. Our parents cheered in anticipation of a championship-clinching strikeout. Instead, the hitter smacked a ball through the infield that rolled through the center fielder’s legs. Only one run counted, as they had reached five runs, and the game was over. But the kids didn’t know. So the other team celebrated a grand slam while our team celebrated winning the Championship.

Our coach cranked up his speaker and blasted “Celebrate,” the song the Oakland A’s used to play after victories at the Oakland Coliseum. The losing team mobbed the kid who hit the grand slam. Our team jumped and slammed into each other in celebration near the mound. For a moment, there was nine-year-old joy all around.

In early 2009, as the Obama administration rumbled into action, I got a call I thought was a prank. A woman with a Swedish accent said “Hello my name is Inga McMichael and I’m calling on behalf of the United States Department of State. “I am calling to ask if you would like to do a five-city tour of your play Tings Dey Happen in Nigeria?”

It was a sunny morning in my apartment in The Mission District of San Francisco, and I was writing and rehearsing a new show. The Swedish accent from the U.S. State Department threw me off. So did the hyper-specific offer in the form of a question. “Yes…?” I stammered. And then, “Wait what? When? Is this real?”

Over the next several months, over Skype calls with U.S. Diplomats in Nigeria, we hashed out the specifics. So in October 2009, I took the stage in Calabar, the jewel city of the Niger Delta, in a hotel baement multi-purpose room. A warm up band had serenaded the room of mostly Nigerians, with a few sweaty ex-pats.

But a Foreign Service Officers paced in the back of the hall. The show had been selected to highlight the promise and challenges of democracy in Nigeria, and to launch conversations about corruption and public accountability. The idea was to shine a creative light on these perennial issues. But when I arrived, after two long flights, some diplomats were getting cold feet. There were new concerns that the show might rile people up in the run-up to the upcoming Presidential elections. (Elections often fomented violence as politicians hired youth gangs to drum up and defend support for their candidacy.) This particular FSO pacing in the back of the room was the leading voice of concern.

So I was performing the first show of what was to be a five-city tour not knowing if the rest of the tour was going to be cancelled. Or if she would throw up her hands, charge the stage and say “Enough! Abuja just called and we have to stop the show!” I was also reacclimating to Nigeria, where I had lived for most of 2005, and performing the show for the first time in Nigeria.

I had performed before for entirely Nigerian audiences in the U.S. The Nigerian students union at Stanford had booked a special show. One night in New York a Nigerian banker had booked the entire theater and then hosted a post-show party at a swanky bar nextdoor in SOHO. So I knew to expect louder laughs during the scenes featuring Nigerian characters, and even clapping and shouting during those scenes, and less laughter during the ex-pat character scenes.

What I didn’t expect was how emotional it would be for me to perform the full show in Nigeria for the first time. I finished the show, did the Q&A, hugged some people I hadn’t seen in years, and had to jog back to my hotel room. I was back in the Niger Delta (not in Port Harcourt, or Warri, or the riverine villages where I had done the research). But still back in the Niger Delta, performing this improbable piece of art, knowing probably somebody in the audience was living what the show portrayed everyday. It was not theoretical, even in a way it could be for Nigerians in the U.S. I was overwhelmed by the honor, and responsibility, and the privilege to be able to carry this story and these characters back to Nigeria. I closed the door in my hotel, and burst into tears.

The next morning at breakfast, I sheepishly asked if the next four shows in Lagos, Bauchi, Jos and Abuja were still on. Apparently the reports back were that it was a nuanced piece of art that was not going to precipate a wave of violence. I had assured the doubters beforehand this was the case, but seeing is believing.

And so we boarded our flight to Lagos for a show later that night. The flight of course was delayed, and there was terrible traffic from the airport. We stopped for quick Gyros in a strip mall in Lagos at around 4pm before a 7pm show. I never normally eat anything that heavy on a show day, and never that close to performing. Sure enough, I was vomiting at 7pm in the bathroom of my hotel, asking if there was a chance the start time could be delayed. It was an outdoor show, the guests were assembled. Couldn’t I just get through the show?

I’ve been thinking a lot about my time as a Fulbright Scholar and then State Department sponsored touring artist in Nigeria. Especially with the news last month that Secretary Rubio is going to be shrinking the State Department, which currently has a budget that is 6% of the Pentagon’s. This after the “wood-chippering” of U.S.A.I.D.

There is a reflexive cynicism towards American Soft Power among some of my friends. As one friend said, “America as a force of good in the world? I hate it when people say that.” And yes, there’s a long roll call of abuses. The toll of Cold War America’s anti-communist fervor, destabilizing left-of center democracies in Latin America and elsewhere. The escalation of Vietnam into a decades-long killing field. The catastrophe of the Iraq War. But especially since the end of the Cold War, there’s been massive humanitarian projects with real results. Even the Shock and Awe George W. Bush administration expanded anti-malarial and H.I.V. Pepfar programs that have saved an estimated 25 million lives.

I got to see the many varieties of State Department employees in my time in Nigeria. There were certainly resentful consular officers, drinking heavily and bitching about Nigerians who lied on their visa applications. They often didn’t know even the most basic phrase in pidgin English, the verb-rich, poetic patois that is the country’s lingua franca (They spent most of their day denying people visas; it was a dreary assignment).

There was the burly ex-Marines who’d served in relief missions in Bosnia and Haiti and had the most detailed map of the Niger Delta I’d ever seen. (I assumed they were CIA or CIA adjacent.) There was the ruminative Ambassador himself, a former history professor who spoke in long, winding sentences but had surpisingly humble curiosity.

The majority of the employees at the Embassy and Consulates in Nigeria of course were Nigerians. They also staffed the so-called American Corners, which were small libraries with books Nigerians could check out—a cool, quiet place to read. They were most visited by women and young students. They did not share the reflexive distrust of American power.

And then there was Cultural Affairs officers like Atim George. On an early visit to Lagos from Port Harcourt during my Fulbright year in 2005, she lodged me in her house and coaxed me to perform excerpts of my previous shows for her and her housekeeper. I obliged, and soon she had me perform some scenes in Lagos for a cultural gathering. She made a point of cultivating meaningful friendships and professional contacts with Nigerian artists, actors, musicians. In Nigeria they would say, “She done try o” She really tried. After performing in Lagos at a gathering she organized, I met an actor and comedian named Tunde, who cracked me up as we talked shop. He said he would keep his eye on me and I agreed to do the same.

But they were still banging on my hotel door before the show four years later and I was wiping vomit from my mouth. Then the voice from the hallway said, “Dan, there’s this comedian Tunde here. He said he knows you. He said he’s willing to riff for a bit if you need more time.” Hallelejiah. God Bless Naija. “Yes that sounds great!” I said. Dry heaving never felt so hopeful.

I could hear Tunde entertaining the crowd while I continued to purge from the second floor of the hotel. Of course it was a Nigerian who saved me. It happens like that all the time.

I took the stage forty-five minutes late, completely dehydrated, still nauseas. But it was a lively, lovely crowd, with lots of young actors, and Tunde had warmed them up. There was lots of laughter, lines repeated, in-scene clapping. And I’ll never forget the chirping of crickets and soft hum of a nearby generator during the pin drop moments.

That tour is still one of the prouder moments of my career. The show was received with huge, heart-warming response. I taught workshops in several cities. We had interesting post-show Q&A sessions with activists, artists, students, journalists, and everyday Nigerians. My favorite comment was from a young activist after the Lagos show who took the mic and said, “If this guy can come all the way from California and do this, it makes me feel I can do more. I have to do more.”

And it was organized and presented by the U.S. State Department. I got to represent my country doing my art form. An art form that is both wholly American in its Whitmanesque/De Tocqueville channeling of voices and perspectives, and yet also wildly uncommercial and niche and bred in a funky black box theater in San Francisco. And yet here it was functioning as a form of Soft Power for the hegemon/superpower U.S. of A. Cultural diplomacy, served up in the unlikeliest of forms. And I know for a fact that the tour changed at least one life. When I was back in Nigeria, I got in contact with Williams, whose story was one of the main throughlines in the play.

I flew Williams up for the final show in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital. The State Department had lined up a television interview to promote the show, so I brought him on with me, and Williams told his story to a Nigerian national TV audience. He caught the eye of Jonathan Mack, a State Senator from the Niger Delta, who was working to create an amnesty program for Niger Delta militants. As I detailed in a previous essay, that eventually led to Wiliams becoming an entrepreneur in the oil industry, and a more secure life for him and his children.

The point is that the State Department continued to engage with Nigeria, it funded and organized a tour, and that led to this reuniting with Williams, the TV appearance, and a connection that changed his life. (There were policy changes in Nigeria and the launch of the amnesty program too that made the timing right.) The U.S. State Department has a very checkered past, and there are certainly diplomats who don’t get down with local people like they should.

But there is good that is being done. There are earnest and intelligent people who are working in difficult jobs to increase opportunities for marginalized people around the world. And a massive contraction or elimination of that will cause a lot of suffering. (A quick search will yield many parts of the world affected, including Gaza food aid, or Colombia’s post-conflict programs that will be devastating.)

Just this morning as I’m about to post this, I got an email from the Fulbright Association that Trump’s 2026 budget proposes to cut international exchange programs by 93%, essentially eliminating the Fulbright program and others like it. (Please write your reps here and tell them you are not ok with this if you can). They are intent on drastically reducing international engagement and exchange. An exchange I am forever indebted too. Nigeria changed my life in so many ways. After the Lagos show, I saw Tunde and thanked him profusely. He beamed. “Noting dey happen, my bruddah,” he said. “It was my pleasure and privilege.” I hugged him. “Same same. I dey feel you o!” I said. I still feel that warmth and joy. And I fear what will happen now that so many of those relationships will be severed.

When I was a kid, my Dad would play a game with me and my big brother and little sister. On a picnic in Dolores Park, or on a park bench in Golden Gate Park, or just in our backyard on Potrero Hill, he’d abruptly say, “What’s the farthest away sound you can hear?” And we’d all be quiet for half a minute. And we’d strain to hear…. a whoosh of freeway traffic. Or the clang of a Muni bus’s electric hook-ups coming off. Sometimes an airplane’s low thrum. Not exactly quaint British countryside sounds.

Sometimes we could hear the crash of ocean waves, or a far-off high school band practice. And sometimes it would attune us to nearby sounds—a neighbor cleaning their garage and singing, a car idling with the door open and the stereo playing, a mother cooing to her baby. Little slices of life that would take us out of our world and into theirs.

It was a shrewd parenting move, no doubt. A way to calm the hub bub of three kids. (Graham Greene’s dry summation: “children are noisy” is comic succor when my kids get loud these days). Yet it was also a grounding exercise. A way to get outside oneself.

I’ve been staying at a cabin in Mendocino County while working on a piece of Journalistic Theater at Mendocino College that premiered last weekend. Normally a quiet morning alone is a revelation. Yet with the dark churn of political events, the ongoing assault on the humanities, a President brazenly ignoring court rulings, it can be uncomfortable to be alone with my thoughts. This is a jarringly new experience. Though I thrive on connecting deeply with strangers, I also love solitude.

So when I played the Farthest Away Sound game alone, and really listened closely, the sounds flooded in like sweet relief. The rising squawks of quail, like a cartoon soundtrack of 18^th century lawyers talking over each other. A lone rooster’s crow reminding me of childhood mornings at Cynthia’s in Carmel Highlands, the aphoristic matriarch who’d dole out sweet cereal and old comic books. On this warm morning, feeling that sweet cool but not cold air, a promise that today will be warm— a connection to past mornings of promise. Chicago in June on my bike riding to Wrigley Field to sell beer, drip with sweat, hustle for tips, crack jokes and fill the iconic role of plucky beer salesman to half-drunk Midwesterners. Listening becomes a coping mechanism. A meditation. An escape from negative spirals of thoughts.

One of the many books that had an influence on my new show Takes All Kinds was Anand Ghirihadras’ The Persuaders. It profiles a half dozen people and organizations who are in different ways trying to win hearts and minds. For my research, I went even more granular, and found relatively untold stories of unlikely community changemakers.

And for all of them, listening is an essential part of the battle plan. In order to storm the castle, one has to know the lay of the land. Listening in and of itself is not the goal. The goal is to persuade, to open up, to shine a light on, to illuminate a different path forward. Sure it’s a humane practice, but it is also a strategy.

I have many friends who understandably say, “I don’t want to listen as our country descends into authoritarianism. I want to know what the hell is wrong with all these people!” Certainly, it is a bewildering experience to watch Elon Musk at a cabinet meeting, his hands held in faux-intellectual spread with fingers touching, his black on black MAGA hat arched high on his head, joking about the thousands of federal employees he’s about to fire. Trump, the baggy old carnival barker, muttering his approval. If only it were Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove and George C. Scott would bust in with a manic grin.

With the detention of a Greencard holder for constitutionally respected free speech, it’s impossible to ignore that we are in new territory. My Dad was a Greencard holder when my Mom was 8 months pregnant with my brother in 1977, and with me in 1980, and my sister in 1984. And yes he was a Greencard holder when one night he launched into the famous Doorstop Monologue.

It was about honoring the dignity of work, of the guy who makes even the simple doorstop. But there were pointed broadsides against the indignities of American capitalism. I was ten years old, and burst into tears. My Dad felt bad, and apologized. And told me it’s fine if I just want to go get ice cream. But I wasn’t overwhelmed by the rant. I was moved by the specter of injustice.

My Dad has always had a strong critique of American exceptionalism. And yet at the same time, his story is undeniably American. Lured by love of my Mom, and inspired by the Beatles’ triumphant British cultural invasion, he—another Northern English working-class kid—came to America to pursue his dreams (my British relatives always call it America, entranced by the poetic largesse of the name). He and my Mom created a life as part of the bohemian middle-class that was a pillar of pre-tech San Francisco. He made it. And yet he could still critique the excesses of his newly adopted country and not fear being deported. (He eventually became a citizen so he could vote twenty years ago).

I toggle back and forth between diving deep into the news and wanting to completely check out. Yet we will not hold of autocracy thru self- care. It was ample inspiration watching my nine-year old Winston pitch his first innings of a baseball game. His long hair flapping in the wind, he took deep breaths after walking two batters in a row. Then he got back on the mound and threw three more high arcing strikes to retire the side. If he can keep calm and carry on, so can I.

This last year, I’ve been teaching the Journalistic Theater process to students (age range 15-80) at Mendocino College. They went out and talked to people all over their county. A migrant couple falling in love as teenagers in the pear orchards of Hopland in the ‘80s and eloping back to Mexico. A trans kid cracking their egg in a rural town and realizing they don’t need to play first person shooter games as their anger has subsided. A former Army captain and Iraq War veteran who became a water rights lawyer after seeing the importance of clean water to community’s survival while serving in Iraq.

I wrangled the script, from dozens of interviews and conversations. Then for two months, working under the inspired direction of my talented comrade (and journalistic theater convert) Lucas Near-Verbrugghe, and produced by Reid Edelman, they turned these stories into stunning theatrical vignettes. Watching seven actors create a truck that an old hippie bought in Oregon in the 70s, or transform to embody a pear orchard, or a wedding dance party in Mexico, I felt shivers. There is something audacious about going out into one’s community and listening to everyday stories and transforming them into art. There’s a resilience in the form that matches the content. Community is not only a coping mechanism, it is power. As the narrator of the night wryly jokes, “the State of California paid to lead a story gathering class. At least there’s some programs too essential to cut.”

The narrator, who is playing an older male rancher (but is played by a woman who is married to another old rancher in real life) later delivers the other piece of cowboy philosophy. “I looked up the word community. It said a community interacts with each other. A society just is. A community does.”

As it happened, I was sitting on the side of one the community members whose story is told in the show. I could see the grin spread across her face as her story was embodied, and stay wide and full the entire scene, as though she had just been slipped a drug. I struggled to not tear up seeing that joy.

Part of the intent of the current political takeover is to overwhelm us, to render us numb. To make us unable to do anything in response, to lose our will, and our humanity. Journalistic theater quite simply helps restore our humanity. As does all intentional congregating and witnessing and creating in community. It sounds like April 5th will be a National Day of protest. Maybe I will see you out there. I will be relishing the sounds of solidarity.

One night performing my show Tings Dey Happen at The Marsh in 2007, I thought I could see the outline of Robin Williams front row, dead center. It was hard to see through the lights. Not knowing made me nervous. And the audience and he could tell I was nervous. But he was laughing and clapping, or at least the outline was. And then I caught a glimpse of his forearms, and they were so buff and hairy I knew it had to be him. I relaxed, and the audience relaxed, and it was a magical show.

After the show he and his wife Marsha Garces-Williams and Jeff Greenwald came backstage and he went off on an impromtu riff for half an hour on Richard Pryor days, (“Courvoisier and Coke…an acquired taste!”) USO tours, Afghan warlords. Yet it was the most self-effacing improvised brilliance, because it felt like it was his way of saying, "Thank you, I enjoyed the show." He spoke through his craft, a craft he was so committed to that when he spoke, everyone felt uplifted, illuminated, cared for.

Last month, I was reminded of this night when I rewatched the Robin Williams documentary Step Inside My Mind. What shines through as much as his genius imagination and soaring craft is his humanity. For someone who channeled so many people and voices, and so quickly, it felt like the joke was always on himself, or those in power. He, as the saying goes, comforted the afflicted and afflicted the comfortable. A trenchant humanism ran through all his work.

I thought of this as I read a piece about the art collective For Freedoms. They formed in 2016 partly in response to the first Trump campaign, and are most famous for making billboards with sly political art pieces that can veer ambiguous. The idea is to provoke, perhaps strike a discordant note in conservative hearts and minds. In the words of co-founder Hank Willis Thomas: “placing images in the public that are designed to encourage critical thinking and uplift joy and celebration is paramount to us. We believe that art is a tool for social change and inner meditation.”

They have gotten lots of press attention. And they also have their detractors. In a recent New York Times piece about their work, the Times journalist noted the response of one detractor who posted online, “Humanism isn’t the answer to white supremacy/colonialism. Get your neoliberal head out of your ass.”

I am, above all else, a humanist. This is rooted in a belief and life experience that connecting with other human beings across the divides is essential to building a society where we all have dignity and respect. It’s a huge source of joy. And it is also based on my formative experiences living in Nigeria, and experiencing a society in which basic human rights were tenuous, sometimes fleeting, sometimes absent.

In the avalanche of anti-humanitarian executive orders in Trump’s first few days (completely suspending the refugee asylum program tops my list as the most dispiriting and soulless), it reminded me of a journalist in Nigeria I met named Grace.

Grace was a journalist with CTL, a respected cable television news network. But her boss rarely paid her. She was expected to make a living on the “pay per play” system that dominates Nigerian media. Most of the time it was enough to feed, clothe and school her eight year-old daughter. When it wasn’t, she baked wedding cakes and sold them.

This was nothing compared to what she experienced during the Abacha regime as a journalist. Sani Abacha is the consensus choice as Nigeria’s worst military dictator; when he died in the arms of two prostitutes on an apparent Viagra overdose, it was deemed “the coup from heaven.” For journalists, it was a dark time. During a press crackdown, soldiers threw Grace in the trunk of a car and drove to an empty field, where she was told to start walking. Instead of waiting for a bullet to the back of the head, Grace turned to the sergeant and politely said, “Give Colonel Amadu my warmest regards.” Spooked that he might be killing a friend of his commanding officer’s, the sergeant ordered her back into the car and drove back to the city. Grace didn’t know Colonel Amadu, but she knew he was a colonel and made a lucky guess. A year later, Abacha died and she was accepted to a three-month journalism training program in Florida.

I heard several similar near-death stories from Nigerians during dictatorship. And always there was a personal appeal to the apparatchik, a looking in someone’s eyes, a leveling with their killer as a human being. In fact, drawing on the withered humanity of their potential abuser/killer saved their life.

I am reminded of this every week in performing my new show Takes All Kinds. Sammy—who was a radical violent extremist in the ‘80s and ‘90s, and has since spent the last two decades de-radicalizing violent extremists—says, “the only way you pull people out is by showing them empathy when they least deserve it.”

That doesn’t mean he believes that’s all we should do. Some people can’t be reached until they bottom out, he believes. His program for rehabilitation of those lost in extremist hate groups had such impressive results it won a large federal grant during the waning days of the Obama administration. (The funding was then rescinded when Trump took office in 2017. But because Sammy’s work was so respected by FBI and anti-extremist police units, much of the promised grant money to expand the program was cobbled together through back channels.)

Of course we are still a country of laws, as pre-Trump presidents used to intone, and so the solution to mass deportations or the end of the asylum program is not just to look into the eyes of ICE agents and beg for mercy. Thank God there are thousands of lawyers and judges who will fight these battles in courts. But to simply say humanism has no role in stopping authoritarianism and cruelty is, in my experience, and in the stories of so many activists, social workers, and artists I’ve met, simply false.

The title of my show is from the phrase It Takes All Kinds To Make a World. It’s what James, a community organizer registering voters in Atlanta, says about working in the trenches of change. Elections have consequences, as these last two weeks have shown us with stunning sharpness. If someone’s best contribution to maintaining our humanity is to make a billboard that questions or complicates certain assumptions, so be it. If someone else is able to show someone empathy when they least deserve it so they can feel heard and might open up their mind and heart to a different perspective, great. And if you can make someone laugh so hard that they lose their rigid certainty about something, all the better.

In a recent piece, Freddy Deboer writes “Our culture has erased transcendent meaning and left in its place short-form internet video, frothy pop music, limitless pornography, Adderall for the educated and fentanyl for the not, a ceaseless parade of minor amusements that distract but never satisfy. And people want to be satisfied; they want something durable. They want something to hold on to. They want to transcend the ordinary.” He worries there is going to be more nihilistic violence from young people in search of meaning.

What is clear in watching the Robin Williams documentary is how much meaning was pouring out of those clubs in the ‘80s when he burst onto the scene. People weren’t just getting craft and comedy—though they got that in spades. People were filled with a sense of meaning and awe. I create an art form that really can’t be replicated in other mediums. It doesn’t translate to video, even radio doesn’t do it justice, we don’t get the indelible physicality to go with the voice. It only really shines as an ephemeral thing to be experienced in person. I’m not so naive and elitist to think that theater will save us from fascism, but more than ever I feel that live performance helps maintain and restore our humanity.

It’s not measured in how many audience members are converted to one way of thinking. The point of art is to move and provoke, not convert. And indeed it is hard, as the great Mike Leigh says in a recent Marc Maron interview, to keep making art that is subtle and ambiguous and complicated in the face of the quasi-fascist onslaught that is the alternative—an endless parade of titillating videos of ever shorter length, low engagement/high judgement click bait, big screens with sports and cold beer, rollickingly cynical streaming series. I know because I’m a humanist and artist and still I self-anesthesize at times. What I would say to that commentator with disdain for For Freedoms billboards is this: It’s true, humanism might not save us from white supremacy. But staying cocooned in nihilism and your phone will do nothing to stop our collective dehumanization. Experience good art; get out in community and feel something. Make Theater Cool Again.

Holidays can be difficult. If you have expectations, a picture in your mind about how you want each day to go, they can be heartbreaking. If you view them as scenes in a sprawling play, documentary movie, or novel, they can be wondrous and epic.

Richard Ford’s trilogy of novels all took place over long weekends. The quintessential American ones: Memorial Day, Fourth of July, Labor Day. His Frank Bascombe character is a sportswriter and then realtor, but at heart, he’s a bemused ethnographer. Ethnography is the study of community, and it involves close observation, even immersive participation, and crucially no or low judgement. One of the tenets, is to act like an alien. This is the ideal way to approach the holidays.

I don’t get to spend my whole life closely studying the world. I wish. The discipline needed to not get pulled into distractions and write or rehearse most mornings necessitates a certain tunnel vision. Add in the need to get exercise, do supplemental teaching work and other side hustles, ship kids to and from school, engage with said kids after school so there’s some shred of hope for humanity and empathy left in a world increasingly bent on/by narcissism, and no, there’s not a lot of time. I execute trips to grocery stores with Navy Seal efficiency. Sure, I’ll lock in with a vibey clerk when ringing me up, but I’m mostly running down specialty items like an action movie bounty hunter.

Holidays, we all get to slow down. We can marvel at America’s love of commerce. At a Whole Foods in Nashville one Thanksgiving, my friend Pratim and I spent a solid ten minutes looking at all the varieties of oranges, and watching how and why people selected the ones they selected. At a Safeway looking over avocados in Idaho on Fourth of July weekend last summer, I bonded with the migrant workers from Michoacan (Idaho is so deeply white, that a white boy speaking Spanish stunned them and we shared stories of how we both got to this supermarket in rural Idaho.)

But how do you study your family? It’s hardest to do close observation and low judgement with the people you’ve known your whole life. Triggers and annoyances may abound. If you think of yourself as someone studying them, though, those annoyances can turn into fascinations, even comic moments. Your Dad comes into the room humming a Beatles tune, looks at the Arts section of the newspaper and dryly says, “The Arts. Do they even exist anymore?” Yes, perhaps your nine-year old son could have learned a different chorus than Eminem’s 2000 hit “The Real Slim Shady” to repeat over and over again, but at least he’s engaged.

Taking non-posed photos and videos are great. But I’m a huge fan of audio recordings. An audio recording of your family on Christmas morning or dinner on Christmas/Hannukah/Kwanza in twenty years it will be the most evocative document you have of this time.

And then there’s in-laws, which allow you to study the tribe you married into. I spent a holiday weekend with my in-laws in a mobile home in Pismo Beach my mother-in-law rented for us 12 years ago. We have two priests in that wing of the family, and they’d both been loaded up with Christmas sweet breads by their congregation. We ate sweet bread and played group charades, and even 90 year old Grandad, who farmed in the desert heat of the Imperial Valley for decades, became a grinning Clint Eastwood in the charade Fistful of Dollars.

We’d both rise at dawn when no one else was up. I’d pick up the local newspaper and we’d read it silently together. Every ten minutes I’d read a headline that might pertain to his life and ask a question. He’d tell me about the difficulty of getting one price for his produce on the phone and another one once he’d trucked it into town.

In the evening, his son, my wife’s uncle, had us all jump into the back of his pickup and took us for a ride over the dunes. He’s a brilliant mechanic and also a well-known daredevil who fell out of a crop duster plane once and broke his back. So when he took his pickup up and down dunes, yes, I feared I was gonna bounce out many times. Then everyone hopped out of the truck and started rolling at high speeds down the sandunes. As an ethnographer, I felt witness to a California desert dune play connected to their identity and family lore.

The abundance of rituals and religious ceremonies in winter around the solstice is not a quirk of history. For most of our existence, there wasn’t copious light after dark. So in the dark nights, we lit candles, sang songs, created games. That can happen with family, it can also happen with strangers. I spent Christmas in Madrid, Spain in 2000. Somehow my crew for the evening was a childhood friend from home, a Brazilian woman and her Spanish friend, and a man from Senegal. We spent the evening in plazas mostly, sometimes going into bars. When we said goodbye, rather than a photo, I asked that we all stand in a small circle and take a mental photo of each other together. We closed our eyes, then opened them and focused our collective attention on one person at a time for three seconds. Our eyes became the shutter, and our brains the camera. I can still remember the smile of the man from Senegal, and the laughter of the Brazilian woman as we collectively took her mental photo.

The internet is built to be received quickly, with high judgement and low close study. The way we talk, interact, judge, and feel lonely on the internet has now crossed over into how we live in real life. It’s harder than ever to think like an ethnographer, and yet its gifts are abundant. Leading with curiosity, being both an insider and an outsider at the same time, and being open to pursuing whatever is the most interesting thing you find. And at the holidays, you can even do it with a drink in your hand. Here’s to a week of holiday connection and curiosity. It’s way less pressure and more fun than needing to be cheery.

Don, a bare-chested white man in his 60s with a handlebar mustache answered the door of his small shack in Glendale, Arizona, rubbing his eyes and looking addled. I’d had to walk down several narrow alleyways, past fraying fences that contained loud, lunging dogs. Heavy Metal music ricocheted around the living room. Did he know it was Election Day and was he supporting Kamala Harris for President? “Yup, today’s the big day, innit?”  

The cold hard realities of door-knocking in working class swing state districts is something every coastal, well-educated Democrat should experience. It’s humbling. It reminds me what people say about Peace Corps, the impact is possibly as big on those “doing the helping” as those “being helped.” It’s also exciting. Democracy in action sometimes means convincing a shirtless man in a dilapidated shack in Glendale, Arizona to turn down the Heavy Metal, drink some coffee, and get to the polls.

I asked if there were any issues he was concerned about? “Paying my rent,” he said without skipping a beat.

My brain buffered as I thought how to spin Kamala as a rent-payment-helper. I rolled out a talking point: “Trump’s tariff plan is estimated to cost every American an extra $4,000 a year.” Don rubbed his eyes and adjusted his shorts.

I asked about health care, but Don was a retired union welder, his health care plan was good. Was there anything holding him back from voting for Harris?

“She’s a women,” Don said matter-of-factly. Electoral politics wrings out one’s righteousness; nothing focuses a pragmatic approach like a potential vote. “OK” I responded calmly, “So what are your concerns related to that?”

“Too weak,” said Don. Again, as though he were stating plain facts.

“Well you know she was a prosecutor?” I said.

“Oh I hate prosecutors,” said Don. “I did three and a half years in prison for sending weed in the mail. Thirty years ago. Still pisses me off, ‘cause now it’s everywhere.”

“Yeah, that’s terrible. I’m so sorry,” I said. Dang. Big misstep. I tried to regroup. “You know, she was not that kind of prosecutor. She was prosecuting child molesters and big banks who—”

“I hate any kind of prosecutor,” Don shot back. “Messed up my whole life. Before that things were good, I was just being a hippie.”

Don began folding up my info sheet into smaller and smaller squares. I’d uttered fatal words. I’d wandered into an emotional landmine, not suspecting Don’s physic terrain so loaded. The door was done. I thanked him and walked on.

It wasn’t often while canvassing in Maricopa County, Arizona that I met a truly undecided voter, so this one stung. I was one of thousands who’d flown in from California to try to swing the crucial state for Kamala Harris and Democratic Senate Candidate Ruben Gallego.

Maricopa County is the country’s fourth most-populous county and is bigger than Delaware, Rhode Island and Connecticut combined. It’s flat and dry and radiates out from Phoenix on a seemingly endless grid of low-slung homes. Some had beautiful, humble altars for different Catholic virgin saints. Others strewn with tools, empty cans of beers, weed delivery bags.

It can be agonizing, especially when you can hear people watching TV and scuttling around inside, but they can’t be bothered to open the door again. Many of their door knobs were already saddle with mailers from other GOTV operations, so it’s understandable they didn’t want to be bothered by another bright-eyed Californian in a Patagonia jacket.

So when you actually get a live person, it’s the holy grail. In a mostly Latino and middle-class neighborhood of winding streets and uniformly designed homes, the app used for canvassing told me there was a 24 year old female named Yesenia who had voted in one out of the last three major elections (so likely not in 2018 or 2022 but in the 2020 Presidential). A wide-eyed girl of about three answered the door, followed by Yesenia, with hair pulled back, a sweet smile, and striking black eyeliner. She hadn’t voted and was undecided.

“I don’t like how Trump talks about Hispanics,” Yesenia said. “But I don’t think we should have so many people coming in. It doesn’t feel safe. But maybe not do it so harsh.”

I heard this multiple times among Latino voters. For many middle-class and second and third generation Hispanic-Americans, they have compassion, but it only extends so far. They have felt an influx of new migrants in their neighborhoods, and don’t like it.

So I said, “Kamala wants to control the border, but do it in a humane way.” Yesenia nodded. “Yeah, that would be good.”

Thinking Yesenia was a mother of the three year old girl, I pivoted to the child tax credit. “Oh she’s just my niece,” Yesenia said. I apologized. “Oh you’re good, you’re good,” she said. Dumb assumption, but not disqualifying.

Abortion is tricky to bring up without knowing someone’s religious fervor, so I said, “also, Kamala is trying to expand health care access.” And then I ventured out: “I don’t know how you feel about women’s freedoms and rights…”

 “Yeah, I don’t think that’s anyone’s business,” she said. “That’s for a woman to decide.”

I detailed Trump’s role in overturning Roe vs. Wade, and soon she was nodding and saying, “yeah, I think I’m more Harris.” From there it was a reminder of the closest Voting Center, the need to bring ID, a huge thank you, a walk halfway down the block, and a silent fist pump.

Perhaps in retrospect the election result was simple: Republicans have been crushing Democrats in new voter registrations the last three years. Incumbents in Western Democracies that experienced post-pandemic inflation have been getting slammed in elections around the world. Biden was a very unpopular President by 2024, despite infrastructure and green jobs legislation he passed that will positively impact millions of people for years to come.  And it’s hard to be the more inclusive party, being welcoming and humane to migrants, transgender folks, even supporting Ukraine. It’s the right thing to do, but it yields relatively few votes, and gets exploited ruthlessly by Republicans.

Rudy Jr. was sitting in his late model Toyota Camry with a LA Dodgers hat on. I congratulated him on the World Series victory. He chuckled. His parents names were on my list, but they weren’t around, so I asked if he’d voted, and could we count on him to support Harris? He raised his eyebrows.

“I’m military, so I don’t like how Biden was running things,” he said. “There’s a lot of people trying to come into this country the right way, even serving in the military, and then other people just slip in? I don’t like that. And we built all these Afghanistan people houses in New Mexico, and then after a few months, they disappeared. And some people say they just want an education, but I think some of them want to do harm to our country. I’m Mexican too, so I don’t like everything Trump says, but America first, you know?”

If it were a month before the election, I might have told him Afghani refugees had been highly vetted, and usually had family who had worked with American soldiers. I’d met and interviewed several of them, interpreters who’d taken fire in combat. But he was a Trump supporter, my remit was not to turn him around, and there was no way I was going to. I shared a bit about why I was supporting Kamala, thanked him for his time, and walked on.

It struck me how many people identified first as a “veteran” or a “nurse” or a “mother” before their ethnic or racial identity. After the Democrats flipped Georgia in 2020, it vindicated the “demographics is destiny” theory of an inevitably expanding Democratic electorate. This election was a rebuke to that. I met a lot of people for whom racial or female representation was not a primary motivating factor for voters. Costs and a sense of uncertainty and insecurity led the way.

It can be a lot to hear over and over that eggs and gas prices and interest rates seems more threatening than Trump. That bringing back to power a felon, a sexual predator, a bully who never accepted he lost the last election and worked tirelessly to overturn it is worth it cause “man, my bills were lower back then.” It’s hard to know what percentage is underlying misogyny, racism, Gaza outrage, or misinformation deep dives.

Peoples views are as unpredictable as ever. Dominique, a mild-mannered Black woman in her fifties smoking a cigarette on her patio said she voted for Harris but believed that “Biden’s a pedophile” and “he changed Easter into transgender awareness day.” When I told her it’s best not to believe everything you read online, a friend doing work on her apartment called out, “Yeah she’s a Tik Tokker!”

It is not a thankless exercise though. At the end of day, as the dark and cold crept in, I’m delivering another rambling message into a Ring doorbell recording device, pouring my heart out about why I came out from California, leaving my wife and two kids at home. And then I hear a voice answer back over the intercom. “Hey Dan, I’m just getting my nails done, but you can come in.” And then a door opens and a plump seven-year old Black girl with braids says hi, giggling. And I hear the voice again. “Dan, come on back.” A trio of young kids lead me down the hallway to the bedroom of Candace.

She’s on her couch, drying her freshly painted cream-white nails. A large fan buzzes from the ceiling. She’s already voted, but wants to get her son Drayshin to vote for the first time. They recently moved from Iowa, her son’s always busy working. I assure her he can get a new ballot at the Voting Center. “Oh really? Oh that’s great. See I knew you were good Dan ‘cause you kept on talking to the Ring, just really going for it,” says Candace. We both laugh.

It was that part of the night where my spiel had devolved into a tired, rambling prayer for dignity and kindness in our country, and Candace, the Ring voice of God, had answered my prayers.

Other times, one is struck by the unending series of small difficulties that prevent people from voting. Tiana, a single Mom with a lazy eye answered the door slowly in a tidy two-story apartment complex. “I want to vote,” she said. “But I can’t. Too many people. I have anxiety in crowds.”

I empathized, talked about how hard that must be. Mail balloting was over, since in Arizona it must arrive on election day, not just be postmarked. We had a car to give rides, but it was the actual polling place that was the problem. Could she take some medication and go do it quick, I asked? She laughed and shook her head. She doesn’t take medication. Again a stalemate, this time by technicality. She said she’d drive by on her way to pick up her son and see how busy it was. I told her how much I appreciated her effort.

My final door of the night of Election Day was a skinny 19 year old named Ebed. It was getting dark, the polls closed in less than an hour. When I started my pitch, he was immediately excited. “Bro, you don’t even know. I’ve been trying to figure out if I’m registered. I’m the only one in my family who can vote. Everyone in this house pays taxes, my parents, they don’t have citizenship. My sister, my brother, they got DACA. We all pay taxes but I’m the only one who can vote.”

He'd been searching on his phone to see if he was registered. I confirmed that if he was on my list he was registered, he just needed ID. The closest Voting Center was only a few blocks away at the school. “Oh, I’m gonna grab my coat and a beanie— I got my car right there.”

Don’t forget your ID, I reminded him. “Oh shoot, my ID Just fell out the other day, I’ve been trying to find it.” Yet another hurdle. We ran through his print ID options and he cobbled together his insurance and car registration. I thanked him, told him he’d made my night. And then he was off to cast the first vote of his family in this country after two decades of calling it home, against a man who was vowing to deport millions of people like his parents.

In June 2022, I was teaching a three week class on Journalistic Theater at Mendocino College, living in a cabin with no electricity. I had a little battery-operated transistor radio though. So as I washed dishes, I could listen to the January 6^th special congressional hearings. The stories of conspiracy theorists bullying election workers shook me. It was a violent manifestation of a country so divided it couldn’t agree on basic facts.

I wondered: how do we heal a society so fractured? I thought of South Africa, and it’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the iconic triumphal story of my burgeoning adolescent political consciousness. A place I had visited, post-Apartheid, in 2002 and 2006. Perhaps I could go back and make a show about reconciliation as a model for our country?

I spent a couple months working up contacts in South Africa. I bought plane tickets and arranged accommodations. But in talking to people who lived in South Africa, it emerged that the promise and hope of reconciliation had faded in the face of corruption, economic tailspin, and infrastructural collapse. More than half the population of South Africa didn’t even have memories of Apartheid. One professor mentioned Colombia as an alternative, a place that was emerging from a fifty-year civil-conflict and embarking on an ambitious process of national reconciliation.  A place I knew slightly from a visit in 2008.

So I reversed course, worked up contacts in Colombia, and flew to Bogota in November 2022. I talked to dozens of people in Colombia, former FARC and para-military combatants and leaders, activists, artists, journalists, survivors, victims, cab drivers, fruit sellers, you name it. It was fascinating. I was fully immersed. (You can read my Letter From Medellin here.)

Right before I went on that trip though, I took a two-day trip to Las Vegas to get the pulse of the country, and to get back into research mode after a long time off during the pandemic. (Las Vegas is a mix of people from all over the country, and it’s cheap and easy to get to).

And in Las Vegas when I told people I was researching a new play on reconciliation, everyone said some version of “good luck with that, this country is in the middle of a fight. There’s no reconciliation.” I realized that in trying to study post-conflict societies as a model for our own, I had jumped forward in time. A full-scale violent conflict had not come to the U.S.  

I had gotten too theoretical, and gotten away from the concrete details of people’s lived experience. So I thought: I should really go see what it feels like to be in the places where the country’s future is most contested.  

So in Spring 2023 I went to Sarasota, Florida, where the first Moms For Liberty chapter started, and three Proud Boys-backed school board candidates had turned a placid beach town into a national battleground. (Which I wrote about here). I went to a Prepper Conference to see what the country looked liked through the eyes of a socio-political fringe that had a mainstream moment in the despair of the pandemic. (Dispatch about that here).

At a bar and grill in St. Augustine, I met a former Blackwater contractor who’d worked three years in Iraq and emerged with fresh insight on the cost of Youtube masculinity.  I connected with a woman in Charleston who found out her family was some of the biggest slave traders in South Carolina, and began airing her family’s secrets publicly. And then started researching all the other prominent families who were involved in the dirty business. But did so with a gentile subversive glee perfectly suited to blue-Blood South Carolina.

One contact led to another and I found myself listening to a survivor of a white supremacist mass shooting recount facing down the murderer in the moment. Sure, she said, so much of what’s happening in the country is painful. But what are you gonna do about it?

I realized I was researching a play that asks: how do people and societies change?

There are no easy answers, no theoretical big swings. Instead, it comes through in a series of closely observed portraits.  I got interested in the people who are pushing the country forward in the politically purple parts of our country. Who are, as one person put it, “in the trenches of change.”

So I spent time embedded with voter-registration organizers in Atlanta. They were former airport baggage handlers, bartenders, and strippers, not prototypical fleece-clad activists. But they saw themselves in the lineage of Civil Rights era activists who organized on the same streets in Atlanta generations before. I profiled a Latino barbershop in Las Vegas where guys preen and poke fun at each other and talk politics all at the same time. I went to Missouri and listened to the ultimate story of redemption—a former violent extremist gang leader from Chicago who’d spent the second half of his life de-radicalizing other violent extremists.

Looking at it now, this new piece of journalistic theater carries the traces of reconciliation. But it’s not a kumbaya, all-together-now reconciliation. It’s the painful and fraught re-imagining and re-creating of a way forward. It’s unlikely activists who negotiate the complexities of changing hearts and minds in politically mixed areas, where there are far fewer common assumptions than in the Bay Area or New York. And in the surprises and complexities of these people, I find joy, and comic truth, and inspiration.

It's my huge pleasure and privilege to witness and chronicle the unspooling of America’s story; a nation that loves to talk, and bears its story publicy. It’s my aim to honor the essence and truths of everyone I met in the best way I can, so audiences get to experience it for themselves too.

I gave it the subtitle Stories of American Democracy, because at a time when our democratic institutions and foundations are being questioned and undermined, I found myself enjoying the spaces and places where democracy shows up and shines. As one character says before going into a school board meeting, “Hell yeah I’m going into the meeting. Everyone gets two minutes on the mic. Democracy’s fun. Enjoy it while it lasts.”

It was 105 degrees as we drove into Redding, CA so I was calmly calling all the mid-market hotels in the area with rates under $150 to confirm their pool was working. A hotel is a treasured treat for our kids, Winston, 8 and Juniper, 3. Television, hot chocolate, and beds you can bounce on are a thrill. But a hotel pool--no matter how shadeless and close to the freeway--is Shangri La. On hold with the Red Lion Hotel, the recorded message boasted “we have the biggest outdoor hotel pool in Redding.” Perhaps a modest claim. For a family of four with two sweaty kids, we’d struck gold.

When Jasmine, the laid-back hotel clerk, picked up the phone, she hedged. “Oh, I don’t know if it’s the biggest in Redding,” she said, laughing. “I think they sometimes lie.” Her candor was refreshing. “Oh, and there’s no smoking in any rooms. But you can just stick your head out the window.”

At check-in, we shared young kid stories. She was a single Mom with a sick one-year old at her parents house. Handing me the key she said, “So you want to park here or here,” circling a couple parking spaces out of dozens on the hotel map. “Cause that’s where the security cameras are. It gets sketch at night—people hop the back fence from the freeway and break into cars.”

Clearly Jasmine’s corporate allegiance was casual. She spoke to me as a fellow traveler. We had a car full of camping gear. How often are the break ins?

“It was really bad for awhile. But we got new security cameras, so it’s gone way down. If you park here or here,” she said, again circulating the specific spots on the map in yellow highlighter, “I’m almost-absolutely-pretty-sure nothing will happen.” Jasmine communicated like a skilled politician. We found a spot close to a security camera and moved all our stuff to our groundfloor room. I noticed the side door lock on the building was broken and asked a young employee about it. “Oh, locks at night I think,” he said. "People hop the fence and come in. But it should lock at night.” It never locked at night, it was broken, but I again appreciated the widespread transparency.

The pool though was a marvel. Bulbous and ample, tucked inside a grassy pentagonal enclosure of rooms. A hipster entrepreneur in Palm Springs would have it thrumming with twenty-somethings in Viper shades and day-glo bikinis nursing cocktails to bassy beats.

Its present faded status was perfect. A gray-haired, barrel of a man in his seventies, floats on his back. His wife, in cuolots and a soft-pink visor, listens to Eastern European peasant music on her phone. A beautific Latina Grandma sits behind large black sunglasses with a soft warm grin, taking in the rays. Her daughter, from San Francisco, asks how she’s doing, and her grin broadens. “So good, mija. Getting browner and browner.” An eccentric Brit, with died Auburn hair, a tucked-in purple shirt and light green pants with no belt is having breakfast with a Chinese-American twenty-something eating a waffle like a large piece of toast. I talk to a bro’d out Black firefighter from Eureka, Calif. in his 50s. He and his girlfriend regularly make the three hour drive from Eurkea just to spend a weekend hanging at this pool. He smiles and cocks his head and says it like he’s listing the brand of a fine garment, “It’s the biggest outdoor hotel pool in Redding.”

It feels like a throwback to a different time. It’s not Howard Johnson 1950s. It feels more funky, community 1980/1970s. We will be camping in remote Forest Service campgrounds for the next two weeks. We relish an empty alpine lake. An Edenic intimacy of rides on my back, dives down to the bottom, tea and cookies as the sunlight slants, cooling off between games of Uno and spasms of laughter, cooking dinner on the beach and taking a last dip at twilight. That can be a private space though.

A hotel pool at a moderately-priced faded hotel chain might be the most undervalued experience in America. They make me feel connected to the part of my country I love the best. And right now it feels as important as ever to be in public community. Our country may be coming apart at the seams, and poolside banter will not “heal the divide” as the RFK Jr. bumper sticker implores. It is essential to build some of the “bridging social capital” Robert Putnam preaches.

Sure, there’s some exclusivity to a hotel pool. But at the Red Lion Inn pool in Redding, whose sidedoor locks are broken, it’s not the barricading of a gated-community. It’s a metaphor for the country—coasting on faded grandeur, nominally exclusive but underhandedly welcoming, united in its desire to chill, especially if there’s a discount.

I wish I could bring this America camping to the remote places we go.

To really enjoy camping there’s a hurdle of knowledge though. A need to embrace some discomforts, like copious bugs. Also sleeping outdoors down dirt roads in quasi ethno-nationalist states like Idaho. So most campgrounds are overwhelmingly white. 

Driving along the rural Idaho highways, the Trump flags were many. Not yard signs. Large, fluttering, declarative flags. It’s not a statement of political affiliation, it is a declaration of identity. There were no Obama flags, or George W. flags, or Bill Clinton flags. MAGA is a movement, and no matter what happens this November, it is not going-away.

Everyone at our campground in Idaho was exceedingly kind. We were clearly cultural aliens, visitors to the right-wing homeland, but we are amiable emissaries from coastal, urban America. It helps perhaps that we are white, pitch our tent quickly, and chop our wood efficiently. The message is in the medium: we’re from Oakland, California, and we are humble, kind, curious, loving family. In a tank top and blue shades, I skew boho-bro. Lyra in her home-made prairie dresses, DIY savant. We are intellectual bohemian urban hillbillies.

So even for right-wingers, we are hard to completely dismiss. Our provenance though is often contested. At our small campground along a buggy lake in Idaho, I told a spry, retired contractor from Ogden, Utah I was from California.  “Ooh, how you like the taxes?” he shot out immediately in a Ned Flanders voice.  I told him my wife’s a teacher, so we know where it’s going and appreciate the services.  (We also don’t make that much money, so though the top California income tax rate is more than double Utah’s, it’s not a flat tax like Utah’s, so we likely pay what he pays in Utah.)

I fell into conversation with a small-business owner from Boise who talked about the influx of California retirees to Boise, especially retired cops from LA who came for Idaho’s lax gun laws. I agreed that the pandemic accelerated a trend towards geographic sorting. “Folks who like having a few more of the freedoms we have here,” he said. I thought about saying, given Idaho’s assault on women’s reproductive rights, “Yup, if you’re a man.” But all the research shows that minds don’t get changed by arguing directly. One has to come with compassionate curiosity, ask questions that may open a window for some cognitive dissonance to flutter in.

I generally don’t like camping at State Parks, they are too crowded and busy. But this summer, perhaps feeling the nation’s cohesion at stake, I relished their combination of accessibility and beautfy. At Wallowa Lake State Park in Eastern Oregon, the crowd more fully reflected America. The water level was higher than usual, so we were all tightly aligned along a narrow strip of beach. Everyone was staying the night in the trees a few hundred yards away. It was a giant slumber party. The kids make friends, share kayaks and sand toys, and by evening we are eating s’mores at each other’s campsites.

There were power couple lawyers from Seattle. Latino families grilling asada. Church groups, with fundamentalist flair—the young women in long dresses and hair braided down to their lower back. The men in Wranglers and t-shirts tucked in at the waist, knives pinned to their belts, ballcaps pulled low, humorlessness as virtue.

As I told my daughter Juniper before we left, camping returns us to our ancestral past, before we had permanent shelters, when we slept outside, and had much less stuff. (Though lounging at a remote lake with my family, I feel like a king.) And there is something stirringly democratic and American about how the most beautiful places and best shoreline real estate is public land, to be enjoyed in community. Summer is the great American equalizer, where you don’t need much to enjoy the country’s bounty. We gather at the country’s glorious watering holes as we have always done, and for a few afternoons, co-exist on our shared land.

The taxi dropped me outside a low-slung series of apartments in Soacha, an industrial city an hour outside of Bogota. Cumbia and Vallenato blared over dogs barking. Rubiela, a sweet women in her fifties with crimson hair pulled back in a ponytail, opened the door and announced she was making lunch for us. I’ve learned to never refuse food or drink when welcomed into someone’s home, but I told her I wasn’t expecting a full meal. She looked straight at me and said, “What, you’re just going to stare at me the whole time while I eat?” We both burst into laughter.

Rubiela is one of the leaders of MAFAPO, a group of women whose sons or brothers were victims in Colombia’s False Positive scandal. From 2002-2008, over 6,400 young men from mostly poor, rural backgrounds were lured by job recruiters, taken across the country, dressed in FARC military fatigues, and then killed by the military. It was an attempt by Alvaro Uribe’s government to bolster numbers of enemy kills to show the government was winning the war against the FARC insurgency. It was in these years that the U.S. was routinely giving Colombia over $600 million annually, most of it for military hardware and training, as part of Plan Colombia.

I had gone to Colombia because I was interested in the national process of reconciliation the country has undergone in the wake of its fifty-year civil conflict. The landmark 2016 peace accord between the government and the FARC included a Special Justice Tribunal (known as the JEP) to oversee the thousands of cases of extrajudicial murder, torture, and disappearances. It also included a comprehensive, years-long Reconciliation Commission in which victimizers publicly apologized to the relatives of the victims, and gave details about the fateful day. This, according to experts, gives relatives’ of victims some consolation, though full reconciliation is often elusive.

I talked to many Colombians about the conflict when I was there, and everyone has friends and/or relatives who were deeply affected, often in terrible ways. And while the wounds may be raw, there is so much less rancor and resentment than one might imagine. I attended parties where there were former leaders of different factions who only a decade ago were mortal enemies. (That said, while violence is much less than it was, it is far from peaceful. I wrote about this in greater detail in my March 2023 piece Letter from Medellin.)

In the U.S. we haven’t had a civil war (since 1865) and we can barely talk to each other. We segregate politically, living and working in different parts of the country. We have entirely different sources of news and information, distinct vocabularies to talk about politics and culture, and live openly disdainful of each other. The play I was working on when I visited Colombia in November 2022 has shifted away from reconciliation though. Now titled TAKES ALL KINDS, it is about our country’s fissures, our crisis of democracy, and the people who are moving the country forward in some of the most stuck and polarized places.

I had hoped to write a play that brought some of the stories and lessons of Colombia’s post-conflict reconciliation to stand in relief against America’s fractures. I realized that the context was too different. And that in our country, at least right now, there is little interest in reconciliation. We are entrenched in our opposing camps, and we are still fighting. Given the stakes of the coming election, perhaps this is understandable.

Yet I often think of the stories I heard in Colombia and marvel at the way people found joy and grace In their everyday lives despite horrific recent histories. In doing the work of journalistic theater, audiences often ask how people feel about having their story portrayed onstage. What I’ve found over and over again is that the people who share their stories with me do so because they want to have their stories shared more widely. To be listened to at length is something most people don’t have in their lives. To have their story then shared widely, and received deeply by strangers, is something even fewer of us experience. (I wrote about this in greater detail in last month’s essay.)

The biggest turmoil I feel is when I’m not able to include someone’s story in my show. There are always stories and people that are profound and moving or funny and unforgettable that I’m not able to include in my theater pieces. Rubiela is an inspiring woman, and her story has stayed with me. Maybe I can go back to Colombia and deepen my research towards a whole new show.

Until then, I wanted to include some of her story as told to me, edited and translated. It is not the same as the embodied version people are used to seeing in my shows. (I think there’s value in seeing the difference.) This is an oral history of an afternoon.  Though it doesn’t include the time after our interview and lunch when we walked the neighborhood and stopped at a local chicha spot and had a whole different set of conversations—the journalism of hanging out always expands in unpredictable ways.

It starts with her welcoming me at the door. She spoke while making us lunch: steaks, eggs, vegetables, salad, and fresh squeezed juice. I marvelled at her ability to cook such a complicated meal, with three burners going and half a dozen pots and pans, while recounting her ordeal. And she told the story with unwavering kindness and grace.

Rubiela:

“Hi Daniel, come in, come in. I'm making lunch for us. Of course I am. What you're going to stare at me the whole time while I eat? And my nephew is coming. All my children are abroad in Spain. And I live here alone.

I'm a widow. Twenty-six years ago. My husband was everything. We met when we were kids, Daniel. He was a farmer, my family were farmers. He lived on one side of the mountain, and I lived on the other. Near Tolima. It was hard losing him, Daniel. So I live alone, with God and the Virgin here.

My parents were illiterate, but they were saints. Honest, honorable people. We are seven siblings, five boys and two girls. (Lighting the stove) I always wanted my children to get ahead, to have a good job. I had four children, all boys.My family is beautiful Daniel. I am proud of my family.

Well, when they took my son away from  me, they took him out of here on the second floor. He was twenty years old. He had served his military service as a policeman, but he didn't like it at all. He said, I'm going to find a job to help me.  Because it was always me and the four guys.

It was Tuesday February 5, 2008. I went to the factory at four in the morning to work making clothes. When I came home in the afternoon, my other son said to me, "Did you hear that Diego hasn't come home? He went out this morning and was with a boy and we don't know who the boy was. And we haven’t seen Diego since.”

So the next day passed. And then Thursday. Diego didn't call me. Sometimes when he had nothing to do he would go to his Aunt’s house and then in the afternoon he’d come home to sleep and eat. Or sometimes he’d go to the countryside to see his grandparents. To help them harvest bananas or to cut grass, the same way I did growing up.  

But nothing. Friday passed. He hadn't called me. So I said I'm going to the prosecutor's office, to get them to start doing something (“poner las pillas” put in their batteries). And then my sister said, “Diego called me, I talked to him.” And what a relief. But he told my sister, "Auntie, I'm so far away." And my sister said she felt a sadness in his voice.

I kept looking, I would go from six in the morning to six in the evening or six in the evening to six in the morning to look for him, Daniel. I went to the prosecutor's office, filed a complaint, but they didn't receive it. More time passed. I was just crying. And I never said anything at my work. I ate all that pain by myself.  It's not for nothing, but everyone in the company loved me. I got on well with everybody. Especially with the boys, because I had four boys, right? And still searching and searching for Diego, but nothing.

In September, a man from the police passed by and said that there were a lot of boys there in Ocaña, and bodies were appearing. He said they would take them, put them in bags, make a hole and put up to seven people in a hole.

They called me on the first of October at four o'clock in the afternoon. I came home and they said Diego’s gone. Oh my god, you can't imagine the pain, Daniel. That was terrible, Daniel. He doesn't know life. He was only twenty years old. Your heart hurts so much. But I never lost faith in God. I've always told God. When he takes somebody, don't take me like that. I know we're all going to die, Daniel. But don’t ever take my child like that. Someone else comes along, takes your child, disposes of their lives? No. For that I can’t forgive him. Nobody has the right to dispose of a life. The only one who should dispose of life is God. No one else.

So I arrived, Daniel. To identify the body.

(To her nephew) In one minute I’ll  serve you, my love. I’m just making a salad.

They had taken off the boys clothes. Put khaki clothes on, to make them seem like guerrillas. He was killed on February 9. The body had been decomposed. The face was not his (was not recognizable).

And I went to hearings. For every boy there were ten people who killed him. Rincon-Amado, the Colonel, I thought he was a lawyer at first. Well dressed and all. Paolino Coronado. There were about fourteen of us (mothers). We almost didn't go to the JEP because they had the man who killed our boys in one room, and we were in another room. So we only saw them on the TV screen. That's why I almost didn't go.

What I liked the most were the projects we did together. I parachuted with an army lieutenant who was involved in the False Positives scandal, but not with my son.  It was a very nice process. He's a tall guy, when I met him it was like I saw my son, because my son was also tall. They took us to the Truth Commission. We hugged. He called me one day. He said I want to have a process with you. They made us paint a vase. And after we had painted the vase, we broke it. Oh! I was crying because it was breaking my heart. And I buried myself in the ground up to my neck in a cemetery in the Centro de La Memoria with some of the other mothers.

At least now it is known that the government was the one that did that. Now God is giving me inner peace. It’s not for a person to forgive. It is only God who forgives. What am I to say, that I forgive? Ay, no.

My heart is clean. You have to live well, not get sick with hatred, with rage, with rancor, and drag the family down. No. My family is beautiful. Very much in love with God. I want us to live with clean hearts, Daniel. And that's how I live.

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