Bleeding Hearts.
About a month ago I was in the dressing room at TimeLine Theatre, in between scenes of our final tech run for a staged reading happening an hour later, when my wife called me.
My wife doesn’t call me; in most cases she sends a text message. I picked up the phone.
“Everybody’s fine,” she said first, in that tone that tells you that there was cause to have almost said otherwise. Everybody was fine but she and my son were at the emergency room. He has an allergy to sesame seeds, of a severity requiring us to carry an epi-pen, and while they were out getting dinner at a Chinese restaurant there seemed to have been some cross-contamination in the kitchen between his meal and somebody else’s. He’d begun gagging and throwing up, and she’d elected to take him to the hospital before it got worse.
When he spoke to me on the phone his voice was hoarse and weak, but he reassured me that he felt much better now. Despite those assurances and my wife’s it took no small amount of willpower not to ask the director if I could leave the event and go check in on him.
And I’m telling you this because my anguish that evening was a single drop of water next to the deluge that our nation has unleashed on the families who approached our southern border. I am ashamed of what is being carried out in my name and I don’t understand how you can’t be, if for some reason you aren’t.
Creative Control 