EXTRA CRITICUM

Flour, water, yeast. Never Lose Sight of the Essential Ingredients.

We're in the home stretch of a Kickstarter campaign to raise 2/3 of the production budget for my play, What We Get to Keep. And, frankly, it freaks me out. I've never had this sort of a public, social media driven metaphorical gun to my producer head before. I ran a non-profit for a decade. I raised hundreds of thousands from investors for two indie films. There were always rules around who we could ask, how we could ask, how much we could raise.

But you know what was never the case til now?

It was never all happening out in public online with every dollar raised tracked, announced, applauded (or not) online for all to see day and night until one day me, my project and all my collaborators would be shoved into one of two columns:

SUCCESS                     OR              `    FAILURE

I  keep trying to remind myself of one of the most important lessons learned during the pandemic shutdown.

In Memoriam: Dr. Nechama Tec

I think I was 9 or 10 yrs. old when my mother, the sociology professor, revealed herself to also be a Holocaust survivor. It was then that, as she described it, her memories began to stir requiring her to sit down to write what would become one of the most important Holocaust memoirs, Dry Tears.

Dry Tears focused on her experiences in Poland surviving the war by passing as Christian, assuming a false identity as she and her family were harbored by Polish Catholic families. 

Anyone caught assisting Jews under Nazi occupation was risking death. And the Germans were serious about this. 

Following her memoir, mom followed her curiosity. She wanted to understand who these people were who risked everything to save the lives of complete strangers. And so she embarked on what would become her life's work, uncovering examples of altruism under the most extreme circumstances. And her next book, When Light Pierced the Darkness was the culmination of a decade of interviewing rescuers and survivors about their experiences. She was an unusually sensitive interviewer. Her colleague, Professor Joel Blatt, with whom she taught a Holocaust course at the University of Connecticut remarked recently that she was the best answerer of student questions he'd ever seen. Because "Nechama was able to intuit the deeper questions that lay beneath a student's question and she never let them go unaddressed."