By the wonders of technology I’m posting from a Peter Pan motor coach (the founder of the bus line was named Peter), making a nearly two-hour trip from Woods Hole, Massachusetts, where we just got off a ferry boat from Martha’s Vineyard. We’re headed to Boston’s South Station, where we’ll catch a cab to our hotel for the night, and we’ll fly back to Chicago tomorrow.

This guy in an adjacent meadow had a horse’s eye view of the wedding.

Between trains (the L to Midway airport), planes (to and from Boston), buses and ferries, I’ll just say you really have to want to go to Martha’s Vineyard to go to Martha’s Vineyard.

We really wanted to go.

For one, it’s a place neither Beth nor I had ever been. More important was the occasion: Our friends’ daughter’s wedding. We were lucky enough to get invited and we probably were the first to RSVP YES.

Claire the bride is a delightful young woman who also happens to be a White Sox fan and who shares with me a special affection for a little known player named Willie Harris. Willie scored the only (and the winning) run in game four of the White Sox World Series sweep of the Houston Astros in 2005. There’s a lot more to love about Claire, but she had me at Willie Harris.

There’s also a lot to love about her new husband Alex, including his family history of summering on the island, and his parents retiring there. That history brought us all there for the wedding. Claire and Alex are one of those couples you like to be around. The kind that make you hopeful. Optmistic. Individually they’re terrific people, and they’re even better together. Happiness and optimism pervaded the event from start to finish. The wedding was eloquently officiated by Claire’s aunt Jill, on a beautiful hillside, on a spectacular sun-drenched Saturday afternoon, which morphed into a beautiful pastel sunset of an evening filled with dinner and dancing.

And did I mention oysters?

Yes. Oysters. During the cocktail hour after the ceremony, two young men shucked oysters before our eyes. And we ate them. Many of them. Maybe it was the event and the atmosphere, but I think those were the best oysters I ever had.

A few of the Summercamp cottages.

We stayed at a hotel called Summercamp—so named for its proximity to The Martha’s Vineyard Campmeeting Association (MVCMA). Back in the 1800s various protestant congregations would hold summer religious retreats. The one in Martha’s Vineyard developed into what is now a National Landmark. It’s a fairy-tale like village of colorful gingerbread cottages—all encircling a central tabernacle. It’s got it’s own rich history—if you get out that way, take a walk through.

The hotel even provided a bed for Whitney.

And if that all isn’t enough, there was this: Jaws. It was filmed on Martha’s Vineyard back in 1974. If you’re a regular Safe & Sound reader, you may know I have a Jaws thing. And though I didn’t have time to see all the filming locations, I did get to see the beach where little Alex Kintner became a snack.

It was worth every mile. Thanks Claire and Alex.

That’s me, Sharon, Audrey, Wanda and Darlene from class. Wanda is pictured with her trusty walker, who she has named Wilma after track star Wilma Rudolph.

The week the Cubs won the World Series last year, I assigned the writing prompt “Winners!” A year later, the Chicago Cubs are in the running again: they play their first game of the 2017 NL Division playoffs against the Washington Nationals today.

This post is the second in a series of posts considering which essay from Writing Out Loud Wanda will read when she appears with me Tuesday night, October 17, 2017 at 6 pm at the Harold Washington Library Center.

If the Chicago Cubs are still in the playoffs on October 17, Wanda may decide to read the essay she wrote after last year’s World Series. It’s featured in Chapter 86, “Winners All” and is written in the form of a letter from her favorite Uncle, Hallie B. An excerpt:

My Dear Niece,
Greeting from Mount Eternity! Spunky (aka Bea) and I are hoarse from cheering our beloved Cubs, Winner of the World Series. Ernie Banks is running around yelling “NEXT YEAR IS HERE!

From there, Wanda has her uncle naming some of the sports heroes from his lifetime. “Many folks were winners against tremendous racial and economic odds,” her uncle reports about fellow Mount Eternity residents. “Joe Louis crowned Heavyweight Boxing Champion of the World. Jesse Owens, Wilma Rudolph, and Gail Devers, Olympic champions.” You’ll have to come to the library at 400 S. State in Chicago on October 17 to hear the part where Halli B. acknowledges that the best man or woman doesn’t always win, though. “This is proven by some of the duds the voting and non-voting public have elected.”

In our writing class at the Chicago Cultural Center downtown, 95-year-old Wanda is often asked how she stays so positive, and she always credits her mama and her Uncle Hallie B. Sure enough, Hallie B.’s letter ends with positive words of wisdom. “Spunky and I polled the group and we say in some way we are all winners,” he says. “Everyone has conquered the challenge of a mountain or maybe a hill. So, Three Cheers for us, WINNERS ALL!”

Mark your calendars: Ninety-five-year-old writer Wanda Bridgeforth is appearing with me for an author talk at the Harold Washington Library Center in Chicago Tuesday evening, October 17, 2017 at 6 pm.

That’s Wanda years ago with my second Seeing Eye dog Hanni.

Stories by Wanda and other writers in my classes intertwine with mine in my new book Writing Out Loud: What a Blind Teacher Learned from Leading a Memoir Class for Seniors,” and she’s still trying to decide which essay from the book to read out loud at our library presentation. One thing you can count on, whatever Wanda decides to read, she’ll be bringing a slice of Chicago history with her.

Wanda’s father and her uncles were among tens of thousands of southern blacks who flooded into Chicago during the Great Migration of the early 20th century, and her essays in Writing Out Loud describe Bronzeville, the segregated neighborhood she grew up in, as a “city within a city.” Overcrowding, joblessness, and poverty were  facts of life, but so was literature, jazz, blues, and gospel music.

So maybe Wanda will choose to read an essay about her formative years at DuSable High School. DuSable opened in that “city within a city” in 1935, 15 years before the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Wanda was a freshman at the new school that year and says DuSable was built to keep schools segregated. “We were blocked in,” she writes, describing the boundaries. “We knew not to cross Cottage Grove, 51st Street or the train tracks. That was our neighborhood, and DuSable was our neighborhood high school.”

When DuSable first opened, some neighborhood parents applied for permits to get their children into nearby White high schools. “Their parents didn’t think a Black school could be any good,” Wanda writes, adding that she felt sorry for those kids. True, DuSable classes could be very crowded — Wanda remembers 50 or so students squeezing into classrooms. “But at those other schools, if you were Black and you wanted to be in a play, you had to be a maid or a butler,” she writes. “At DuSable, we did everything, we were in all the plays, we wrote the school newspaper. We were having such a good time at DuSable.”

Wanda was at DuSable between 1935 and 1939, walking the hallways with jazz great Nat King Cole, comedian Redd Foxx, singer Dinah Washington and John H. Johnson, publisher of Ebony and Jet magazines. “Nat Cole added King to his name later,” Wanda once told me with a laugh. “You know, like Old King Cole!”

The library Wanda and I will be appearing at on October 17 is named for another famous fellow graduate of DuSable High School. Harold Washington, the first African-American to be elected mayor of Chicago, attended DuSable with Wanda, too. Look for us at 6 pm on Tuesday, October 17 in the Authors Room at the Harold Washington Library Center, 400 S. State Street, right in downtown Chicago.

This post is the first of a series where I’ll be summarizing different essays Wanda is considering — to find out which one she finally decides to read, you’ll have to come to the presentation October 17!

Last week I was at the 12^th Annual North American Passive House Conference in Seattle. The event is produced by the Passive House Institute US (PHIUS)—I’ve been a board member or employee of PHIUS off and on for the better part of 15 years now.

Every year, the event brings together building science geeks to talk about how to make buildings—houses, apartment buildings, hi-rises, schools—more efficient, more comfortable, more durable, and less expensive.

I’m here to report there’s a lot of reason for optimism. New materials, new discoveries, and an exponential growth of renewable energy (wind, solar) that is accelerating in much the way that computing power has grown under Moore’s law. We’re getting more for less all the time.

On the human side, the veteran architects, builders, and engineers who’ve seen it all mixed with brilliant 20 somethings who are more than ready to carry the technical and advocacy batons. These people are working hard to advance the ball. And to not take their eyes off the ball.

It was a delight to see a couple Printers Row pals.

The icing on the cake was sitting in a sandwich shop the day I got into Seattle when a familiar face walked in, slack-jawed at my presence. It was John, a stalwart Hackney’s employee who lived in our building in Chicago before moving to Seattle. He was on his way to work at The Elysian, and when I stopped by to see him that night I was pleasantly surprised to learn that another Hackney’s-to-Seattle transplant was also working at the Elysian. It was a total joy seeing John and Elise.

I got home late Sunday night. unloaded my laptop and some other stuff, and Beth and I headed out for a beer across the street at Kasey’s to debrief one another about our last few days. Once home, I was dead tired and I didn’t bother to open my laptop, I just put my phone on charge and didn’t set an alarm.

When I awoke early this morning I went to get a glass of water. Beth said, “Don’t look at your phone.” I told her it wasn’t even on. “She said good, something bad has happened. You’ll find out soon enough.”

That’s how it’s gotten. I managed to grab another hour or two of sleep.

And then I woke up. All in all, a horrific Monday if you are:

1. A Tom Petty fan
2. An American
3. A human being

And a tragic Monday if you were at the scene of the slaughter in Las Vegas. More often than not I skip the now ubiquitous video that’s always available from these things. This time I didn’t. And to hear the rapid staccato fire while music was still playing, I don’t know.

I don’t have anything against guns or gun owners, per se. I just don’t know how owning weapons like the ones used in this most recent horror has anything to do with the Second Amendment. There is no absolutely unqualified right in this country—“falsely shouting fire in a crowded theater,” for example, isn’t protected speech.

The NRA has very deliberately courted country music stars and fans. A fair number of the victims of Sunday’s insanity likely were NRA members.

I wonder how they’d answer the question – “What do military weapons have to do with the Second Amendment?” – today. I think they, and every single member of the NRA, owes their fellow Americans an answer to that question.

It’s an honest question, and I’ll wait for answers.

Meanwhile, there’s a lot to do. Back to work.

When Chicago’s Court Theatre produced Wait Until Dark on stage nine years ago, they asked me to be a technical consultant.

Karina Jones in Wait Until Dark.

In the movie version, Audrey Hepburn played the lead: a blind woman terrified when a psychopath breaks into her apartment. In the Wait Until Dark chapter of my new book, Writing Out Loud, I explain that while I have no expertise in anything psychopathic, “I do know what it’s like to be newly blind and married to a man who can see, and that’s what the cast wants to know about. How can I say no?”

I loved being a tech consultant, but when I bragged about the actress playing the Audrey Hepburn character coming over to watch how I move around our apartment and get errands done, or when I was with friends and shared some of the questions I’d been asked by the handsome actors (why picture them otherwise?) on the set, those friends would inevitably ask, “So why don’t they just have you play the part?”

The easy answer was that I am not an actor and don’t know a thing about acting. The more complicated answer was that back then, even if I’d studied acting, I wouldn’t have been considered: actors with disabilities were not getting many roles on stage or in Hollywood nine years ago.

But that’s beginning to change. last year I wrote two posts about actors with disabilities scoring major parts:

• Michael Thornton rolled onto the stage in his wheelchair to play the lead role in Gift Theater’s production of Shakespeare’s Richard III at the Steppenwolf, and
• Micah Fowler, a young actor with cerebral palsy was cast as a character with CP on the TV comedy Speechless.

And then there’s four-foot-five actor Peter Dinklage, who won an Emmy for his role as Tyrion Lannister in HBO’s Game of Thrones, And now actor Mickey Rowe is one of the first actors with autism to play a character with autism on a major professional stage: He’s playing the lead role in the Tony award-winning play Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time at the Indiana Repertory Theatre before it opens at New York’s Syracuse Stage October 25th.

But wait. There’s more! Nine years after my debut as tech consultant, for the first time ever, an actress who is blind has debuted as the lead in Wait Until Dark, too! I got in touch with British actress Karina Jones after she landed the Audrey Hepburn role. Turns out she’d lost her sight as a young teenager, and she shared a link to an interview to share with you all that gives more information on her background –including her time as a circus tightrope walker and trapeze artist!In that same interview she expresses her surprise about her part in Wait Until Dark: “It’s 2017 and yet I am the first blind actress to take the role of a blind person in a play that has been around since the 60s. Why?” More from the interview:

“Producers and directors should give disabled roles to disabled actors. A blind person wouldn’t be auditioned for, say, Desdemona – we’re not there yet – but with roles that are written as disabled or impaired I think it is only fair that they should be played by disabled actors. In this play I’ve totally got an advantage [over a sighted actress] because I’ve got a lot of shorthand. I’ve got a head start because I have real insight into the character. Playing this part is, for me, an amazing thing; a real push forward for equality. It’s brilliant.”

The play opened at Devonshire Park Theatre in Eastbourne on August 24, 2017 and is on a UK tour now. They’ll be in Exeter next week,and the tour continues until December. For tickets and more information, visit www.waituntildark.co.uk”.