Spread the Love: The One Where Lindsay Cries

This episode of Spread the Love is all about you, our customer. Your stories motivate and move us, sometimes to tears…

Transcript

Hi, welcome to “Spread the Love.” We’re here, still at the Texas Educational Theatre Association Conference, we’re in Houston, Texas. It’s much warmer than it is at home, and it’s just like, “It’s so awesome.” And this week on Spread the Love is… just a little bit different. I had a really, really wonderful discussion with a teacher this morning. She came and looked at our stuff, she bought a couple books – she’s from a middle school – and when I got here this morning, she was like, “I was supposed to leave, but I came back. I have to talk to you.” And I’m like, “Okay.”

She’s never directed before, or on her own, and so it was gonna be her first project, and she just had all kinds of very honest questions, like “How to Royalties work?” “How do cuts work?” “Can I do that?” “What’s the policy?” “How does music work? What’s your envisioning for the play?” Just question question question question! And spread the love, for us, it’s not just about standing with a book and going, “We love this book!” It’s also about being available for those kinds of questions. It’s about spreading the love of theater. It was just so great for me, to be here, in person, standing face to face, to be able to answer all of her questions she had for her show and doing her show, and now she’s gonna go and tell her kids that she met the playwright, and that’s such a cool feeling for me.

And then it got even better, because she said, at the end, “Okay – I have a lost soul. I have a kid who doesn’t work, who gets in trouble, who’s in my class because there’s not really another class for him to be in. And just this week, he said, when they were talking about going to high school, he said, ‘What if you want to write?”‘ And this is why a tunnel-vision education system that only focuses on maths and sciences– how does that help or encourage the person who is a lost soul? Who just wants to express themselves? And writing’s the way they do that, how are they being encouraged? And that’s what “Spread the Love” is too, for us, because I said, I gave the teacher my email, and I said, “You tell that kid to write me. If he has questions about writing– I’ll answer them. If he wants to send me his writing– I’ll read it.”

Whew! Shake it off. Okay. So… well that’s all I have to say on “Spread the Love!”