Help me get the story I need to tell to NYC✌

My friends, I’ve just (finally) finished my solo show, UNCONDITIONAL, a musical memoir. 

It’s s a love letter to my family and a promise to my daughter. 

I began writing in January 2019. 

The idea to write this story; my daughter’s, mine and my family’s? This hard, beautiful thing? Really it came from her, from Nora, in her clear courageous voice telling me I could do anything as an artist and why the fuck wasn’t I? Complementing me and bitch slapping me to the ground simultaneously.     

Only months later when the unimaginable happened and I was in shock, sitting in the critical care waiting room of Northridge Hospital, Nov 2018 outside her room, huddled and keening with three close friends, it was wisely suggested to me that instead of crying in a closet for the rest of my life save for when my son needed me, I could dedicate myself to being the woman and the artist my daughter saw and believed I could be- that’s how I could go on living. 

So that’s what I did. I made Nora that promise before I said goodbye, knowing I’d have to do it

Ive kept my promise in the most imperfect, stumbling, wailing fashion and I’m sure I had her rolling those blue eyes from somewhere, some perch, many a time. The best I can say is that I just kept going, knowing I had to do it and finish it and do it better than anything I’d ever done, just in order to stay alive. 

So. 

It's grown into a bigger show than I thought it would be; lots of music and a real score and along with the story, glittery things and broken ones too, found along the way. Now it’s jam-packed bursting at the seams, ready to be shown and shared, as terrifying as that is to me. 

And. 

I've been invited to do it at the United Solo Festival in NYC, just one show- but it's NYC and a great way to start. Key word- start

I have a wonderful music director(Aaron Benham) a brilliant director(Michael Kearns), my Dramaturge(Anne Kenny) who led me through all of 2019 and but for whom I wouldn’t have even had a first draft, and all along the journey, dear friends and all of you in these social media waters, urging me on, from the beginning; lighting candles, crying with me, taking flowers to her bus benches, loving slideshows and pictures and stories, sitting Shiva for nearly three years, despite all you have also gone through. 

Here’s my final ask, at least in this chapter:

 I need the funds to make it happen; travel and musicians and and expensive NYC (oh my)- and it’s a lot.  

So

If you can, please give me a hand; if you can't that's OK, share it for me and that will be terrific as well.

Thankyou all

lots and lots of love, 

MARGOT