100 Interviews

[Audio doesn't match my mouth. C'est la vie.]

When I finished interviewing 100 people in a year, I wanted to write some kind of glorious wrap-up. I thought maybe it could rival the Gettysburg Address in brevity and poignancy, or prove once and for all that journalism isn’t dead. It could bring hope and comfort to struggling writers and journalism majors everywhere: A sort of 100 Interviews fireside chat. Alas, none of us are Lincoln or Hunter S. or FDR. We don’t have good enough beards, drug habits, or lap blankets. But I am like you. I graduated from college and had no direction. The only difference is one day, I decided to stop thinking about doing something insane, and instead, I just did it. Maybe I’m naive, and journalism is dead, and I’m clinging to the past with two fists I’ve nicknamed Woodward and Bernstein. But how could I believe it's anything but alive after what this year has done for me? I worked a full-time job and did comedy for the first 11 months of this project. Then, in my spare time, (what spare time, right?) and initially for no one but my harried, frustrated self, I wrote 100 Interviews. I did it, as most rappers and sports professionals would say, for the love of the game. I’d still be writing it for no one if the Village Voice hadn’t picked up on what I was doing two months in. For that, I am eternally grateful. In my college journalism ethics class, I was taught that the interviewer is supposed to melt into the background. The final piece should come off as though the subject was questioned by a robot ghost with no opinions, feelings or conflicts. After this project, I believe that the interviewer matters just as much as the interviewee in why a story turns out the way it does.

Did I mean for my parents to read about my flirtations with a porn star? Did I mean to cry during interviews and make enemies of people I liked and generally let every stranger I meet know the intimate details of my life? Can’t say that I did. 100 Interviews is not going to end. In a few weeks, the site will be redesigned and start taking submissions. The love, inspiration and insight of the bottom line behind this project has been proven more than necessary. There’ll be another post soon with more information on that, but please know 100 Interviews will continue. (If you’re a web designer or Photoshop fiend, hit me up.) There will also be a 100 Interviews Live show on November 4 in New York City. More details to follow there too. I hope you all can make it. Like some of you, I was worried I’d majored in the Titanic, a sinking ship about as useful as a Beta Max. But you, the readers and fans, prove that journalism isn’t dead, that people still want to read long-form stories about people, that writing about someone can make a difference. There’s a reason to keep reporting, to keep majoring in journalism, to keep those skills sharp even behind a barista counter, even at an office job, even in your parents’ basement. Journalism is alive. They say if you truly love what you’re doing, it won’t feel like work. I think that’s bullshit. 100 Interviews was work, every day of my life for a whole year. But I loved it enough to power through the work part to get to the amazing part. And so many parts were amazing. These 100 people, all of them, made me think and helped me become a better writer and reporter and human being. I can never thank them enough. As Steve Martin once answered when someone asked him how to make it in show business: "Be so good they can’t ignore you." 100 Interviews showed me that there is no reason to give up. What we do has evolved, but it still serves a purpose. And only we decide when journalism is dead.

Now, let's not be ignored.

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When officer Michael Rosenbluth was in the hospital, two Haitian aides came into his room to pray over his injured body. They wanted to touch his hands as they spoke to God, they said, because Michael was a miracle. The story of what happened to Michael, who goes by “Rosey,” in July of 2006 garnered some media attention in South Florida, where I grew up. That’s how I first heard about him. Rosey was “that cop that was hit by a car so hard he went over the highway overpass." He dangled there, near death. Around the same time, Rosey and my father were becoming friends. I heard the story about the cop in the news, and then my dad told me it was Rosey. For years, I kept Rosey in the back of my mind. His story broke my heart and fascinated me. I wanted to interview him, but always felt too awkward to approach him about what’s probably the worst moment of his life. He was my dad’s friend and he’d suffered a lot. It felt intrusive. When he heard about 100 Interviews, Rosey told my dad he’d be interested in telling his story in full for the first time.  Rosey grew up in Queens, NY and became a cop at the insistence of his police officer older brother. “Fire trucks and cop cars always attracted me,” he says. “And I guess it was better than what I was doing.” He doesn’t elaborate, but from what I gather, it wasn't exactly productive. He retired in New York at age 42 and moved to Florida with his then-wife and two kids, where he started working again as a police officer on the night shift in Pompano. Four years later, he had just finished a 10:30 p.m. until 6:30 a.m. shift with his fellow officer and friend, Shannon Belanger, when, driving onto the highway, they noticed an accident in the left lane by a 100 ft.-high overpass. It had just happened and the people waved both cop cars over. They needed help. “We could have just went right by them, but we didn’t,” Rosey says. “We stopped and did the right thing.” Later, he says about cops, “I feel like if you have it in your blood, then you have it in your blood to help people.” Even though they were off-duty, Rosey and Shannon pulled up to block off zooming traffic from the fresh accident scene. Shannon went up to help the people and Rosey started setting up road flares. Initially, he just tossed them into the roadway because he was afraid to get too close to the cars zipping by. It was then Rosey realized where they were. A year earlier, a Ft. Lauderdale police officer had died on that same overpass. He’d misjudged the height of the drop and jumped it to avoid a perp he thought had a gun. He’d fallen to his death. As Rosey stood in the left lane, the height freaked him out too. It was 7:20 a.m., rush hour and the speed limit was around 65 mph. “It’s a difference when you’re up in the air especially with cars buzzing by you,” Rosey says. He worried drivers wouldn’t see the lights of his cop car or the flares in time to swerve. “A lot of the time, people are on autopilot, when they get on the highway,” he says. His anxiety was briefly quelled when a big Road Ranger truck pulled up about fifty feet behind Rosey’s cop car. With the truck behind him, Rosey felt safe enough to step out further into the lane, turn his back on traffic, and instead of tossing them, start propping the road flares up on their wire legs. He says this was probably his big mistake. He stops talking for a moment. “Honestly,” he says. “I got a knot in my stomach right now talking about it. My chest is a little bit tight, and my stomach is in a knot. But I’m trying to talk about it.” My father, sitting off to the side, says he feels like Rosey is just recounting the details of what happened, like it happened to someone else. I think my dad’s being too critical and I want to let Rosey off the hook a bit if he’s really so anxious so I say, as a journalist, I know that policemen aren’t the best at answering personal questions. Rosey says, “Well, I’ve also learned never to trust a reporter.” Touche. At the scene, Rosey heard a noise behind him. When he turned, a small two-seater Honda convertible was coming at him sideways on the passenger side, between the tire and the windshield. Everything went into slow motion. Rosey waited for impact and then pushed up, trying to pop himself over the hood. The Honda hit him on his left side, crashing them both into his patrol car. Then, the car spun and hit the wall of the overpass, smashed. In seconds, Rosey was over the wall, clinging to the concrete under his armpit so he didn’t drop. His body hung in mid-air.

When Dylan Thompson was six years old, he found out he was sick. His parents had known since he was 18 months that he’d been born with neurofibromatosis (NF 1), but they didn’t know how to tell him.

During a routine doctor’s visit, his pediatrician asked them if Dylan knew the extent of his illness. NF 1 is a genetic tumor disorder that causes non-cancerous lumps, and side effects like vision problems, epilepsy, and sometimes cancerous tumors. His mother, Dawn Thompson, told the doctor they planned on breaking the news to him later that year, when they felt he was old enough to understand. Without much warning, the doctor brought Dylan “The NF Book.” It had pictures of children with neurofibromatosis and said, “Children with NF go to the doctor's more than other children” and “Sometimes children with NF get MRIs and X-rays.” Dawn and her husband were nervous, but Dylan was fascinated by the book. He pointed to the pictures and told his parents, “I did that. I went there. I have that.” Dawn says it seemed like a positive way to learn about his disorder. On the way home, Dylan was quiet. “Am I going to die?” he finally asked Dawn. “I think he connected something might be different,” she says during our interview, three years after that day at the doctor's office.

“And I said, ‘We're all going to die, buddy, but no time soon. We've got a good life to live.’ He was okay with that.” NF 1 affects about one in every 3,500 individuals, or about 100,000 people in the United States. Symptoms usually present themselves later in life; Dylan was very young to be diagnosed. One of the first symptoms of NF is “cafe au lait spots,” or coffee-colored birthmarks.

Dawn, Dylan's mother, moves the collar of Dylan’s blue T-shirt over to show me a “cute heart-shaped one” on his neck. Dylan was born with at least 10 marks on him. Dawn remembers seeing the one on his neck, right when he was born. She pointed it out to her husband and said, "What are these all over him?" The nurse and doctor told the couple it was fine, but for Dawn, the marks didn’t sit well. Dawn brought him in to the doctor initially because six-month-old Dylan was underweight. When he was 18 months, Dylan was the size of a 10 month old. Dylan had also stopped walking, going back to a crawl. Doctors X-rayed his legs, but it showed nothing wrong. Pediatricians told them it was fine because he was so young, but Dawn worried.

Then, Dylan started waking up in the night with leg pain, which Dawn says is the worst part for her: to watch him suffer. The family was incorrectly told that Dylan just had growing pains. Dawn says the family had been to nine doctors before anyone was alarmed by the birth marks she always pointed out. Their pediatrician had never even heard of NF. After his diagnosis, Dylan went into the hospital for ten days of biopsies, MRIs and tests. Dylan was tested for cystic fibrosis, which he did not have. When Dylan was four, his eyes crossed, a possible symptom of a brain tumor. Tests showed he had strabismus, a condition common in children with NF. Dawn says she was just relieved it wasn’t a brain tumor. But if Dylan’s right eye got stuck, it would lose vision. In 2007, Dylan had one of three or four surgeries he would need in each eye to tie the muscles in his eye to his nose and keep them straight. It didn’t take. He had the second surgery last November. After the eye surgery, Dylan’s biggest concern was that his gym teacher wouldn’t let him play his favorite sport, basketball. Dylan tells me gym is his favorite subject in school and, proudly, that one time he made a lay-up during a game. Three weeks ago, they were told Dylan needs the third surgery as soon as possible, though their doctor thinks based on the first two, that it won’t be successful. They’ve decided not to have the third procedure because the pain of Dylan’s recovery did not justify the poor results on his vision.   In the car, on the way home from the doctor, Dawn says Dylan asked her, "Am I going to lose my vision?" She told him his right eye would give him trouble, but that he’d still be able to see. He seemed satisfied by that response. “For him, it's a luxury to see at all. The rest, he doesn't care about that,” she says. When he was six, Dylan also lost his hearing in his right ear. Dawn says it was around then that Dylan’s illness started taking a toll on her and husband. They both felt helpless.

“There's nothing we can do,” Dawn says. “Even on his birthday, instead of just enjoying that he's getting older, I know that it's progressive.” Dawn wanted to feel some control over her son’s situation. She started working on fundraisers and getting involved with the Children’s Tumor Foundation. They held a motorcycle run fundraiser, and do an annual fundraiser for CTF, which my boyfriend, a stand-up comedian, has performed at. That's how we meet Dylan and Dawn, because Dylan's one of my boyfriend's biggest fans.

Online, Dawn found a program called Racing4Research and the NF Heroes, that raises money for NF research using race car drivers in Daytona to drive with the children's names on their cars. The Thompsons raised money, but when it came time to go down to Daytona and see the race, Dylan was too sick. In the mail, Dylan received a huge picture of a race car signed by all the drivers. They did it again the next year, but again Dylan was in the hospital. Third time was the charm; Dylan raised $7,800 and made it to Florida to watch the race. All together Racing4Research raised over a million dollars.

The experience really lifted their spirits. It was the first time the family could talk about NF without feeling despondent.

Dylan, however, started seeing money as the answer. He told Dawn, “I hope they have enough now for a cure” and “NF must be rich by now.”

Dawn took him to a forum for doctor’s working on a cure for NF, and they explained to Dylan where the money he raised went.

Dylan sees a doctor in Boston at least once a month. He visits an eye specialist every three to six months and an ear doctor every six months. It’s rare to have hearing loss with NF 1; it’s more common in NF 2. Dylan’s hearing and vision loss are caused by nerve damage in the brain. Because Dylan has NF 1, the hearing and vision loss concerns his doctors. They worried it could be a brain tumor. Brain scans showed Dylan was all clear, but they’ve been checking frequently for five years. “We're relieved every time,” Dawn says. His last scan was in November. But the family stopped Dylan’s annual scans, Dawn says, because the stress leading up the tests was too much. X-Rays are also not good for the body. And even knowing about a tumor wouldn’t help. Because they are wrapped around nerves, NF tumors can’t be removed. “You're just torturing yourself,” Dawn says. “And he's happy and healthy; it's harder to bring him in when he's feeling good.”

In another incident, Dylan told her, "My bed is shaking." It wasn't his bed, it was him. He'd lost all muscle control and developed a condition called acute ataxia. It was two months before he could walk again. Six months later, it happened again. Doctors thought maybe Dylan had a type of quickly spreading cancer. He had two spinal taps. For two weeks, Dawn and her husband worried, but the test came up negative. "We felt like that was such a blessing," she says. But eight months later, it happened again. They still haven't found out what caused it. "If it's not presenting a problem, we don't dig," she says. "He's been through a lot." Unlike the trajectory of cystic fibrosis, neurofibromatosis is unpredictable. Dawn says the family knew a healthy 14-year-old girl with no symptoms of NF except the “cafe au lait” marks. She died before she was 15. Another friend with NF died at 32 from a cancerous nerve tumor. But, Dawn says, they also know children with NF who have survived severe brain tumors.

“With NF, if you get the cancer it's usually a deadly cancer,” Dawn says. “But with NF there is a lot of uncertainty and there's a lot of hope too.” Dylan is small for his age, but full of boundless energy. He tells me that when he grows up, he wants to design and create video games. As Dawn and I do most of the interview, Dylan asks to read the newspaper, buys an orange juice fizz drink and tells my boyfriend that his mother and I are “just talking like girls do.” Dawn calls him “such a character.” He’s an extremely confident kid, his mom says. He once won an argument with a bigger girl who mocked his size by telling her that he was older than her. She relented.

On the way over to the interview, Dawn says he asked her if she’d be happier if he’d never been born, “because you wouldn’t even know you were missing me,” he reasoned. Dawn assured him she would miss him, because she always wanted a little boy like him. “He’s a thinker,” she says. Dylan also loves reading, and his favorite author is R.L. Stine and his “scary and cool” Goosebumps series. When I tell Dylan that R.L. Stine is one of the other interviewees for this project, he is impressed. “I went to his house,” I say and Dylan asks where he lives. I answer, New York City. There’s a beat and then Dylan fist-pumps and shouts, “I knew he was still alive!” He’s a really funny, cool kid. Dawn says usually, as soon as they get back from a hospital stay, Dylan is out the door, ready to play.

His active nature makes Dawn happy, but also worries her. Dylan’s vision problems mean he has no depth perception. It could lead to processing problems. Sixty to eighty percent of kids with NF have learning disabilities; Dylan has normal intelligence, but he uses a special laptop Alpha Smart at school because it’s hard for him to write and keep up. From my experience spending time with him, he seems really astute and precocious. Because Dylan sees in 2D, his drawings of people are very unique. Eyes and mouths are embedded rather than projected. Dawn actually sold two of his pictures, one for $350, on eBay and donated the money.

An example of Dylan’s 2D vision is they saw two horses on a farm, one far away and one close up. Dylan saw them as one big horse and one little horse. He had no concept that next to each other the horses would be the same size. Dawn worries about him jumping off ledges and misjudging the distance. Dylan’s broken an arm, elbow and wrist jumping too hard from the back of a truck. Dylan remembers his hospital stays, but focuses on Santa visits or gifts he received. Harkening back to what happened when he found out he had NF, a doctor recently told the family, in front of Dylan, that he may have a tumor in his leg. Dawn's heart sank. Dylan turned to her and said, "That's normal right? Well, normal for NF." In November, Dylan is set for a series of X-rays of his hip, leg and pelvis to check for a tumor inside the nerve of his right leg. "I have to remember not to act on what could be or what might be because his thing is, 'It's all right. If it's good right now, it's okay,'" she says. When Dylan was younger, Dawn got a tattoo on her ankle of a rose with a missing puzzle piece. She told Dylan that some day, when a cure is found, she’s going to get the puzzle piece filled in. “So one day he came up to me with a piece of puzzle from his Transformers puzzle and goes, ‘Will this one fit?’” Dawn says. “I was like, ‘Buddy that's not the kind of puzzle piece... if the doctor's find the answer, that's the puzzle piece.’” It was then she realized she needed to emphasize to Dylan that a cure wasn’t the only way for him to have a good life. One of Dylan’s doctors told her that with NF, it’s better to focus on the good days.

“If today's a good day, it's a good day,” she says. “And we have way more good days.”

Eight lines. That’s how much space the officer at the scene had to take Maria DiBari’s testimony and to describe the injuries that left her temporarily paralyzed. Eight lines on a police report that Maria would later have to beg to have reversed. In 2007, Maria was brutally assaulted. Her spinal cord was compressed. There is a metal plate and at least nine screws in her left leg. Her attacker was her husband. Maria, a middle-class, educated chemist living in the New York suburbs, found herself someone she’d never thought she’d be: a victim of domestic violence. The police officers that arrived at the scene didn’t question Maria separately from her husband of six months. Her foot was hanging off her leg, she says (and X-rays confirm). She was too hurt and scared to tell them the truth. Her husband was standing right there, and one look at him told her he might kill her if she spoke. At the scene and at the hospital, no one checked her for signs of domestic violence either, she says. No one checked her for strangulation. No one checked her arms for scratch marks or bruises. She did not meet the common stereotype of a domestic violence victim: "low income" or "trash."

The police in Maria’s area of Dutchess County receive domestic violence training once a year, Maria says. The focus is on policy updates. “We all think that the officers that are called to the scenes of crimes are trained individuals, but a lot of them are inexperienced on these issues,” Maria says when we meet at a coffee shop upstate. Maria is a very pretty, dark-haired woman with a stern face that shows maturity beyond her 29 years. She speaks precisely and strongly; it’s a tone I imagine she’s had to adopt lately. For Maria’s new nonprofit, The Tri-County Crisis Center, better training is one of the tent pole issues. A year after her attack, Maria faced endless roadblocks to getting help as a domestic violence victim; Much of it stemmed from her initial police report which stated she’d had an accident. Because of the police report, her husband wasn’t arrested. Maria had spent that year forming a safe exit strategy to leave her abuser. She had a police escort take her out of the house. I ask if he had any repercussions. “No,” she says. “He’s a teacher. He teaches little children.” When she did leave, she was unemployed, had lost her house and needed constant medical upkeep. She started reaching out to hotlines and agencies, requesting the services she was eligible for: shelter and medical compensation. She was continuously denied. For instance, Maria’s injury made it hard for her to move her neck, but she wasn’t approved to go to the chiropractor. “It was a nightmare,” she says. “A 30 second incident taught me so much about our society and what we value.” She grew increasingly angry and frustrated. That year, she started a blog called “A Movement Against Domestic Violence," which soon became a resource for other victims nationwide dealing with the same problems. Instead of their applications leading to action, each agency referred victims to other agencies who would then refer them to somebody else. It was an circle leading nowhere. “They just made it this whole big ordeal for me as a victim,” she says. “Many victims give up because they can’t get help.” Her blog also became a place to whistle-blow the failures of the agencies. Maria says she believes most of them to be inadequate. “Almost every agency you can think of is not doing a proper job,” she says. “The services do not match the funding.” For example, on the blog, she audited the New York-based domestic violence group Safe Horizon, which receives 42 million dollars in government grants. Maria found that about 37 million goes to salaries.  “The agencies are my worst enemies,” she says. “Unfortunately it has to be like that.” The blog also became a place to post her updates on the current procedures for domestic violence victims. Maria has written her own booklets and manuals to help victims know what to do next. If they don’t, the results can be fatal. In Dutchess County, there have been seven domestic violence-related homicides. Two of the victims, Maria says, were denied services when they reached out for help. “These women are, in my opinion, dying because they’re not being properly assisted,” she says. Maria couldn’t wait any longer for herself or for the others. Victims needed a place to get direct help.

That’s when she turned her blog into a physical location: the Tri-County Crisis Center, an emergency crisis center for people of any race, gender, and/or sexual orientation who can’t wait weeks or months for a shelter or agency to assist them. The center has two private locations in Poughkeepsie, NY and Beacon, NY. The center, or TCCC, focuses on policy reform, and also on basic needs for victims: surgeries, documentation, legal help, technology, safety plans. “I always say you know, the first thing you do is get your documentation together. You need documentation. Without documentation in New York State and any other state, you’re not considered a victim,” Maria says. One form of documentation that’s important for some cases is a restraining order though Maria believes they won’t protect a victim. Even when no physical crime has taken place, such as in stalking cases, Maria advocates making a detailed timeline of every encounter and filling out an informational report with the police every time. “911 every incident,” she says, even if you think the police won't care. Maria shows me a thick white binder where she’s personally, in red, edited the procedures taken by police to assist victims of domestic violence.

One example is that, like in Maria’s case, the parties are not separated during questioning. She's added that they need to be "out of hearing range." Maria’s husband could hear everything she told police and doctors after he hurt her. “My abuser was right next to me and they screened me, ‘Are you a victim of domestic violence?’,” she says. “How can I answer that question when I just got my bones broken?” She’s working on a nonverbal screening tool, a form with quick questions in case the victim is too afraid to verbalize what’s happened, but so far there's been little interest in adopting it. Maria says the agencies, hotlines, and police departments need to be trained by people who have lived through domestic violence. For example, there are tools that could help them better assess how at-risk a victim is. “It’s so easy to predict violence in adults. We’re very predictable,” she says. If the police can predict risk, they can set bail or jail time at an appropriate amount and perhaps prevent homicide. “They believe they’re the experts,” Maria says. “And I’m not an expert.” The problem with implementing the changes, Maria says, is money, laziness, and bureaucracy. “They get paychecks if they do good or not," Maria says. "There’s no incentive to change.” So Maria’s organization picks up the slack. One of TCCC’s clients, who was disfigured by domestic violence, appeared on the Discovery Channel and received the full reconstructive surgery she’d been denied by the National Coalition and by Safe Horizon. Maria got another victim free dental surgery in New York City and another client in California had a tattoo of her abusive boyfriend's name removed. She also gets victims much-needed computers, recorders and telephones through cell phone banks or other networking and partnering. In Maria’s eyes, technology is essential to connect to resources and keep documentation. TCCC also helps clients with identity protection and changing their social security numbers if their abusers aren’t arrested and victims need to run.  “We’ve helped people where their throats are slit open and you know, ‘What do I do from here?’ to, ‘I need medical compensation. How do I do the paper work?’ or, ‘I need resume help because I need a job and I just lost everything,’” she says. She also hopes to get a free program called VINE (Victim Information Notification Everyday) made mandatory. VINE is a service, that a victim can register for, where when they receive a phone call when their abuser is released from prison. Maria says none of the officers during her incident told her about it, and that VINE is mentioned briefly in the mountain of paperwork given to victims. She’s even, as a test, called departments and asked about VINE. Hardly anyone on the phone knew what it was. One of the victims in Dutchess County was never told about VINE, Maria says. Her husband was released from jail and came back to murder her. “It’s a life-saving phone call,” Maria says. “...I want automatic registration for every victim of a crime after an arrest.” At the end of the interview, Maria says she still goes to the doctor every two weeks for injuries her ex-husband gave her. She keeps her address private, because she worries he could find her. “Am I in fear still? Yes,” she says. “I’m always prepared.” Though she works upstate as an engineer, Maria spends her free time working for TCCC. She uses her scientific mind, she says, to keep all the paperwork in order, and has started apply for very competitive grant money. She says she feels like she has an obligation to work with other victims because she’s in a position where she can. “I mean they could hire me tomorrow and I would sit there all day long and update these policies,” she says. “This is very important. And you don’t know how important this is until you’re in a situation where, ‘Shit, I really wish this was being done.’”

Steph Wilkins wasn't scared until 1997, when Jeremy was born. After her commitment ceremony to Maureen Keene six years earlier, Steph had considered herself married. Now, their baby was in the Intensive Care Unit. Maureen had had a difficult time delivering Jeremy. Steph was barred from being with him because she didn’t have a suitable answer to the question, “What is your relationship to this baby?” “As far as they were concerned, I wasn't anything legal to Jeremy and it was horrible,” Steph says, with a mother's worried tone. “It was like, 'This isn't right. This is so scary.' As far as I was concerned, I was his mom. Period.” The couples’ doctor intervened and Steph was allowed to visit her son, but the idea that the hospital staff could legally withhold her child really frightened Steph. She’d never thought about getting married to Maureen in the government’s eyes after their small Massachusetts ceremony with friends and family. Their love mattered to them more than an official piece of paper. But Jeremy’s arrival signaled a need for her and Maureen -- and now their new son -- to be protected under the law. The terror of potentially losing their new son didn’t end there -- for either of them. Maureen had given birth to Jeremy with help from Steph’s brother, to ensure their baby had both sides of the couples’ basic genetic makeup. Her brother then happily gave up his rights to Jeremy to Maureen and Steph as promised. He is not listed on the birth certificate. But Steph’s name couldn’t just be added to the certificate as Jeremy’s "other mother."

First, Maureen had to temporarily give up her rights to the baby she’d birthed and then the couple had to apply to jointly adopt him. The couples' lawyer in Boston assured them this was the best way for both women to become Jeremy’s mothers. Both Steph and Maureen had to get letters of recommendation from friends and family and co-workers, as if Jeremy was a regular adoption. I'm in disbelief. “Even though you'd given birth to this baby?,” I say to Maureen. “You needed paperwork to adopt your own biological son?” “Pretty much,” Steph says. Next, the couple took their letters of recommendation to a judge, who interviewed them to decide if they were fit parents. Maureen gave up her rights to Jeremy and they jointly adopted. I’m still having trouble understanding what I’m hearing, “But,” I say, “how hard is it to just go, ‘This is the other mom?’”

Apparently, very hard. In order for Steph to be recognized as Jeremy's mom legally, Maureen had to give her permission to adopt and then adopt Jeremy back.

Maureen hated the idea. “It was like, you're asking me to give up my rights to my son,” she says, pained. “It's very scary,” Steph says.

Maureen was worried the whole time. What if she gave up her rights and then they were denied as a couple? What would happen to Jeremy?

“We trusted,” Steph says. They didn't have a choice. “Thank goodness, the process that we went through was really not so painful because the people were very kind and--but you know, not everybody is. And not everybody has the support that we have.” In 2008, Steph and Maureen tied the knot officially at town hall, after it became legal in Massachusetts. Then, they had a small, simple ceremony on their front lawn with their own vows. Steph’s mom and Jeremy were there.

“We wanted to be recognized as a legal couple. And it also protects us, and it protects Jeremy because we're both his parents, and we're married,” Steph says. “It just took the weight off us.” The couple could now also share an insurance plan, which is convenient, but Steph says she wanted to become legally married for another more romantic reason.

“As silly as this might sound, when I would fill out applications I could not stand when it would say ‘Married,’ ‘Single’ and I couldn't say I was married because I wasn't legally married; I'd have to say I was single, which I'm not single,” she says, looking at Maureen.

Steph and Maureen met in 1989, through work. Steph was born in Framingham, Massachusetts, the oldest of two siblings. She went to college at North Adams, and then to Lesley for her Master's in expressive therapies, or using the arts as a therapeutic tool, a combination of art therapy and music therapy.

She then worked at the Department of Mental Retardation. The name only changed two years ago, which Steph and I agree is crazy-backwards. Maureen worked at a linked private agency, Nexus Incorporated, and Steph was a service coordinator for Maureen’s house, often correcting Maureen’s paperwork.

“She’d take a big red pen, make the corrections, send it back,” Maureen chuckles. I ask when it went from business to friendship. Steph says their colleagues and friends started liking each other, occasionally going out after work. It was a natural transition. 

Maureen made the move toward romance.

“She tried to ask me out and I wouldn't go,” Steph says. She had just gotten out of a tough long-term relationship with someone she’d really trusted. “I just wasn't sure what I felt and what I wanted to do. And she was very persistent. I was really very shy. She didn't give up on me pretty much.”

Maureen deadpans, “She got tired of me calling.”

In fact, Maureen would often called during Steph’s favorite show, Knot’s Landing because she knew that’s when Steph would be home to talk. 

They started dating and then moved in together at the end of 1989. Their commitment ceremony was two years later.

“I remember the 1991 [ceremony] more than I do the legalized one, not because it's not important but because we really had committed to each other back in '91 so this was more of a legal thing,” Steph says, “but the '91 was the ceremony that brought us really together and kind of cemented everything.”

I ask if it felt different to tie the knot legally. They both say it didn’t. Their lives are filled with positivity, they say. The only blip is occasionally people being slow on the uptake that both Maureen and Steph are Jeremy’s moms.

When Maureen was pregnant, Steph says their doctor let slip that their baby was a boy. They tried to prepare a lot for the questions he might have later in life, but they also worried that what they were doing was overkill. Perhaps his understanding of his alternative family would just come naturally.

When Jeremy was young, Steph says, they read books about single parent families or children living with their grandparents as well as a book about a child with two mommies. They told him his uncle was his biological father and the two have a special bond, though not a parental one.

“We talked about differences and tolerance,” Steph says. Plus, Maureen works with adults with special needs. Steph says Jeremy grew up around different men and women and understood them.

They lucked out too that the school Steph and Maureen work at is also a very accepting environment. Steph remembers being floored when a little boy pointed at Maureen and said, “Your wife's on her way.” A little girl once said to Jeremy on the playground, "You know, it's not really fair that you have two moms. Why can't I have two moms?" For those kids, acceptance is second nature.

“It was like, he was just surrounded by love,” Steph says. Though Jeremy grew up around mostly women, Steph says he was such a typical little boy that it's funny; he played with toy guns and trucks and other “socially male” objects with no persuasion either way from his mothers. “He has the best of both worlds; he had both sides of him, like the yin and yang,” Steph says. She’s in awe, she says, having watched Jeremy as a child, equally enjoying watching Indiana Jones movies and also listening to quiet music. “He had his little police car that he would ride around in, so we didn't teach that. That just was intrinsically in him; that was his personality,” she says. I mention that it’s terrible they’d even have to defend the way Jeremy was raised, as if there’s some misplaced fear that he’ll turn out "too feminine." Steph says the arguments of people who are anti-gay adoption are steeped in fear and misunderstanding. Love is love, she says. But, she thinks, people are afraid of anything different. She compares homophobia to a child being afraid of the dark; the fear is irrational. “I wish they could see I’m no different than anyone else in this room," Steph says. "I'm educated, I had a good family and I'm really healthy and she's my wife.”

As for Jeremy, he comes in to the interview later to say 'hi' to my boyfriend who is with us. (He taught Jeremy at school briefly.) Jeremy is 6’1 and wearing a brown t-shirt with wolves on it. His demeanor is exactly that of a teenage boy -- slightly quiet and embarrassed by attention.

Steph says he recently told them he wanted to put a sign on his door reading, “No parents allowed.” His moms weren’t even mad; they were just tickled by how "typically teenage" the request was. Steph says it proved to her that it doesn’t matter the sex of the parents raising the kid: She and Maureen were, in Jeremy’s eyes, completely and totally his parents.

Photo courtesy of goodbirdinc.com

Barbara Heidenriech’s 24-year-old pet parrot Tara cleans her owner’s eyelashes and eyebrows every night.

“It’s called allopreening,” Barbara says. “It's very intimate in a way because the bird's right in your face.”

Allopreening is part of a familial grooming practice for parrots. The birds usually do it for each other, but after all the time they’ve spent together, Tara uses her sharp beak and claws to preen her human friend’s lashes very gently. Barbara is a zoologist, parrot expert and founder of Good Bird Inc, so she finds maintaining a positive relationship with an animal to be the utmost reward. “You smell the way they smell so for me the smell that an Amazon parrot has is ‘love,’ you know?” she says. “When I smell an Amazon parrot, it's like, ‘Aah warm and fuzzy.’” Barbara is a pretty blonde woman, who looks vaguely like the actress Heather Graham. She currently lives in Austin, TX but is in New York City to teach a parrot seminar. It’s right before Hurricane Irene is about to hit, so she’s not sure yet if it’s going to be cancelled. We head over to a Mexican restaurant hear her hotel. Barbara gets a margarita and I get a Modelo Negra. We both order food, and I notice she’s not a vegan.

“I was vegan for two years,” she says. “I do think if I had to kill an animal to survive, I would be vegetarian. I can't do that. I can cut up an animal after it's dead because you know, you do have to do that to feed animals in zoos.” I blink. I hadn’t thought of that. It’s not like cobras are vegetarians and they do need to be fed. Barbara nods, “I mean, especially working with birds of prey. I've had to cut up many dead rats, rabbits and mice and I actually have a really fabulous, trained pet rabbit at home.” As a trainer, Barbara can immediately spot a well-trained animal. Outside, Barbara notices an agitated woman pulling a mid-sized brown dog on a leash by a crowded, busy street. “We are so accustomed to manhandling and forcing animals,” Barbara says, gesturing to how the woman and her pet. If he was a puppy, Barbara says, and he showed that fear response, the owner should sit him at the door and give him some treats and then open the door and give him some treats. “We say, 'Oh my god you tolerated that horn honking--here's a treat!' 'Oh my god, that man with the beard petted you, here's a treat!' So the animal goes, 'Yeah! Men with beards are cool.' 'Horns honking are cool!' He would start to learn that being out here is paired with good things not scary things, So it's really our choices that are shaping what these animals become,” she says. “So I look at stuff like that and I go, There's so much work and help to be done.” Barbara was born in upstate New York. As a child, she’d play in the creeks by her house, putting frogs into baby carriages. It was meant as a show of affection, but it often killed them. She played with butterflies. Her parents let her keep rabbits, mice, gerbils, and fish. They took her to the Catskill Game Farm, to feed the animals and the Morgan Horse Farms in Vermont. She thought maybe she’d become a veterinarian, but after a high school internship with one, she decided it wasn’t for her. Her job was to restraining distressed animals for procedures. It was too sad. “I had to have a heart to heart with myself and say, well what is it that I like about animals? Why are animals important to me?” she says. “And I think what it comes down to is I love the relationship you can have with an animal.” Barbara worked in a pet store, and in an eco-research lab. She got a degree in zoology from University of California Davis, and started working at a zoo 45 minutes away. Next, she worked at Brookfield Zoo outside of Chicago for a couple of years. From there, she moved to Orlando, Florida. She’d heard a new zoo was opening, put together by Disney and Barbara wanted in. This zoo would later become Animal Kingdom. Barbara sent along her resume to Discovery Island, another zoo in the area and worked there first. Barbara went to work over there as a zookeeper, making seven bucks an hour and cleaning cages. Being a zookeeper is a very low-paying and physical job. When Barbara was a zoo keeper in Chicago, it was around 70 below at night. Some animals lived outside. Barbara went out in thick overalls, steel-toed boots and with a pickaxe to chip away at the frozen poo.

“I had some good biceps back then,” Barbara jokes. In school, Barbara took classes like ornithology, mammalogy and herbatology. She worked with animals out in the field and observed them in the wild, but a lot of her schooling was preparing for research or graduate work. Barbara knew that wasn’t her path. “I always tell people who want to work in zoos, you need to get as much hands-on experience as possible,” she says. “You won't get a job in a zoo just based on your degree. You just have to get animal experience. That's huge.” Barbara’s interest shifted to birds when a friend asked her to babysit her pet parrot, Tara, for a short while during the summer between her freshman and sophomore years in college. This turned into twenty four years. Tara joins Barbara’s other pets, a dog named Waylon, other birds Delbert, Blue Lu, Joe Cockertiel, Banana Puddin’ and a rabbit named Loretta. When Animal Kingdom opened in 1998, Barbara thought the park could use a bird show. She wrote up a proposal, made an example VHS video, and submitted it to the vice-president of the Animal Kingdom. To her surprise, she was called into a meeting with some Disney big wigs. Rather than just using her proposal, it was assumed that Barbara would be a part of the show. “I was literally a nobody,” she laughs. “...I never even interviewed for a job with the contracting company, I was just sort of absorbed into it. It was a neat experience.” Barbara did the bird show at Animal Kingdom for five years. She was also sent out to consult as an animal trainer at other zoos. She also started working with people who had parrots as pets, teaching workshops and eventually writing a book inspired by the behavioral problems she was having with Tara and the repeated questions guests of the bird show would ask her about their pet parrots. She participated in chat rooms answering people’s parrot questions. She set up vending booths at conferences. She lectured, and continues to do so, at veterinary colleges around the country. One she’s particularly proud of is the avian symposium at her Alma mater, UC Davis. In 1987, she’d been a student there and now 20 years later, she was a speaker. She felt honored. Seven years ago, Barbara started a magazine dedicated to parrot training, through the kinder gentler methods of building trust and positive experiences between trainer and animal. That corporation became the now digital Good Bird Inc. There was no other collective resource for information about training and raising parrots. Barbara’s role as a parrot trainer into another book. She started producing videos as another teaching tool. She taught live workshops in New Zealand, Australia, Finland, France, Spain, Germany, Finland, Sweden, England, Ireland, Canada, and Mexico.

"I love my job," she says, after I express jealousy. "I absolutely do." Barbara says she is actually probably one of the few people, in the zoo community, that  promotes parrots as pets. Many people don’t have the tools to live successfully with a parrot, but that’s hardly means the parrot isn’t an ideal pet. She says her birds don't scream, bite  or destroy her house. “It's really about educating the owners as to what to do to have that great relationship, and so a lot of those things that are being mentioned as drawbacks to having parrots are actually just the results of people not having education, not knowing how to address these problems,” she says. It’s one of the reasons she founded Good Bird Inc. Animal training is important for a variety of reasons -- not just for films (although I almost lose my mind when she says she knows the people that train the Harry Potter owls). Medical reasons are a big factor. In the past, animals had to be anesthetized for medical procedures, which is risky. Now, people like Barbara teach animals to cooperate in medical care. “We can train a gorilla to present his arm for a blood draw, or a river otter to present her belly for ultrasound and so a lot of the training I do at zoos is more oriented towards that,” she says. In general, zoos receive a lot of criticism for caging animals that would otherwise live in the wild. Barbara says she believes the people that work in zoos care more about animals than any animal rights activist. “These are people who are getting paid like six dollars an hour and would give their life for the animal in their care. They don't always have control over things like the finances to create the best environment or habitat for that animal but I can't think of a zoo person I've met that won't do everything in their power to try and make that animal's life as enriched, as engaging, anything they can do to make that animal's life the best it can be, they will do,” she says. We talk briefly about the book ‘Life of Pi,’ that takes place in part at a zoo in India. The book defends zoos by describing more like hotels than like prisons. Barbara says statistically almost all animals live longer in captivity than they do in the wild. “People romanticize life in the wild. Life in the wild is hard,” she says. “But we don't want animals to be bored, which is why many zoos have zoo-wide enrichment programs where they find ways to create opportunities for animals to express their natural behavior so that they're challenged mentally and physically and that's also what training does.” Barbara says when people tap on the glass or yell at the animals, it’s because they want the animal to respond to them. She suggests that instead of setting it up so the person has to misbehave to get that reaction, why not make it so the guests can do something healthy to interact with the animals? Her idea is a button that when pushed causes an animal to pick up some bark. Next, the animal gets rewarded for doing that with a treat that comes down a shoot. The human would have caused the animal to do a natural behavior and the guest gets to be involved.

Barbara says its not a wholly original idea: one zoo she saw allowed the chimps to have power over a shower, placed over the guests. The chimps can get the guests wet and watch the reactions through the glass. It’s a huge re-enforcer for them, and I imagine, hilarious fun for the people getting wet. “The real goal in the zoo world is to teach people to appreciate animals in the hopes that they'll care about wild life. ...I think in order to get anybody to take action in terms of conservation or preserving habitats, they have to have a connection, they have to feel some sort of affection towards animals,” she says. She says it starts with people understanding how rewarding it is to have a relationship with an animal, to stop thinking about them as “tigers” as a whole, and start thinking about, let’s say, your favorite tiger at the zoo, Simba. “So it becomes like a friend, like another human to them where it's a personality, it's a living being, it's not just a category of tiger so that they go, ‘You know what? I care about that tiger and I care that tigers might be extinct one day,’ and help them,” Barbara says. Plus, loving an animal, she says, makes you take more care when interacting with people too -- it makes you a better fellow human being.

Image courtesy of Kadampa.org    Buddhism, I learn, is a science of the mind.

 In fact, in the free e-book 'Modern Buddhism' by Geshe Kelsang, it's defined as "scientific methods for improving our human nature and qualities through developing the capacity of our mind." This is not the scientific method I remember from grade school.

 After work a couple Fridays ago, I head to an office buidling in Chelsea and take the elevator to the fifth floor. There I find Geshe Kelsang's Chakrasambara Kadampa Meditiation Center and its resident teacher, Kadam (or "Teacher") Morten.   The center is a few rooms used as a kitchen, an office, a bookstore and a big carpeted meditation and prayer “temple.” Golden statues of the Buddha line the walls, above them are paintings of the different Buddhas, representing different aspects of the enlightened mind. There’s also a platform with a pillow, from which Kadam Morten leads meditations and classes like “The Key to Happiness” and “Understanding the Mind’s Potential” while students sit on the carpet or in folding chairs. It’s a simple, beautiful set-up.   Morten, a welcoming guy who looks way younger than his actual age, is originally from the primarily non-spiritual country of Denmark. His father was a diplomat so the family split time between home, New York and Switzerland. When Morten was 10, his parents became interested in transcendental meditation, then a popular 1970s fad. That was when Morten learned to meditate.   In Switzerland, Morten’s father became sick with cancer. Morten remembers practicing meditation as a way to relieve his own stress. Back then, Eastern medicine was not mainstream; it would have been seen as absurd to teach meditation to sick people. There was less of an accepted medical connection between the mind and the body.   When Morten was sixteen, his father passed away.   “I felt no peace,” he says. “At that point, that was obviously a huge event within our family, traumatic, tragic. It was definitely, for me, really for my whole family, a bit of a spiritual wake‑up. I was basically interested in, for lack of a better way of saying it, exploring the meaning of life...That's what I was trying to work out: Why are we alive? Why do we have to die? What the heck is going on?”   His fascination with meditation and Buddhism continued when he went to college in York, England to study English literature. There, he found a Buddhist center and kept gravitating towards what he calls “a meditative way of thinking.”

Buddhism is a religion and philosophy encompassing traditions, beliefs and practices based on the teachings of a 4th through 6th century man named Siddharta Guatama. He is commonly known as "The Buddha" and in short, believed in enlightenment as an end to the cycle of suffering and rebirth.

Morten says the main commitment is not to harm others and the main practice is to give love and to understand the potential for compassion, the mind and love. He does also wish to achieve enlightenment himself.

The Buddhist center is where Morten met his teacher: the aforementioned Geshe Kelsang, an 86-year-old Tibetan man. “Geshe” is a title meaning “spiritual friend." Geshe Kelsang had been raised a monk in a Tibetan monastery, and fled to India when the Chinese took over the country. There, he went into a retreat for 20 years. When Morten met him in 1981, Kelsang had been sent over to the West to set up Buddhist Centers in Europe.

Morten gestures behind me to a series of three photos of Geshe Kelsang outside wearing a winter hat. They're hanging on Morten's office wall. He's the cutest, thinnest old man I've ever seen. His smile practically blooms on his face. I tell Morten I think Kelsang is adorable.

"He is an authentically happy fellow, which is quite rare," he says, admiration evident.

I ask if Kelsang is considered "enlightened" or if enlightenment is seen as possible for the modern human being.

Morten says enlightened people will never announced their own enlightenment. To Morten, Kelsang is enlightened and one of his teacher's main goals  is to help now modern people have access to a mind of enlightenment.

 His followers would regard Kelsang as enlightened, as "a source of inspiration in our own lives," Morten says.   While Morten liked Kelsang, he fell in love with his teacher's focus on Buddhism's practicality.   “What I liked is that it explained our experience in terms of the mind, as opposed to in terms of some old story. It was just explaining it all in terms of the mind. The reason we're unhappy is because we have unhappy minds,” he says. “We have agitated minds, like anger, or attachment, or jealousy, insecurity, these types of minds. Then you can learn to identify those in meditation, and you can learn to let go of those. That just felt very practical to me.” The Chakrasambara Center has a couple days a week where the general public is welcome to sit in on a class. Morten says his classes usually focus on meditation and then one specific practical tidbit for students to apply to their everyday lives: dealing with stress or channeling rejection, etc. Someone need not be a Buddhist to be studying Buddhism: It’s not uncommon to identify as, let's say, a “Jewish Buddhist” or the cutesy “JewBu.” Morten says people from other religions sometimes use Buddhism to deepen their appreciation of their own faith. “The lovely thing about Buddhism is that it's very practical, and you don't have to be a Buddhist to make use of that practice, so people can introduce meditation or integrate meditation into their lives with any spiritual background or no spiritual background,” Morten says. Buddhism, he says, is a method. It’s training yourself to learn about your own mind, and subsequently, on a basic level, it’s how to let go of unhappy states of mind and cultivate positive states of mind.

As Morten finished school, he split his time between classes and Kelsang's Buddhist Center. He describes it as an internal "discussion between the Western perspective and the Buddhist perspective." He was caught up in his secular studies, but remained drawn to Buddhist teachings.

Morten was among Geshe Kelsang's first students. He was around before there were any teachers, or a set protocol for becoming a teacher. The first time they met, Geshe Kelsang told Morten to study and train to become a teacher.

"That was like the first thing he said to me, was that I should do that," Morten says. "I thought he was joking, actually. I thought I was already taking enough exams at the university," he laughs. "He wasn't joking."

Westerners were gaining interest in Buddhism and Kelsang wanted Morten's help. I joke that the Beatles' time in India really did a number on the popular hippie culture. Morten laughs, "Blame it on the Beatles," he says. Whatever the reason, the interest was there. Tibetan teachers were being invited out to the West more and more frequently.

Kelsang's teachings, Morten says, focus on the practical. Westerners, more so, wanted to understand how to use Buddhism in their everyday lives. In Tibet, there was a more academic approach to Buddhism.

Kelsang's teacher gave him permission to re‑present the Buddhist teachings, or the Dharma, according to the needs of modern Western people. Morten says it's something Kelsang has done with great creativity and energy: Kelsang has written 25 books on how to begin and progress on the Buddhist path.

Gradually, he began to set up centers and to train Western teachers. "He saw that if it was to flourish in the West, it needed to come through Western teachers," Morten says. "Otherwise the danger is that it remains a bit of a trip. It remains exotic."

In that way, Kelsang was radical and ahead of his time. He began his own Buddhist tradition, which he called the New Kadampa Tradition. Morten's been there from the beginning.

After graduation, Morten and a few other young enthusiastic types moved into the Buddhist Center in York and started training to become teachers. For a decade, starting in 1984, Morten taught full-time all around England. In 1994, he came to New York and Washington DC to start spreading the New Kadampa tradition in the States.

"It didn't exist here. Basically, when I arrived, there was nothing," Morten says. It was also pre-Internet and so advertising was truly grassroots. "It was just me and some posters that I would walk around town and put up and say, 'Hey, come and listen to me if you're interested,'" he says. He sometimes placed ads in the Village Voice. "It was like starting up a band or something."

Gradually, people started coming to hear him lead meditation and to speak on topics like learning to deal with anger, improving relationships or increasing self‑confidence. Sometimes Morten spoke on more profound topics like the ultimate nature of reality or the nature of consciousness. "Buddhism is very, very rich because it's basically an exploration of consciousness, so it's very interactive, and it's very dynamic," he says.

"That's the cool thing that [Buddhism is] a science and it's a religion although the thing about religion, especially these days, is it's a dangerous word because I think immediately people associate it with a dogma," he says.

Buddhists, for example, do not mix church and state, so to speak. There are no restrictions on the LGBTQ community (there are gay Buddhist teachers) or stresses to vote one way or another, which Morten calls "dangerous, dangerous stuff." Kelsang does not want the centers to get involved in politics, however Morten says he is a "radical" person: two of the main teachers at the top of the tradition are Buddhist nuns, a position women don't usually hold.

"Forget the patriarchy," Morten says. "It was just very modern even though he is an 83 year old Tibetan. He just wants to bring benefit to all living being. Of course, everyone equally has Buddha nature."

Buddhists tend to verify their religion through experiences: If you meditate this way, you will have this verifiable experience.

""People associate faith with believing in something unbelievable. In other words, faith involves believing in something that is irrational," he says. "...Everything can be tested and verified in your own experience."

But, I counter, Buddhism has fantastical stories about the Buddha, just as Judeo-Christian religions have in the Bible. Morten says whether or not those stories are true is unimportant to Buddhism.

"What's important is are you becoming more peaceful, more loving, more compassionate? Is your own anger reducing? Geshe Kelsang says the real source of happiness is inner peace. Whatever's on your mind is peaceful, you're happy and you can experience that directly," he says.

"We tend to think that there are stressful situations. We will say, 'My job is stressful,' or, 'My kids are stressful.' But they are only stressful if your mind is relating to them in such a way as to produce stress. Basically, if you investigate your mind, which is what we do in Buddhist practice, you will discover that there is some rejection taking place in your mind. So, the example that I often use is, if you are running to catch the subway train and the doors close in your face, then almost everybody's response, it's like a universal response, is, 'No.' But if you think about it, it doesn't make any sense, because actually the doors have closed. So we are resisting or actually rejecting what has taken place," Morten says.

He compares it to driving the handbrake on.

"We are taxing our system. So, if we are constantly resisting our life and the circumstances in our life, guess what? You get exhausted and you become unhappy. You get angry. You get bitter," he says. "So what we learn to do in meditation is first of all, to develop a peaceful mind."

Meditation, Morten says, is a science. Paying attention to your breathing gives you momentary peace, through which you learn peace is possible. From there, potential is limitless.

"It's basically telling you that your happiness is in your own control. It's your responsibility. Rather than go around blaming all these people for making you unhappy or making you angry or whatever, no, it's my mind. I need to start training my mind," Morten says. "We learn to recognize those in our own experience and let them go. It's like, 'Oh, look. Anger. No big deal. Just let it go.' Then, instead learn to respond with a creative mind, with a positive mind, a flexible mind and finally, a happy mind. So, in Buddhism, we can verify. Happiness comes through peace."

In terms of the mind as a science, Morten says humans have unlimited potential for love, and for the use of their minds. They just have to believe in their own potential.

"The mind is this incredible thing. Sadly, most of us in our life, we don't identify with our potential. We walk around identifying with all our limitations. We think I'm a loser or nobody loves me and all I need to do is find one person who will love me and then I'll be happy," Morten says. "We go about life in a very passive way, grasping on to ourselves as being stuck and then just trying to see if we can find some kind of situation that will make us comfortable. But the real problem is you have an uncomfortable mind, doesn't matter how comfortable the situation is."

Morten says by learning to identify the person who angers you regularly, you can instead begin to see them as a sparring partner, someone created to test your peaceful mind.

"Instead of being an object of anger, they become your object of patience," Morten laughs. "You're growing as a person through your relationships, through your difficulties. I think one of the misconceptions about Buddhism is that it's also about running away, heading for the hills or becoming an aesthetic or walking around very slowly and drinking tea very slowly. Actually, it's about developing a quick mind. It's really a very creative practice that enables you to make use of anything that's going on in your life as part of your training, as part of becoming a better person."

I tell him I find all this really great in theory, but I'm skeptical about the ability to implement it in real life. I'm a very stressed out person, and it's hard for me to imagine breathing my way through problems.

"That's why people come here regularly," Morten says, gesturing to the center.

It's Mark's job to appear at pivotal junctures in people's lives.

A Russian businessman is gunned down and Mark wrangles a full-size motor-coach of 75 relatives to the funeral home. A friend’s 22-year-old daughter is killed in a car accident and Mark is there, crying with him and making arrangements. A 17-year-old boy dies in his sleep for no reason at all while his mother is at work and Mark comforts her and the boy’s brother.

For me too, Mark has been behind the scenes of a lot of formative events. He's not unlike the Jacob character from Lost: So good at his job, I never even noticed him.

When I was a sophomore in high school, "Tim," a boy I was acquainted with, died in a plane crash with his father on the way home for our Winter Formal. When I was a senior, "David," a fellow classmate I’d been briefly tutoring was killed in a suicide bombing in Israel. Both deaths were huge, immeasurable tragedies in my hometown’s Jewish community.

Mark was the director for Tim’s funeral. A recommendation from Tim’s mother led to Mark directing David’s funeral as well. Thousands of people attended David’s funeral. It was the largest I’d ever attended and the largest Mark had ever worked. The Israeli consulate gave a speech. His mother, father and sister huddled in the front row. His best friend told the crowd, “He wasn’t a pawn in a war. He was just David.”

I remember. I was there.

Mark was too.

It both hurts and is mind-blowing to be interviewing him now, years later. Mark also directed my grandfather’s funeral six months ago, but that one I knew about. That’s how my mother found Mark for this interview.

Those are three monumental occurrences in my young life. For Mark, they were his job.

Mark offhandedly mentions tidbits about the people's lives he's impacted. This woman was so heavy she had to have her double-wide casket lowered with a crane. This young boy had 500 classmates at his funeral. This college girl died in a car accident in the 1980s and her friends still come to visit her. This couple were forced by the Nazi to throw their baby over a balcony during the Holocaust. This man's wife had a mailbox inserted on the front of her husband's mausoleum so she could mail him postcards when she traveled. This couple was married for 70 years. This woman died in 9/11. This man literally ate himself to death.

Mark started working for funeral homes in Florida in 1974, after forgoing college. He admits he couldn’t make the grades.

Mark worked as an intern for Riverside Funeral Home in Miami Beach. He started out going to the hospitals, nursing homes and residences picking up the deceased, running errands, getting death certificates signed, going to the Health Department, and helping assist on funerals.

Mark became a licensed funeral director in 1979. Since death is unpredictable, Mark says he can never really know what each work day will bring.

“When you first start working in a funeral home [you wonder]: can you handle working with deceased human beings, the grieving of families, the sadness, the sorrow,” he says. “And it's not the type of thing that just anybody can do. I can do it. I deal with it. There are people that just don't want to talk about it. They don't want to hear about it. They don't want to think about it. I guess I was cut out for it.”

He also learned how to deal with the sadness through experience. He's married with two children. Being around death makes him appreciate his family even more, he says. He goes home and immediately hugs and kisses everybody.

In the beginning of his career at funeral homes, he mostly made arrangements. Now at the cemetery, he interacts with people more. He can get to know families and they can get to know him. He doesn’t want people to associate him only with bad days.

The concept of the funeral has really changed since Mark started in the 1970s. Everything from the ceremony to the headstone is more personalized. Some of these monuments are amazing (etchings of faces, guitars, golf logos, crossword puzzles, Betty Boop). Some are less so (A scorned man's headstone reads: "My ex‑wife should go to hell").

Another new trend is cremation, which Mark says people are choosing more often for economic and environmental reasons. A funeral, Mark says, costs about $12,000 or $13,000. This includes buying cemetery property, the funeral and rabbi, a casket and death certificates. My mother chimes in that my grandmother chose her own casket. I cringe. She asks Mark about the silliest item he's had to put in a casket. He says golf clubs and golf balls are common in Florida. A roll of quarters. A desk of cards. Cigars. Cell phones. Baseball memorabilia. An always-worn leather jacket for a beloved father. Miami Dolphins gear.

I tell him it's interesting that people want to personalize their lives, even in death. Like your casket is just another miniature monument to the idea that you lived. It's Facebook or Twitter to future generations after you've left the Earth. It's proving you - with your ideas and loves and opinions - existed. "It's wonderful," Mark says. "People have gotten really creative."

Mark says today, at funerals, more family members speak at the podium than did in the 1970s or '80s. Funerals are turned into "life tributes" or "celebrations." People put up pictures, and easels; displays about people's lives. They show home movies. Mark had a woman spend three hours last week setting up a huge collage with photos of her mother.

Photo courtesy of tribalgovernmentgaming.com

Jim Shore, the General Counsel for the Seminole Tribe of Florida, is completely blind behind his dark sunglasses.

One eye was blind at birth and the other lost sight after a car accident in 1970. In 2002, Jim survived being shot three times, once in the chest. He was the first Seminole Indian to attend law school, and he helped negotiate the first acquisition of an international corporation by a tribe of Native Americans, a $965 million dollar deal that handed the entire Hard Rock casino, hotel and restaurant franchise to the Seminole Tribe.

Jim Shore's story is remarkable, but Jim Shore would be the last person to tell you that.

A couple weeks ago, my father and I went to the Seminole Tribe’s South Florida headquarters for an official meeting with Jim. Everyone from the security guard to the office assistants was in awe of him. "His story is amazing," we heard over and over. We’re directed to a conference room and soon enough, Jim enters. My father and I are instructed to stand and introduce ourselves when he arrives, so he knows from our voices where we’re sitting.

Jim is 66 years old. He has a round face, dark skin, and graying hair. He speaks with a mix of a Southern and Midwestern accent that sounds like he's a John Wayne character. He’s a self-described hard worker and never takes vacations unless it’s traveling for work. He’s not married. Other than the occasional smirk, he doesn’t make any facial expressions. He’s extremely matter-of-fact. In the beginning, interviewing him is unnerving. It’s not that he’s distant or unfriendly. He’s just all business.

Jim was born in a traditional chickee hut on the Brighton Reservation near Glades County in northern Florida. He grew up on the res. His father had cattle and horses and Jim worked as a ranch hand, farmer and cowboy whenever he wasn’t in school. His mother was a homemaker, taking care of Jim and his six siblings.

When Jim was in the fourth grade, his government-funded reservation school shut down due to lack of money.

All the students were transferred to the nearby public Okeechobee schools, after other public schools declined to take the reservation students. It was the first time Jim and the other young members of the Seminole Indian tribe were integrated in the community at large beyond quick trips into town. He graduated from Okeechobee High School in 1963.

The Seminole Tribe has a strong presence in the state of Florida, dating back to the early 1700s when Indians in the Southeast were removed from the East Coast to Oklahoma under the Indian Removal Act. Some were able to escape to Florida, and then a combination of those tribes formed the Seminoles.

The U.S. government tried to again move them from Florida to Oklahoma in the early 1900s. The government was mostly successful except for a small group of about 300 Seminoles that remained.

“They fought the U.S. government to the point where they quit fighting us and so forth,” Jim says. “So Seminoles here are descendants of that 200 or 300 that were able to fight off the government. There's at least 3,700 of us now.”

The Seminoles that were removed to Oklahoma formed their own, larger tribe. The ties that may have existed back then no longer do, Jim says. They have their own government and membership. And a somewhat strained relationship still exists between the US government and the Seminole Tribe.

The tribes deal mainly with the federal government, because that’s where the money comes from. Jim says the relationship depends on which administration is involved: Republicans or Democrats. State governments can impose regulations, but generally tribes and state governments stay out of each other's ways.

“We got to where we just tolerate each other, because we're here and we're not going to go anywhere and they might as well. Now we're going to be here, so why not just try to work with each other,” he says. “But it always depends on the economy, like everybody else. If it's good, then things are good, but if not, then some of the smaller groups, smaller programs, will be first to be cut or eliminated.”

The relationship there always involves money. When the US economy is suffering, money for the Indian tribes across the country is reduced. The tribe depends on the US government for "Indian Health Service," which helps with the medical needs of the tribe and for money for education. Education, Jim says, gets very little assistance. He says the revenue they generate from gaming helps the Seminole Tribe stay out of debt better than other, less business-oriented tribes.

Not all tribes do, but the Seminoles have a system where, depending on the budget and how much gaming money is projected for the year, each tribal member gets some monetary assistance.

Aside from money, Jim says he prefers the federal government be hands off.

“I figure it is just to leave us alone and then we'll be in good shape,” he says. “There's people that, for whatever reason, historically unknown, may never get along with the tribe; but then there's other people in the country here, for no reason at all, they will always be supportive of the tribe. So there's no one group across the board that you can say reflects how they feel about the tribe...I think we always have faith in mankind.”

It's strange that they would. My dad, who grew up in the same area of South Florida around the same time as Jim, tells him he remembers a lot of prejudice and bigotry towards the American Indians in the 1960s.

Jim says that on Brighton reservation, he and his friends were lucky. They never experienced racial prejudice until they left the immediate Okeechobee area. It helped that a lot of his Native American friends played on the high school's sports teams, winning them popularity among the white students.

My dad says he recalls signs at restaurants that read "For Coloreds" and "For Whites" when he was growing up.

Jim laughs, “Hell, we never even knew if we was white or black,” he says. “We go through that white area and nobody ever said anything. We always thought that was the way it was supposed to be until we left Okeechobee. But there was a lot of these prejudices, not only here when we were in Okeechobee, but across the country. It still exists.”

In the old days, Jim says, if you were not white and you tried to go through Davie or Hollywood, Florida, you could get stopped by police. "Coloreds" were not allowed to be there socially -- only for work.

My dad says that his mother had a black maid in 1957. One Saturday, she brought her son with her to work, and he and my father were out in the streets playing. One of the neighbors came over to the house, knocked on the door and told my grandmother, "You'd better get your son and that boy in the house right away."

Jim nods. It's a familiar narrative. He says back then, he would tell young Native Americans to just avoid the area.

In the safety of the reservation, Jim grew up speaking both Creek, the tribe’s native language, and English, which he learned on his reservation’s school. Some Seminole tribal members can speak both Creek and Miccosukee, but Jim regretfully admits he’s “only bilingual.”

That’s a staple of my conversation with Jim: downplaying accomplishments. His tone of voice never changes, even when discussing things he reluctantly admits might seem "extraordinary or crazy."

For example, nine years ago, an unknown gunman tried to murder Jim through the sliding glass door of his home. The bullets went through his chest and shattered a bone in his arm. He was alone. Blood flowing down to his right hand, he dialed 911. The assailant, who some in the tribe suspect was a person who blamed Jim for a bad business negotiation, was never caught. Since then, the tribal government has provided him with tight security.

“People that have heard my voice on 911 says I made it sound like it was just a plain, cool day here,” he says, laughing softly. “They would have been screaming or something. But again, I had to get through whatever. After that the ambulance came and I even walked out to the ambulance. People used to say I walked out and [other] people had to be carried out. I don't know what that was all about, but that was just an experience I went through.”

It wasn't his first brush with tragedy. After his car accident, Jim went to a rehabilitation program for four months in Daytona, Florida. The program taught him how to get along without sight, including how to read Braille.

“I don't think I was upset at any time. You've got to be realistic in life these days,” Jim says. “Whenever I woke up from the hospital all I seen was a red glob and I probably knew that I was going to never see again. Whether you like it or not, that's the way it is, so you just have to deal with it. I think that's what I did.”

After rehabilitation, Jim went to junior college in 1973 and then law school, which he finished in 1980. Before his accident, he never thought he’d become a lawyer.

“Well, there's not much you can do when you can't see, so you have to start all over again,” he says. He could no longer be a cowboy without sight. “I just took things a day at a time, when I went through rehab and then I started junior college. I didn't even know if I could make it in the junior college. So I just started there and just ended up surviving a semester at a time until I got through. I was never going to go to school until I lost my sight.”

There were no computers, so Jim listened to a lot of textbooks on tape, which he would order way ahead of time. He was a history major but toward the end of his college career, Jim realized he didn’t want to teach. That’s when he applied to and was accepted at Stetson University College of Law in DeLand, Florida.

He came to South Florida in 1981, and it wasn’t long before Jim started working for the Seminole Tribe at the chairman’s request. The tribe didn’t have many college graduates then. Jim only vaguely knew he was the first to attend law school.

“When you're the first one, you could always be the first one to flunk out, too,” he says. “I was lucky I made it through.”

It was an accomplishment, he says, that was lost on his very traditional parents. “What do they know about law schools and so forth?,” he says. “They knew we were something, but they wouldn't know the extent of what it was.”

Having a lawyer on the team that was also a member of the tribe was a boon for the Seminole Tribe. Jim already knew the tribal members and could “bring something extra than you would if it was just strictly from the books,” he says. A non-tribal member with the same education would lack the attachment Jim has. It helps the people relate to him.

In the legal world, Jim is most well known for the 2007 Hard Rock negotiations. The tribe wanted to get more involved with gaming and using the iconic "Hard Rock" name would help immensely, Jim says. The name was owned by a company in England. The Seminole Tribe was granted permission to use the name on their Hollywood, Florida and Tampa, Florida casinos for ten years. They wanted a more secure deal.

“So our management then thought that it may be a good idea to buy the Hard Rock itself so we don't pay them; we'll be paying ourselves,” Jim says. The deal took three years to negotiate. In 2007, the Tribe officially purchased the worldwide Hard Rock including all the cafes and most of the hotels and casinos. Even if they facility is owned by someone else, the name "Hard Rock" belongs to the tribe, so the Seminoles get a fee for the name.

“We don't do anything if it's not going to make us money,” he says.

The emphasis on money is interesting since Jim grew up rural and poor. I ask how growing up on a reservation is different from the childhood of someone who grew up elsewhere. He says it probably wasn't that different.

“Sometimes we get hung up on living on the reservation. We had people next door to us that was part of the countryside that weren't no better off or worse off than we were," he says. "You can't say there was a difference in growing on a reservation than off reservation because, like I said, no one was better off than the next guy. We were just all in the same situation."

But, I say, the difference would be in the upholding of Native American traditions that could primarily take place on the res. I ask if he thinks the new generation of American Indian will keep the old traditions. He says he thinks this younger generation is more focused on learning about their history and culture than the one before who tended to fall more under the Baby Boomers or ex-hippies of cultural Americana.

“The reason they may not know anything now is because their parents didn't teach them, and the parents of their parents, or their grandparents, didn't teach them," he says. "I think some of the people that were involved in it at that time forgot to tell their kids, their grandkids, of the tradition and so forth. I think we were, at one point, we were in a lower ebb of our historical knowledge, tradition, and so forth. Every now and then, any group of people always get back to this nationalism and so I think the younger folks today are trying to get more focused in on the tradition and custom."

But he worries it may be too late.

"All the older folks that knew these things may not be around and the group that should have taught them were the ones that didn't teach them. So it's kind of one of those things. Could be a losing game, but at least they're trying. They teach the language and some of the arts and crafts, but more traditional stuff you're supposed to learn from your elders and so forth. So you don't have them then you may already be at a loss here."

What about cultural appropriation by white people?, I ask. Does that bother him? The Seminole tribe sells authentic leather jackets and crafts made from cypress leaves. And yet Urban Outfitters also sells rip-offs of these items. Jim says he'd rather, if they wanted to mimic the dress style, people purchase actual Seminole goods -- and get the culture right. They don't even wear headdresses or moccasins.

I ask if he thinks visibility helps with the education of people who may have false assumptions of Native Americans based on 'Pocahontas' and the sanitized Thanksgiving story.

Jim says not doing enough to eradicate ignorance is probably one of the tribe’s biggest shortcomings.

“I think, even in my work here, I live with the tribe so much that sometimes we may forget the fact that there are other people out there that may not know us as much as we do internally,” Jim says.

Imagine a tour bus pulling up outside of a popular rock club.

There are exuberant fans lined up around the block, all geared up for a sold-out show. You're probably expecting Axl Rose or Robert Plant to step off of the bus. But now imagine that the musicians filing out onto the sidewalk are eleven and twelve years old. What you’re picturing is the School of Rock’s All Stars summer tour. The All Stars are a group of kids ages 10 to 18. They’re the best of the best of the regions of 69 Schools of Rock across the United States and Mexico. Student musicians from the area audition to get in and if selected, participate in a summer-long tour around Long Island, New Jersey and Connecticut. No parents allowed. (Except for four chaperones.) The twenty-odd gifted kids live on the bus, go from venue to venue, and occasionally stay at hotels. One of the All Stars from the Manhattan School of Rock is a twelve-year-old bespectacled African-American boy named Reef McKeithan. Reef is the most talented drummer at the Manhattan School of Rock. When I called the school’s General Manager Joanna Erdos to ask if there was any kid at the school she felt fit the definition of “child prodigy,” she was happy to set me up with Reef. His answers to my questions are exactly those of a twelve-year-old boy. He's a man of few words, let's say. I don’t know what sort of candy was involved in bribing him to chat with me, a boring, old adult, but I’m glad Reef granted the interview. Because Reef is a prodigy. He’s a drummer, currently in a band with people mostly five years older than he is. Joanna tells me the guitarist for ‘The Roots’ once came to see Reef play and just kept asking, “How old is he?! How old is he?!” in disbelief. Reef’s father was a drummer, though he never played with a band. He bought a drum kit for the basement of the Cobble Hill apartment building the family owns when Reef was seven years old. The McKeithans live on the first floor and two tenants live on the other floors.

Reef says he picked up his dad’s drumsticks and just started playing. He knew one beat, which he repeated ad nauseam. I ask if he remembers how he felt the first time he played. “I was happy,” he says, because he was a kid allowed to bang on stuff. Reef says his elementary school had a music program where he’d played the bass. There was a drum set there but he played it less frequently. Reef’s talent grew, but at a slow pace. He needed some direction. His mother works for UPS and found the School of Rock because she delivered a package there. Once Reef had been playing his drum set for about two years, she took him into the city and enrolled him at the school. School of Rock is an after-school program founded in 1998 in Philadelphia. Students jam with each other and take private lessons, often culminating in packed live shows at places like the old CBGB and The Roxy. Reef says when he first got to Manhattan’s School of Rock, there were three people jamming -- all adults. Nine-year-old Reef just went and played with them. He’d never played with anyone other than his family or his classmates. Soon, he was coming almost every day, riding the subway from Brooklyn to Manhattan after school. “[At lessons,] they teach you basic stuff. They teach you drum rudiments first, out of anything. Then, they just tell you to go home and practice,” he says. “They write it out for you and you go home and practice and then you come back. Then, you progress.” His first real show playing drums, a couple of months after he started, was the School of Rock’s sold-out “80’s Show” at Crash Mansion. Students can sign up if they want to perform. Then, they’re placed in “bands” with each other. Reef says possible personality clashes aren’t a problem because “everybody’s friends here.” His group played four songs including "Rebel Yell" by Billy Idol and "Rio" by Duran Duran. The School of Rock puts emphasis on learning about classic rock on top of learning instruments. Two of their upcoming shows are a “Kurt Loves Courtney” tribute to Nirvana and Hole and a Jimi Hendrix showcase. Reef says he loved classic rock even before coming to School of Rock because his parents would play a lot of Led Zeppelin at home. Zeppelin is Reef’s favorite band. He’s glad his parents introduced him and his siblings to that genre of music, but he’s not shy about saying he’s eclipsed his father in drumming talent. I ask if his dad would agree with that and Reef says he would.

“He’s old,” he says, smiling devilishly. “He gets embarrassed every time he plays the drums in front of me.” He wasn’t always so confident. I ask if he remembers what he felt like before his first show.

“I guess I was pretty nervous,” he says, blaming it on the packed crowd. His parents were also in the audience. They later bought him a brand new drum kit for Christmas. It’s silver. Reef already has his eye on a newer model by the brand Ludwig. He's gleeful while describing it.

At first, Reef says, he thought drumming would just be a hobby. Now, he believes it’ll be his job in the future. Ideally, he wants to become a studio drummer or session drummer because they make the most money.

“I mean, it's my job now,” he says, referring to the band I mentioned earlier. It’s a group called “The Skins,” with a hard-rock and blues feel. Reef plays drums, his 17-year-old sister sings, his 16-year-old sister plays the bass and two other older teenagers play guitar.

The band started in the early spring of this year and they hope to have an EP out in the next few months. They all collaborate on song-writing. I ask if he wanted to start a band with his family. Reef looks at me like the answer should be obvious. “I mean, no,” he says. I laugh really hard.

“We would just jam a lot. So my two sisters were like, ‘We should start a band.’ And I was like, ‘All right, whatever,’” he says sounding exactly like an annoyed little brother. “I didn't really want to start a band. [Now, I like it] because we’re doing well.”

“The Skins” play a lot of shows around New York City and Brooklyn. They've played at the Grateful Dead-celebrating "Gathering of the Vibes Festival" in Connecticut. Sometimes they get paid. Their next big show is a festival in New Jersey this week. Reef doesn’t know what it’s called. I laugh, “You just show up where they tell you?” I ask. Reef says, pretty much. One of the band’s guitar players books the shows.

Reef says he still gets nervous because he can’t tell if a show is going well until it’s over.

“During the show you can't really tell if it's good or not because you're still playing,” he says. To calm his nerves, he chews gum while he plays.

“That's what you should do when you're a drummer because when you drum your mouth is open the whole time because you have to breathe, because you're moving around a lot,” he says. “Your mouth gets dry and it becomes uncomfortable, so gum keeps your mouth from getting dry also.”

His favorite songs to play are ones with good strong drum beats. He likes "Show Me What You Got" by Jay-Z the best. “The Skins” often let him improvise solos because he’s got good rhythm. It shows in the Youtube videos I later watch of Reef drumming. In ones from about a year ago, he's rocking a mohawk he doesn't have now. His confidence on the drums is evident for someone so young. I can't ever remembering being that self-assured as a tween.

“[After a show], some guy came up to me, and he said that I was the tits,” Reef says, grinning mischievously. I ask him if he even knows what that means.

He thinks for a second, “It's sort of like, ‘I'm the shit.’” he says. Reef just replied, “Uh, thanks.”

“Do people always bring up how young you are?” I ask. Reef says they do.

“It's very annoying,” he says. He thinks it shouldn’t matter. “How about, I don’t know, ‘You're a great drummer?’”

I ask what makes someone a great drummer.

“Musicianship,” he says simply. “And you need to communicate because as the drummer, the band follows you.”

I ask what he means. “You keep the beat for the band,” he says. “Without the drums if you have a band without drums in it, like, without the drums, it would sound empty.”

So he’s reluctantly in a band, but he loves touring with the All Stars. It’s authentic and fun, he says. Everyone becomes best friends forever.

“It's the best. It's fun. You get to eat at IHOP at like three a.m. in the morning. It's amazing,” he says. “I mean, All Stars, it changes you. It changes you as a person.”

I ask how so.

“Since it's really hard because you play really hard songs, because you're supposed to be the best. It makes you a better musician and it makes you learn how to communicate with people more. So your whole personality changes,” he says.

I ask how he’s changed since the All Stars tour this summer.

“Well, I became a better drummer, one. And two, I don't know. Maybe more of a sense of humor because that's what you do. You practice a lot, but then on the tour bus you sleep and you just make jokes, and those sorts of things,” he says, suddenly more enthusiastic than he’s been the whole interview. “And it makes you smarter too because there are a lot of things I didn't know. I learned a lot of theory about music from other drummers. You learn from each other.”

After the summer, Reef will start eighth grade. He says his middle school does not have a music program “because [his] school sucks.” I notice he drums his fingers a lot, on his knee, on the couch, on a nearby mic stand. I ask if he does it at school and he says he gets in trouble a lot for it. He can’t help tapping out a rhythm though.

“You can't, though," he says. "I always play drums on the desk and I get in trouble." “Do you tell them you’re a drummer?” I ask. “They already know,” he replies, exasperated. I laugh. “You know? And they're like, ‘Stop!’" I tell him he should reply that it’s in his blood. Reef makes a face. I laugh and ask if he's picturing what his teachers would do if he said that. Reef nods, “I'm sure they'd be like, ‘I don't care.’" Reef says he’s pretty good at other subjects like English, History and Math, which he says he tries at because he knows they’re important. He wants to go to college and study business so he can manage his own drumming career. “Do you ever think about what would have happened to you if your mom hadn’t brought you here?” I ask. “I don't think I would be as good. I would suck,” he says. “Would ‘The Skins’ exist? No. That band would not exist.” I ask what advice he’d give another young kid if they wanted to become a drummer.

“Practice,” he says. “You just need to practice always.”

“Even if you're the best?,” I ask.

“Yes,” Reef nods. He practices a lot, even though he says his favorite thing about drumming is how naturally it comes to him.

“It must be cool to know you’re good at something,” I say, off-hand.

Reef cracks a smile. “Word,” he replies.

[Please donate to music education here.]

Videos of Reef drumming

White Room - Cream (Aug 2010)

Ring of Fire - Johnny Cash (March 2011, Warped Tour Kickoff Party)

Green Manalishi - Fleetwood Mac (Aug 2010)

Raam is leaving for Ecuador later to go on holiday with his parents.

He apologizes profusely because he needs to Skype with them to figure out some logistics for the trip. I tell him it's cool, that I'll wait and then I watch him argue with them in Persian for ten minutes. I don't speak the language at all, but I know they're fighting because of the tones of voice alone. It ends with Raam saying what I imagine is Persian for "Fine, okay" over and over.

He hangs up and apologizes to me again.

"Were you fighting?" I ask. He says they were, over the choice of hotel. I laugh. Fighting with your parents sounds the same in any language.

Raam looks like the Iranian Buddy Holly, because of his glasses and cropped hair. I joke that Brooklyn, where he lives, has really done him in. It's a far cry from his home: Tehran, Iran.

Raam is the lead singer and one of the main songwriters of the Iranian punk band, Hypernova. He was born in Iran and moved to Eugene, Oregon when he was young so his father could get his PhD. When Raam was 10, his family moved back to Iran until he was around 18 years old. Then, Raam went to Canada for college and then back to Iran in 2000.

In Iran, Raam's father is a professor and his mother is a housewife and cooking teacher. They're also environmental enthusiasts, taking people on treks up the mountains for weeks at a time. His father leads the group and his mother cooks. Raam says his parents support his work 100 percent, despite the inherent dangers of making punk music in Iran.

His girlfriend also calls him during the interview. She and Raam, who never thought he'd sing in his native Persian, collaborated on a song called "The Hunter" for Raam's new solo project "King Raam." The song, a beautiful, dark tune that has been tied to the recent Iranian protests, combined her poetry and his music. It became the most popular Persian song of the year.

Before all that: His band Hypernova's big break came when they were accepted into Texas's South by Southwest Music Festival in 2007. Because of trouble with their visas, the band members weren't able to make it to the United States in time.

But what seemed like a huge disappointment actually skyrocketed Hypernova into music superstardom -- and got Raam banned from ever again visiting the country where he was born.

Reading through the transcript of our talk, I find myself highlighting huge chunks of Raam's words. So here's a 100 Interviews first: The majority of this interview will be styled like a Q&A. It's a different format because 1) I love everything Raam said and I think it's important 2) I have seven interviews backlogged and I'm crunched for time and 3) It's always nice to switch things up. I thought you guys might like to see how I ask questions after all this time. So here goes:

Gaby: Were you always a musician?

Raam: No. I did play a little piano when I was a kid. I read a lot. I wrote a lot. But I never thought I'd be a singer. I think every kid at one point dreams of becoming a rock star but that comes and goes. Like every other kid I wanted to be an astronomer or something.

Gaby: You taught yourself guitar?

Raam:  I just taught myself how to play after I joined the band.

Gabrielle:  Were you like, "What if I can't sing?"

Raam:  It's really funny. Now that I sing, I sing in this very low baritone.

Gaby: You have a very low voice, yeah.

Raam:  When I first came to [New York City in 2008] people told me, "You sound like Ian Curtis of Joy Division." I'm like, "Who's Ian Curtis?" I'd never heard of this guy. And people told me, "You sound exactly like him." "Or your band sounds like this guy or this band." It's funny, because all the bands that we were compared to, I'd never heard of. But now I'm fans of them. Like Bauhaus or Chameleons or Psychedelic Furs, and Sisters of Mercy.

Gaby: You split time between Iran and the US growing up. Is there a big difference between how things are for you in Iran versus how they are when you are in Oregon? Are you able to handle doing things differently in each place?

Raam: In a way. It was very different growing up in this very progressive, liberal place like Eugene, Oregon... I moved back to Iran and my teacher beat me up on the first day of school. Nobody ever raised a hand on me so it was also this huge culture shock. People who are in power back in Iran are people who follow a very archaic kind of living, unfortunately. The fundamentalists, even though they're the minority, are the ones who unfortunately wield the power. And they're a very dangerous group.

Gaby: Who came up with the idea to start a rock band?

Raam: When I went to Iran, you have to do military conscription once you're 18 to [be able to] leave the country. So, we had to do time. That's where I met our drummer, Kami. And Kami was a childhood enemy of mine. We used to compete over the girls in our neighborhood, so we never really liked each other.

When I say military, it's not like the real military, especially what we went to. It's this spoiled camp for kids who could afford to buy off the military. We didn't do the full two years that is mandatory. We only did three weeks, basically. It was just something that was more like a boot camp. It wasn't a real training or anything.

And we were just really in love with rock and roll. We just got to talking. And Kami said he plays the drums and he has a friend who plays the guitar. He told me that I should join them and do something together. And I was like, "Why not?" He's like, "What do you play?" I'm like, "Well, I don't play anything." He's like, "Well, since you speak English, you can be the singer." I'm like, "OK." I basically just became the singer by default, not because I really knew how to sing or knew how to play any instruments. I just spoke the language.

And since we started off as a cover band as most bands do, we just started playing around in the underground over there as an underground band, just mostly covering songs. The year was 2000, but we were like 10 years behind. Grunge was just happening.

Gaby: That's too funny. What was the first rock and roll that you remember hearing?

Raam: The first cassette I ever had was Queen. I just had a bunch of bootleg cassettes.

Gaby:  Where do you get those?

Raam: I don't even really remember how we used to get them. But I remember we would trade at school. Or our parents would come from foreign countries and they would bring us cassettes. Or we'd find stores that sell them underground style. It would be a bakery and then the guy would say, "Give me your coat," and give you a piece of paper for a list of all the tapes he has. It would be really stupid and really funny at the same time.

Everybody in Iran sat and a person would bring the latest Hollywood films. And the way he would bring them is this guy dresses up really nice and he was carrying a suitcase, like he was going to work, and in his suitcase was a bunch of VHS or Beta tapes.

Gaby: That's amazing.

Raam: That's how it was. But then satellite TV came, the Internet came. Everything became, obviously, instantaneous. And everybody had access to everything all the time. Then we caught up. It was just overnight we really caught up with everything. All of a sudden there was this big bridge to everything that they never had access to, so people kept downloading. And downloading as much as they could, everything they'd missed.

Gaby: Were you like, "This is an English band or an American band? This is cooler by definition?"

Raam: I think it's part of the nature of where we were from. It's a subconscious form of rebellion to the traditional sounding, really awful music we would hear on the radio. And we grew up listening the The Ramones, NOFX, Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden and Sonic Youth.

Gaby: Maybe being ten years behind was actually a blessing.

Raam: I guess so. We just grew up listening to those bands, so that's what we wanted to sound like. We didn't want to sound like the junk you would hear on the radio. [Note: In Iran, Raam says, the only music allowed to be widely listened to is traditional and sung in Persian.]

Gaby: Where did you practice if it was illegal?

Raam: Basically an underground room and it was very difficult rehearsing in Iran. You have to soundproof everything. And you have to be careful of neighbors who would rat you out to the authorities.

It was a very Orwellian environment basically, exactly like "1984." People were always raised in this constant culture of fear and terror. I remember as a kid growing up there you had to lie to your teachers. Your parents would tell you to lie to your teachers. "Don't tell them we have alcohol in the house, or we're playing cards, or we watch foreign movies," because all those things were illegal in Iran. And if you got caught with any of them, the punishment could be a stupid fine, or as severe as being flogged. Gaby: Does it feel like typical teenage rebellion or something more?

Raam: No, there was no conscious form of rebellion whatsoever. It was just us wanting to rock the fuck out. We just wanted to play as loud as we could wherever we could.

And wherever we were given the opportunity to perform, we played at this senior party where the average age was 70 and above. Or this 14 year old girl's birthday party. Wherever people would let us play or perform for them, we'd play. Even though our music was really crazy. And people would just stand there and look at us like, "What the hell are you doing?" But some of it they would dance to, if they were drunk enough.

Gaby: Is there a punk scene in Iran or were you pioneering that at the time?

Raam: There weren't that many bands. When we started out, there were very few. And we all knew each other. It was a much smaller scene. Our band became known, because we were the band that played the most shows. I don't really think anybody played more shows than we did in the scene. Everybody else was more, hype than actual performers. Every show we had to figure out weeks in advance. We had to figure out how to soundproof the place, how to put guards in different parts of the streets and neighborhoods to call us up if the police come up, or have money ready to bribe the police. It was always very planned out to make sure we would never got caught. Whenever we did come getting close to getting caught we had to bail and run away or just bribe the police.

It happened a couple times. It never got really scary in our case. When we played, we were always extra careful. But some of our friends were unfortunate, and when they got caught, they all went to prison for a couple weeks and fined ridiculous amounts.

Gaby: What's the logic behind that?

Raam: I don't think it's so much the music. The Western music supposedly is banned. It's not really. They play it everywhere. The position of the government is that it's banned, but it's really not. There's Western music everywhere. You can buy it everywhere, actually. It's really stupid that they have this ban. The logic more is so that if the music, makes people dance. And makes them jump around and move, and then especially when there's girls and boys mingling.

And then there's like alcohol and drugs. Forget about it. People are drunk and stoned. Then they start having sex and doing whatever. Basically all these parties and these kids and these groups were deemed as Satanists, as these Satanic parties. That's what the authorities would always blame it on.

Gaby: You said you guys just wanted to play music and that was it. But you must have been conscious that this is a political move. Or is that something that people in the press pin on you?

Raam: I think it was somehow. Like there were like elements in the music lyrically and in the music, too, that was politically motivated. But for us it was basically about having something to perform and go crazy. Because a lot of the punk bands like the Clash, there were a lot of people that I was always looking up to, and I'm like, "Wow! These guys sing about things that matter! They don't just sing about random nonsense."

Gaby: Yeah, that's what punk is anyway. It seems almost intuitive that a band coming out of that oppressive environment would then gravitate towards punk. It just makes sense.

Raam: Of course. When we started out, we were very punk. We covered punk songs, and we were very garage and grunge. But then we started playing. We got into the whole Britpop thing, and getting into the whole indie and the electro thing. Our band, I don't even know what the hell we are anymore. We just evolved into this crazy big sound.

The shows in Iran were always an opportunity for us to perform for a bunch of kids who never had the opportunity to see a real live show. A lot of these kids could never leave the country. Because they don't A: have a passport, or B: can't get a visa to leave the country.

Nothing even has come close to that feeling, that rush, that excitement, that fear, the adrenaline. All of us in this party just going crazy dancing and performing. There's a sense of unity among everybody in that specific moment in time and space. Where it was brilliant. It was flawless. Nothing ever came close to that. And it was the best high in the world.

Gaby: But you guys left Iran?

Raam: We realized after playing several years in the undergrounds that we couldn't do this forever. Either we would have just got caught by the authorities, or would have to pack ourselves up to leave for the West to try to make it as a real band. The first couple years was all fun and games. Then we got better and we grew as a band. We realized that "Hey, we might be on to something. Why don't we give this a real shot?"

I had been a miserable failure at everything else in my life. I had dropped out of college. I was studying international relations. Change the world for the better or do some boring thing with my life. But I was like, "Fuck it! I'll be a rock star and I'll change the world." When we set out on this journey to America, we didn't know what to expect. And we had no idea what we were in for.

It was March 2007 when we came to the States. Several months before we had been to a festival in Europe, in Holland. And we heard about this festival in the United States called "South by Southwest." We decided to apply. And then we were back in Iran. We got this email from Southwest. "You've been accepted to showcase," and it was the greatest day of our lives, really to see that. Wow! We finally have this opportunity to go and perform outside of Iran. We didn't know what we were getting ourselves into.

We never even said goodbye to anyone, because we didn't even think we'd stay here for this long. It's almost been four-and-a-half years or something. We've been in the States. We just left with a guitar, a suitcase, and a couple hundred dollars each.

Gaby: You had some trouble with getting visas though, right?

Raam: The deputy ambassador [of the US Consulate in Dubai] was like, "Don't worry. I'll get it ready for you guys, so you'll make it to the festival." He's like, "Just give me a call the next day, and we'll take care of it." And I give him a call. He doesn't pick up. I email him. He doesn't reply. We just wait. And as the days go, we realize we're going to miss the festival. And we eventually we do miss the festival. And finally the visas do come through like on the 20th, or the 22nd.

And that day, I go to pick up the passports and the visa. I realize I had missed an email I hadn't read. And it was the deputy ambassador. He had sent three weeks ago. And I had never read the email for some reason. And he had said, "Your visas are ready. Come pick them up." Basically we missed the festival because of my stupidness of not reading the email.

But the funniest thing in that sort of story and that twist of fate is that the New York Times and MTV wanted to do a small story about us, including like the international acts in "South by Southwest." When they finally heard that we finally made it to New York, they called us up. And instead of having just a small story written about us, they both did like a full feature story on us. As soon as we landed, on our first show that we played here.

And when those stories came out in the New York Times and MTV, that's when everything changed for us. All of a sudden, that day when I got up and the story was out, all we had was the website that had an email on it. Nothing else. And there were like thousands of emails.

Gaby: I think it's got all the elements of a perfect story. I mean, you guys got into "South by Southwest." It was perilous. "Were we going to make it, were we not?" It's rock and roll, which everyone loves and relates to. It's got the political underlying thing, and it's a couple kids just trying to make it.

Raam: It's the underdog. And the funny thing is, had we gone to "South by Southwest," it would have been a different story. Because we sucked so bad when we first came to the States, that they would have just been like, "OK, you can go back home now." But those stories gave life to our story. The article, New York Times and MTV really kickstarted our career, because we got so much attention.

But at the same time, I felt quite undeserving of all this attention. I was really overwhelmed. I knew how bad we were. I'm like, "Jesus Christ, these people don't care about the music, obviously!" It's just a human interest story for them. And I felt really bad secretly, that there was so much attention to us. And yet we had no talent whatsoever.

Gaby: Maybe people were more into admiring the guts that went behind even just attempting. That's like a big part of it. Four years later, you're like, "No, we have to be a good band."

Raam: That's the thing about America. It is the land of opportunities. But over here you have to earn your way to the top. And we've been learning that, the past four years. It's been a crazy ride, to be honest with you. The rise and falls that we've had. As a band from Iran we were like the first to break all of the records that have ever been set. We've done everything that no other band from Iran has ever done. In a way we're like pioneers. And we're very proud of that.

But in comparison, we're way behind in terms of where we want to be compared to all the artists that we look up to. We feel that we're equally as good if not better than many of these acts. We're such hard workers. We rehearse five, six hours every day. I don't think I've ever seen a band rehearse as much as we did in the past couple years. We always practiced in the mornings, too. I'd never seen any other bands practice in the mornings.

Gaby: After SXSW, what did you do?

Raam: Basically the first year or so, we were just playing around in New York. Then went to L.A. We were very fortunate to meet some very wealthy entrepreneurs and very successful people, very generous, who helped us out. If it wasn't for them, we wouldn't have been able to survive. People who helped make the first album come to life. And living in L.A. was an experience of its own, because you get caught up with all the madness and the celebrity.

And then we played this big festival there called Pangea Day, which was broadcast to something like 500 million people. And backstage there were all these celebrities that we were hanging out with. After that, we got a lot of buzz and you were hanging out at all these famous peoples' homes. And it was just really crazy, all the things that we were going through.

It was all happening so fast. All the attention and all the fame we were getting was much more than what we were actually worth, I felt. I really saw we hadn't reached that point. All of a sudden we were getting known, but musically we still weren't there.

So we moved back to New York [in 2008], and then we went on a national tour with the "Sisters of Mercy," a big '80s Goth band. And it was really funny, because people started calling us Goth. And we're like, "We're not Goth, but thanks." [laughter]

The first album was recorded in 2008 but it came out in 2010. And that really hurt us, because the negotiations took forever. There were different labels that were interested, so that was one of the lessons we learned the hard way in this industry. It's everything. This whole industry is moving and evolving at such a fast rate. You have to be constantly delivering, constantly be on top of your game. You can't just wait around for anything to happen.

And then we went on tour that winter, which is December. And even now, we get to play in front of thousands of people and the finest venues. Backstage we had champagne and steak and fruit. We were treated like royalty. We had such a great time on that tour, and you get spoiled. And the next week you go. You're playing in front of nobody. "Oh, shit!" And the big tour, we sold out everything. Our CDs, and, T-shirts. That was huge. Then again, you go to another tour. Some cities are good. It's very unpredictable, this whole game. It's been a really crazy ride.

Gaby: You didn't say goodbye when you left Iran. Then you started getting all this press and fame and now people in Iran know what you're up to...

Raam: Right. And in the beginning, I have to tell you that I was very diplomatic. Although I was speaking my mind, and speaking out even against the government, I wasn't doing it in such a rash and forward way. I've become a little bit more even outspoken than before, since the 2009 election. First, at the end of the day, any opinions that I have, because I get asked questions a lot about the nuclear issue. I'm like, "What do you want me to say?"

[They say,] "About your situation! Stand up to Iran." I'm just like, a guy who enjoys music, and I'm a news junkie. I follow the news, but I'm no political analyst. Any opinions that I do have only represent my personal experience. It's not something that you can generalize or apply to an entire nation. Iran is a very complex society with complex people. It's not as black and white as, "Do all Iranians hate Americans? Or do all Americans this or that?" I think the most interesting thing for me always has been just touring across America, especially in the Midwest. And we hear stereotypes about people over there. They hear stereotypes about us.

Honestly, there's so many points where I would just flip out and I would be like, "I'll be so close to giving up." Because I felt it is just so difficult sometimes. I just wanted to go back home to Iran, because I miss Iran so much. I miss my family. I miss my life, but I realize that that place that I miss so much doesn't exist anymore. The government has become so oppressive, that it's just not the Iran that I remembered anymore. It's literally turning into a full on totalitarian dictatorship basically. People have no more say in government, unfortunately.

We do American press though. We never do Iranian press. They suck and they tend to over-politicize everything. It's like, "Who's side are you on? Which party do you follow?" We didn't really want to get into that. I've just always been of the school of thought of I respect whatever the people demand and respect their most fundamental basic human rights. Allow them to vote. Allow them to enjoy the same fundamental freedoms that everyone else can enjoy around the world. Very simple, very basic, that's what I believe in. And everyone should be allowed to have a say in government. I may not like many of the religious point of views, but they should have their voice also. Everyone should have a voice in government.

And it was after the 2009 elections where the people were robbed of their votes, and we all started joining together for protest in front of the UN over here. And we organized a whole bunch of protests. I was a part of most of them. And I, with a group of other Iranian musicians, wrote this song. Johnny B actually, he wrote this song. He's a friend of mine, an Iranian-American kid. It was called "Freedom, Glory, Be Our Name." It's called the Freedom Guard project. And that song's very political a very straightforward political song. It's for the green movement, for the people of Iran. Now that song, because of that we got into "Time" magazine and CNN.

I had to do interviews with The Wall Street Journal and Reuters. It came out and it was in the press a lot. But this time, it was largely politically motivated.

But I just felt really powerless, seeing all my brothers and sisters back home, being in the streets.

There was just this feeling of I have to sit here and watch them getting beat up on YouTube. I just wanted to show that we are standing in solidarity with them. And it's like the least that I could do. And it's a very small contribution compared to what everyone else is.

I never want to come across as a preachy person. It's just something that has to happen organically. That definitely was a setback that we realized that, "OK, maybe we can never actually go back home after this."

Gaby: When did you know for sure you were never going back to Iran?

Raam: As the situation got worse in Iran, I just kept doing more interviews. And I was just more involved with the people's movement. And whether it was online, sharing information, sending out emails, and signing petitions. I became quite active. And then I went and did an interview on [Voice of America]. There's a show called "Parazit." "Parazit" is like the Iranian Jon Stewart. They have 500,000 fans on Facebook and they're watched by 40 million people a month.

If you go on that show in Iran, and they're like basically an anti-governmental show, speaking out against the government's brutality. Basically if you go on that show, you are automatically on the blacklist for never going back home.

Gaby: And you went on that show?

Raam: I went on that show. I didn't do it for a long time. They asked me to come for the longest time. I would never go. But I finally decided to do it. And it was crazy, because I got thousands of emails after it. Almost every single Iranian on the planet watches that show.

I realize that once I go on this show, this is it. If I go on this show, this is the end of me going back to Iran. Because my friends with much less records than mine, they went back and their passports were taken away at the airport.

Gaby: That's interesting that you decided to do it anyway.

Raam: Yeah. I realized that now, as an artist, you have a responsibility to speak out and speak your mind.

Gaby: What did you say?

Raam: I just talked about, on a very personal basis, how I believe that people who use religion as a context to oppress or enforce their own belief. And enforce their own way of living upon others. I'm not a religious person myself at all.

I'm a complete atheist. I have respect for religious people. I just don't like the way that the religion is abused in a country like Iran to enforce or to oppress the people. It's just absolutely wrong. I remember I got beat up in school in Iran, because I brought a Walkman to school. And my teacher said that it's forbidden in Islam, or by the Koran. I'm like, "Sir, I'm pretty sure there were no Walkmans around when this book was written." And I got my ass beat up for making that remark.

Gaby: That's a little sassy.

Raam: But that's what I'm saying. There's this group of vigilante police in Iran, who are not even approved by the government, only by the Supreme Leader. They have no proper authority, but yet they have this almost divine authority from the Supreme Leader. And these people, the Basij, this vigilante militia, they have this right to right the wrongs that they see as unfit to their way of living or their way of life. They spend so much time beating up kids who dress in a certain way, or wear makeup instead of actually cracking down on criminals and drug smugglers.

It's ridiculous. The number of kids who get beat up for just looking different or dressing different or listening to music, things that are not even a crime anywhere else in the world. They're not even anything of any importance to anyone. They're not even harming anybody.

Gaby: Your parents are still there.

Raam:  Yes.

Gaby: Can they come here?

Raam:  Yeah, because they have dual Canadian citizenship.

Gaby: Why don't they move here?

Raam: My parents love Iran. They would never move anywhere else.

Gaby: I was noticing that you're like, "I'm not really a political person." But then you just discussed it so easily. If you talk to an American kid and they say, "I'm not really into politics." They would really not be into politics. Do you know what I mean? There's a different obligation to at least know something and to be interested in it, even just for the fact that your parents are still there.

Raam: I always tell my friends I'm like, "You guys are so privileged. You have it so well. Sometimes you forget, and you take your freedoms for granted."

Gaby: What's next for your music?

Raam: Now I've recorded my solo album, in Persian, and it's going to come out pretty soon. And I'm very excited. I think it's going to be huge, to be honest. I don't think I've ever heard anything like it in this language. I'm going to release it for free, actually. And people can just download it. And the reason I'm putting it out for free is all the kids back home in Iran want to listen to it. They don't have access to iTunes.

But I don't care [about money]. The joy that they get from the music is so great, I wouldn't trade that for anything. ...Well, I wouldn't mind some nice caviar and champagne.

Gaby: Ha!

Photo: ontopmag.com

It would not be unusual to find Gregory T. Angelo at a Kiwanis club in Missouri standing in front of a room full of people who think he is an abomination of the Lord.

Or maybe at a church in Mississippi shaking hands with people whose fathers and grandfathers would have shunned him or worse. Or making good with people who simply, have never met “one of those gays” before.

Greg’s willing to let them gawk. He tells them though our Constitution is informed by Christian principles, the Bible does not govern us. He sits through question-and-answer sessions. He listens to opinions. He doesn’t judge and he doesn’t condescend. He brings along other members of the LGBTQ community. He brings evangelical parents, like For the Bible Tells Me So’s Mary Lou Wallner whose lesbian daughter committed suicide after Mary Lou and her husband didn’t accept her. She speaks about the importance of acceptance, often telling groups: "It's better to be kind than to be right."

“Everything that they've seen and heard and read in the media hasn't given them a good impression or even a realistic impression of what an average gay citizen of the United States is like,” he says. "[It’s] to really show these individuals that gay people are just like you and I. They're trying to live just like you are, just trying to get by. They'd like to have a family. They'd like to be recognized with the same equal rights and protections that heterosexual couples have under the law and that everyone should have under the law.”

Gregory T. Angelo does all this because he is a gay Republican. To some people, that may as well read: “Gregory T. Angelo is a Jew supporting Hitler” or “Gregory T. Angelo is the Easter Bunny."

I can vouch that he’s a real person. Greg is in his early thirties. He lives in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York City, where he also serves as Republican District Leader, an elected position within the GOP.

In June, he started a new job as Executive Director of Liberty Education Forum, a nonpartisan, nonprofit think tank that advocates for the LGBTQ community to conservatives and people of faith. It is connected to Log Cabin Republicans, a branch of the GOP serving the LGBTQ community. There are 43 chapters of Log Cabin Republicans nationwide.

Greg is a church-going Christian. He watches ‘The O’Reilly Factor.’ He has light hair and light skin. He always wears an American flag lapel pin. He looks like a young Republican candidate for office might.

Greg says the kind of work he does in the Midwest, the South and the Heartland lays a foundation for eventual acceptance.

“Are you going to roll into Mississippi and speak to a church and the next legislative session pass marriage equality? No," he says. "But could that get people in a community, especially if their story is covered by the news, to maybe think differently about their opposition to employment nondiscrimination, to maybe think differently about hate crimes legislation in their state? Yeah, it could.”

Log Cabin Republicans takes its name from the legacy of President Abraham Lincoln. The organization’s goal is to fight for equal rights while maintaining the core of the GOP: “individual liberty, personal responsibility and small government,” he says. They also campaign and fund raise for GOP candidates. Greg says, at its heart, the Republican Party is about equality, but “sometimes Log Cabin Republicans need to be there to nudge certain members of the party and remind them of that fact.”

Greg was born in Long Island and grew up in Connecticut. His father is a libertarian and his mother is a Republican. His father has never skipped voting in an election, a tradition Greg carries on. His mother spoke highly of Ronald Reagan, George Bush Sr. and George W. Bush, and was critical of Democrats.

During Greg’s senior year majoring in English and Theatre Arts at Boston College, Greg’s father asked him point blank if he was gay. Already out to his sister and his friends, Greg decided not to lie. His mother cried.

His father wrote him a letter outlining the reasons being gay was a “terrible life choice,” mainly that he was condemning himself to die of AIDS. For most of the second semester of Greg’s senior year, they didn't speak.

After some time, Greg moved in with a guy he’d been seeing and his parents invited their son and “his friend” to brunch. Greg’s boyfriend worked in finance and impressed his father with his intelligence. His mother was thrilled to see Greg’s relationship was committed and loving. Growth began. Just last week, Greg says, his mother told him that she recognizes the importance of the work of the Log Cabin Republicans. I tell Greg what he does now encourages strangers to evolve in the same way his parents have.

"I don’t like to psychoanalyze myself, but I have certainly seen firsthand, in a very personal way, how important it is and how far one individual can come when that type of one-on-one advocacy takes place," he says.

Beyond his family, most people Greg knew in college were Democrats. When he turned 18, he registered to vote as an independent. He was working as an editor at the time and didn’t want to taint his objectivity with an official political party. In 2007, he left his job in journalism. A year later, he was registered Republican. His liberal friends were horrified.

“Being a gay man, I had a cacophony of individuals who were really encouraging me to join the Democratic Party,” he says. He was also terrified to come out to his conservative friends. When he finally did, none of them reacted poorly. It showed Greg that the Republican Party doesn’t exist to hate gay people.

"The party leadership obviously understands to win elections we need to be inclusive and not exclusive. It flies in the face of what people will automatically and wrongly assume it means to be a Republican,” he says. “In my own personal experience, I have found I am far more accepted as a gay man in Republican circles than, in many cases, I am as a Republican in gay circles.”

To Greg, being a Republican means being self-determined, letting individuals make their own decisions, and being responsible for the consequences of those decisions for better or for worse, in life and in business. With Republicans, he says he agrees on 95 percent of the issues and disagrees strongly with 5 percent. With Democrats, the only issue he really agrees with them on is gay rights.

“I don't believe equal rights is a partisan issue. …It shouldn't be a Democratic issue or a Republican issue and I'm not particularly fond of people who play political football with my equal rights,” he says. He’d prefer to play the “politics game” within the Republican Party to get the laws he wants passed.

Hence, Log Cabin Republicans exist. It gives people like Greg a seat at the table within the Republican Party to push for those five percent of issues he disagrees with.

“It's far easier for me to have a dialogue with someone when we agree on almost everything,” he says. “…To put it in practical terms, if you're going to reach a conservative you need to speak to them as a conservative, and if you're going to reach a person of faith, you need to speak to them as a person of faith.”

We talk a bit about gay pride parades. Greg laments that what was once a march for equal rights has turned into a party whose message “gets lost in all the rainbow confetti and glitter that gets thrown about” and feels it’s “non-exemplery of what it means to be gay in the 2011 United States.” But, he says, it’s not like the St. Patrick’s Day Parade really says anything about what it means to be Irish.

Most of the other gay Republicans Greg knows, he says, are not fans of the pride parade. They're not wearing their sexuality on their sleeve, he says. Many are partnered. A lot are business owners.

“The bottom line is many just want to live their lives in quiet dignity. Their rights are important to them and achieving equal rights is important to them but the way to do it isn't really to go out and bang a drum and make a lot of noise. It's more so to make a difference within the party and to sit down with fellow Republicans and sit down with their partners, sit down with the foster children they're taking care of, sit down and explain that they're a business owner who is also not happy with the MTA payroll tax in New York and make the case that we are normal,” he says. Greg has met with people who think all gay men are hairdressers or fashion designers.

"You're different people who just share a sexuality is what you’re saying?” I ask. “You’re allowed to have different politics."

Greg nods, “Correct.” Later, he says, “[In the 2012 election,] I think jobs are going to be the number one issue.”

I ask if he thinks economic issues will trump social issues.

"People say, ‘How could you possibly vote for someone running for President who doesn't believe you should be married? …I can tell you that gay issues are not the only issue that is important to Log Cabin Republicans or to many gay people in this country who are maybe not even affiliated with Log Cabin Republicans. If you are an individual who has been unemployed for the last two years, and you lost your unemployment benefits, they've run out and your house is in foreclosure and you get into that voting booth come November 2012, what's the most important thing to you?” he says.

“It's a great myth of the left that they want people to believe that you need to be single issue voters and that you cannot vote for a Republican because Republicans don't want you to get married and Republicans didn't want to repeal ‘Don't Ask Don't Tell’ even though that was proven to be a fallacy. But in fact, we are not one-dimensional. No one is. At the end of the day it comes down to what is most important for you, as an individual and a voter.”

I tell him I think the GOP has a long way to go before people think it’s a cool party again. Greg says he doesn’t agree with the need to make a political party seem “sexy.”

“At the end of the day, we're dealing with some very serious issues and not to introduce hyperbole but often times what you're dealing with in politics is life or death," he says. "It's very serious. To say we need to focus our energies on making this cool..."

I interrupt, “But that's why you lost to Obama, isn't it?”

Greg laughs, “And what did you get out of that ultimately? There's a lot of empty rhetoric and you have a lot of young people who were very enthusiastic to vote for a President who they thought was 'cool' that I don't know, perhaps coming from a Republican background, I know many people who voted for Obama who, younger people who are dissatisfied.”

I ask if he thinks it's moving them to vote Republican in 2012. Greg says he thinks so. I counter, saying people more closely identify the Republican Party with someone like Michele Bachmann who recently got lambasted in the press for not being clear about whether gay families are really “families.”

Greg says he would point to Michele Bachmann in general, as a glaring sign that Liberty Education Forum still has some tough work ahead.

“If you're a let’s say, left wing extremist who is glitter bombing Republicans or chaining yourself to a White House fence or lying down in the middle of Times Square and stopping traffic to support equal rights, how sympathetic do you think Newt Gingrich or Michele Bachmann or Mitt Romney or Rick Perry is going to be to hearing you out? How effective do you think you're going to be unless you're able to get face to face with that person and say, ‘You know what? I'm just like you. I am. I'm a taxpayer. I'm living in this economy. I know people who are unemployed. I might be unemployed and the issues you care about I care about too," he says.

In May, I wrote a piece on 100 Interviews about a couple in Staten Island, Amanda Curtis and Brendan Coyle, who run an art gallery out of their apartment. Last week, Brendan Facebook-ed me to say that a reporter for the New York Times reached out to them about doing a piece. I thought it was cool. They deserve the recognition. In the message he wrote, "when she came to interview us she asked about your interview and said she was using it as a background reference on us to get aquainted(sic) with our story." That worried me. The Times piece came out on Sunday (ironically, the same day I had a small interview in the Times Magazine). The reporter didn't plagiarize and I'm sure she got all the information from Brendan and Amanda directly but reading the piece, it didn't sit right with me. The structure was exactly like mine, with no mention of 100 Interviews. 

See: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/14/realestate/what-the-ravens-wrought-habitatstompkinsville-si.html

This is the email I sent to the Times in full:

Hello, I am trying to reach Constance Rosenblum or her editor at Habitats with this email, but if this is not correct, please let me know. My name is Gaby Dunn and I write the blog project 100 Interviews (100interviews.com). In May, I wrote about the couple featured in the Habitats piece "What the Ravens Wrought" for my site. About a week ago, the male half of the couple, Brendan, reached out to tell me that Habitats would also be running a piece on them. They deserve the attention so I was pleased. I was slightly worried though, when he added that the reporter, Connie Rosenblum, had read my original article: "when she came to interview us she asked about your interview and said she was using it as a background reference on us to get aquainted(sic) with our story." Super flattering and great for a somewhat small blog like mine. However, when I saw the finished product that ran Sunday, I was even less pleased. It's very, very clear that my piece was used on background and as the backbone for Ms. Rosenblum's article -- and supplied multiple anecdotes including Amanda's childhood and the story of how they met to Ms. Rosenblum's story. The Habitats piece also uses the same anecdote about Amanda's Victorian inn childhood that I used in 100 Interviews as the lead for the story -- just as I used it as my lead. Ms. Rosenblum obviously did not plagiarize, but it's very clear her piece would not exist as it does without my original reporting. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/14/realestate/what-the-ravens-wrought-habitatstompkinsville-si.html http://100interviews.com/post/5578804094/39 Again, I'm very flattered your reporter read my blog -- and as I just started freelancing for the Times Magazine, I love you guys. I would really appreciate a link to my piece included in the online version of "What the Ravens Wrought."  Thank you for your time, Gaby

Then I worried about a response. 100 Interviews is a popular site, for sure, but it's not the New York Times. What if they never replied? What if they did reply and told me to piss off? What recourse does a little blog even have?

A reply came quickly. It was from Constance Rosenblum. It acknowledged that she'd read 100 Interviews in order to write the piece in the Times, but she'd then done her own research and interviews. She probably should have linked back. It said, in part: "I would be very happy to see if i can add a link to your interview, which i thought was excellent. let me see if i can make that happen."

Soon, she wrote again saying she was working on getting the Times web people to link to 100 Interviews. She hoped it'd be up by Wednesday.

A link to 100 Interviews was added to the side of the New York Times article on Brendan and Amanda today, as promised.

“A man in the back speaks up. ‘We have an informant that has said that you told this woman to come here today, so that you could do an abortion on her.’

‘No, that’s incorrect, ‘[I say,] ‘…She had never had a pregnancy test, or an ultrasound scan. …Because we do not have access to the ultrasound on the weekend, I told her to come back today. ...She is pregnant, and the pregnancy is 16 weeks, but because she speaks [another language], I could not tell her. So I brought her to someone in our clinic who speaks [it], and he said he would tell her. I left her there with the ultrasound report, waiting for him. That was the last I saw her.’

The [hospital administrator] spoke up, looking relieved. ‘Now, you see, Doctor has explained. She did an ultrasound. Now we are settled, and we can finish this discussion.’

Everyone speaks at once, but the man in the polo shirt was loudest. ‘No, we cannot finish because she has not shown remorse!’” – ‘No Remorse,’ 5/5/2011

This is an excerpt from the blog of a passionate, young obstetrician named Alice. The blog chronicles the year she spent working at a hospital in an African country where abortion is illegal. She has asked me not to name the exact country and to give her an alias for this interview. She chose "Alice."

Alice attended medical school and did her residency in New York City, but didn’t have a clear direction until she did three days with each specialty. When she got to “labor and childbirth,” she was so struck that a superior took one look at her beaming face and asked, “You’re going to be an obstetrician, aren’t you?”

“I remember that moment,” she says. “I really loved that we were in clinic and that we had sat there and talked to somebody so honestly about sex, and all these embarrassing topics and all these things you're not supposed to talk about. And it was a relief, for us and for her, to be able to talk about it and to be so frank. [Women’s health and reproduction is] the most amazing thing in the world, and yet, we don't talk about it. It's so empowering.”

I tell her I feel like it also has the most potential to be amazing because the grown patients are so grateful for her help, but also to be devastating when something goes wrong during a birth.

“It's 90 percent amazing and 10 percent devastating,” she says, of the birthing process. “The thing is, the amazing never stops being amazing.”

Alice, as she sits in front of me, doesn’t fit either stereotype of an OBGYN; either the creepy male gynecologist or the placenta-eating spirit mother. She says the medical stereotype of OBGYNs is that they’re “the bitches.”

“We have to be, because if you're sitting there bleeding to death, as one of my friends used to say, ‘You don't want someone who is going to stand around and contemplate the meaning of life.’ You want someone who is going to walk in the room and be like, ‘Move over there. Get out of my way,’ and shove their hand down,” she mimes putting her hand into a woman. “When you're giving birth, you could die in a matter of minutes. So you don't want someone who's indecisive.”

I ask how she felt the first time she delivered a baby that she knew was going to die.

“I knew she wasn't going to survive beyond a few hours, and the whole situation was not because of anything we did. It was a chromosomal thing, but that was sad. I remember it was Thanksgiving,” she says. “It was really depressing.”

But, Alice remembers, she didn’t cry. It’s not that she’s never cried in the delivery room; in fact, seeing a dad hold his newborn always gets to her, but in this truly tragic moment, she felt almost out-of-body.

“I think I was more wide‑eyed and taking it all in. The parents handled it amazing. They were so beautiful and they just held her until she died,” she pauses and then says: “I can remember so much of that episode that I usually wouldn't remember.”

During her training, she delivered her first child, and like every trainee, performed her first abortion. Performing an abortion was not required of all students, but Alice says most in the other residents at the inner city hospital chose to learn.

“It's a major, major part of our specialty,” Alice says. “It's not a rare thing.” According to the reproductive health group, the Guttmacher Institute, in 2008, 1.21 million abortions were performed in the United States. Approximately, 1/3 of woman in the US will have an abortion by age 45.

“I can't say every [OBGYN] does one later on, or maybe they do first-trimesters. And I get that,” she says. “But I'm not particularly comfortable with the fact that people go into OBGYN and don't do them, which is a controversial thing to say. I think it's like going into general surgery and then being like, ‘I'm not going to do amputations because diabetics did it to themselves.’”

Alice grew up in the city and was raised in a liberal, non-religious, feminist family. She says she doesn’t understand people who defensively claim they “aren’t feminist." She grew up pro-sex education and pro-choice. But, of course, there’s a difference between believing in choice and actually being the one to do the abortion.

Alice says she compartmentalizes. She likens it to when she worked in an oncology department, delivering flowers to cancer patients. People would always ask her, ‘Isn’t it depressing?’ Alice never saw it that way. This was a struggle they had to go through, and she was helping them through that process. She feels the same way about terminating a pregnancy.

“I'm not the one making the choice. I'm the one helping her once she's made the choice,” she says.

And for those that come to Alice undecided, she says she makes them go home and think it through. Her pre-procedure counseling, she says, is very strong and never rushed. If a woman comes in and says her boyfriend convinced her to have an abortion, Alice will parse out the real reasons.

“Sometimes you have to be really blunt, and you have to say, ‘I don't want you to do this. I need to feel like you want to do this, because if you aren't able to say that, then you're going to look back on this and regret it,’” she says. “I’ve seen both how excruciating it can be and how clear the decision can be. People sit there in front of you and cry.”

This reminds me of what I told abortion protester Sarina that night at the coffee shop in New Jersey: that no one wants to be having an abortion, no one waltzes in gleeful about it. Alice agrees; it’s so rare to see someone like that, even if they’re on their 12th abortion.

Though Alice says she’s too “loud-mouthed” to friends and private to strangers to have people get confrontational about her profession, she does avoid using the word “abortion” whenever someone sits near us. I do too. When we do use it, I notice our neighbors side-eyeing us. Alice says she’s tried, like I did with Sarina, to put herself in the shoes of those who are against abortion and found she can not fathom their reasoning. She also realized she doesn’t care what they think.

“I am not in the business of persuasion and I'm not in the business of trying to convince you that it's right or not,” she says.

The point of the issue, Alice says, is not whether or not you think it's right to do the act. It's about whether you think the act should be legal.

“If you don't think that someone should do the act, don't do it,” she says. “I don't think someone should commit adultery, but I don't think it should be illegal. It's like why the National Rifle Association refuses to ban assault weapons. Nobody uses an assault weapon on deer, but they're afraid that if they concede the point of an assault weapon, it's going to be a ban. I think there are actually a lot of pro‑choice people who don't agree with the act. But they recognize what it would mean if we made it illegal."

What it would mean, according to many sources, is more abortions. In the African country Alice spent a year working in, there are actually more abortions than in the US despite abortion being illegal, according to Guttmacher. There, even counseling someone considering an abortion is banned.

“You can't sit there and counsel them. They could be recording what you're saying. They could go back to the police with what you said. And you wouldn't do anything and they would implicate you [for criminal intent]. So how do you give them adequate counseling?” she says. “[In America, where abortion is legal], I can literally sit there with someone. I can say, ‘What about regret? What do you think about regret?’ You can sit there and go through every option, but you can't do that if you make it illegal.”

Also, in the African country where Alice worked, a family member is allowed to sign medical consent forms for a woman. In one instance, after having five children and living in poverty, a woman's husband would not sign forms for Alice to tie his wife's tubes. Having a man sign for a woman made Alice uncomfortable.

“There were times when it just time‑wise wasn't appropriate to insist. But if I had time, I insisted that the woman signed the form. And it was always a hullabaloo, ‘She can't write, she can't read, there's no pen,’” she says. “And none of that ever guarantees that she actually has any idea what you're talking about or is on the same page, but you do what you can do.”

I mention how most of the powerful people working to ban abortion are men. “They’re scared of…” I start. Alice finishes, “a woman having power.”

I nod. Alice says, “Why? They're not going to abort them.”

I ask about the woman she did the ultrasound for in her blog entry. Alice didn’t perform abortions in that African country because it wasn’t her home country – if America outlawed abortions, she says she'd consider performing them. When I ask what might have become of that woman, Alice says she doesn’t like to think about it.

“She could have found someone to do it, but it would have been very dangerous at that stage, because people don't know what they're doing. No one can legally be trained. I encouraged her not to, and I actually told her, if she does try to get one [in that African country], she could die,” Alice says.

The most difficult part of her job, Alice says, is when the mother dies in childbirth.

“That’s much, much harder to get over,” she says. “I don't know that you ever do. That's what led me to [Africa] and everything, because when you realize that women die giving birth, it's just the most infuriating injustice that exists, right? It's supposed to be this life‑giving thing. That's harder to put aside.”

One of the things I asked Sarina during our interview was what she would do if she was told she would die unless she got an abortion. Sarina told me she would trust in God.

I tell Alice this, adding: “If a doctor told them, ‘You have cancer. You could probably cure this,’ they would listen. But if you were like, ‘Hey, listen, the baby's going to kill you,’ they're like, ‘Well, I'm not sure.’”

Alice says it’s less about that, and more about taking the issue as strictly black and white.

If fetuses are always people from the moment of conception, Alice says, why when a woman has a first‑trimester miscarriage, she usually suffers alone with her partner. Where are the pro-lifers then? Or what about when abused and neglected children suffer in foster care or unfit homes, like Sarina's would have been had she continued using drugs; what then?

Alice's passion for medicine is evident. The people she helped, the beauty she witnessed and the difficult situations she put herself in the center of in Africa -- and even in New York -- is truly beyond anything I've personally experienced. This is never more evident than when Alice tells me about one of her first births, where the woman...um, tore particularly badly. Alice felt like she'd failed, especially with the patient yelling at her. But in the end, mother and baby were fine. My response? "Never having children ever," I pretend to write in my notebook.

That's not even the worst that can happen. While death during childbirth can happen in an instant, there are also lasting painful effects for women without proper reproductive and childbirth medical care. When Alice was younger, an article about the famine in Ethiopia was one of the things that made her want to be a doctor. That feeling returned one day when she read about one such condition called obstetric fistula.

Obstetric fistula happens when a woman is in labor and the fetal head puts pressure on the pelvis. Eventually the baby dies and when the woman’s tissue heals, it’s necrotic, leaving a hole between the bladder and the vagina or the vagina and the rectum.

“What it means is that she's constantly in pain and has urine incontinence, [leaks urine and feces] for the rest of her life. It makes her a pariah. It makes her stink horribly,” Alice says.

I’m aghast (as I’m sure you are reading this). “This is common?” I say. I’ve never heard of fistula.

“The last time I read about it, which was years ago, I think it was estimated that two million women have fistula,” Alice says.

That information makes me want to cry. “You know that if there was even a remote possibility of this happening to a dude, there would be a million foundations,” I say, thinking about the number of penis pills that exist.

"Right," Alice says simply. “It wouldn't happen.”

The problem of fistula stayed in Alice’s mind. “It shouldn't fucking happen,” she kept thinking. “It just shouldn't.” She wrote her residency essay on fistula and in her fourth year went to Africa with the Global Health Initiative. After that, she was itching to do more in developing countries, which led to the scene at her hospital, where the pro-life investigators cornered her with frightening accusations of performing abortions.

“What really almost gave me a heart attack was these men sitting there saying the most vicious things, and I was thinking about episodes where I had been sitting there operating on someone who was bleeding to death in front of me. It's just like, ‘Who the fuck are you?,’” she pauses. “And you can quote me on that. ‘Seriously, when she's dying of hemorrhage, where the fuck are you?’"

My voice is grim, “Nowhere,” I suggest.

Alice nods, “When the kids in the malnutrition ward right now are dying because they don't have food or they don't have protein, where are you? That hospital, that pediatric ward is half malnutrition. Where are you? You don't care about them.”

On an episode of ’30 Rock’ last season, Tina Fey’s Liz was stuck on an airplane while her boyfriend, the pilot, tried to buy time by explaining every half hour, the new technical difficulty they were facing.

For anyone who’s ever been delayed on a runaway or had a flight cancelled, this scene held the familiar frustration.

Taking the opposite approach, comedian Louis CK has a joke he calls “Everything is Amazing and Nobody is Happy,” the premise of which is that no one is grateful for any of today’s technology.

“We had to sit there for 40 minutes on the runway!” he says, pretending to be a whiny patron and then counters, “Oh yeah, and what happened next? Did you FLY THROUGH THE AIR INCREDIBLY LIKE A BIRD? DID YOU PARTAKE IN THE MIRACLE OF FLIGHT?”

I’m one of those people who, once a flight, completely believes we’re all going to die. When the pilot says there’s going to be rough air, I imagine he’s lying and it’s really that the wings are on fire. That ’30 Rock’ episode didn’t help dissuade me.

Neither did talking to commercial airline pilot Joel Smith.

Josh and I drive to Joel’s house in the suburbs of Boston. It’s huge, on a culdesac of other mini-mansions. They’re building a new big house next to Joel’s and Josh and I joke that they’re putting in an Applebee’s. Joel is only mildly amused.

Joel’s got tan skin kind of like my dad’s. He’s a young guy and he’s wearing a Yankees button-down and a baseball cap with his light hair coming out the bottom. We go into his office and he offers Josh a beer. Josh declines and Joel gets himself and Josh one anyway. Throughout the interview, Josh, not a big drinker, sips at it dutifully and delicately like it’s a pouch of Capri Sun instead of a beer. (So just, picture that while you’re reading this because it's hilarious.)

Joel (not his real name) was working at a hotel, living with his parents at home, and wondering what he was going to do for the rest of his life, when he decided to start back at kindergarten. What had he wanted to be as a young boy?

“Oh yeah,” he thought, “that's what I wanted to do. I wanted to fly a plane! I wanted to be a commercial airline pilot.”

“I think it was just a boyhood dream,” Joel says. “And then, to tell you the truth, the way it really sparked it back in my mind was probably working at the hotel and seeing flight crews come in. I was like, ‘I always wanted to do this. Maybe I can do this. How can I do this?’”

In the spring of 1998, he researched flight schools and picked out Westmont, a college-accredited aviation school in Arizona. His father offered to support him and so Joel enrolled for that September, having never flown an airplane before.

“I feel that you should probably work for a couple years and figure out what you want to do [before college]. Like, if you were to go to college when you're in your mid‑20s, after you've worked and things like that, you'll put a lot more effort into the studies and things that you're doing, because you'll be focused on, ‘These are the things I want to do’ not, ‘These are the things I have to do,’” he says. “And if I wasn't good at [flying], then I'd do something else. But I knew that this was something that I wanted to pursue, so I knew that I was going to put every effort into it.”

“And it was just basically from scratch that you started?” I ask.

Joel nods, “From scratch,” he says.

Joel was assigned to an instructor. His introductory flight, before he knew anything about aviation was in a Cessna 152. Joel and his instructor both had the controls. His instructor told him to focus on the air speed gauge.

“When it reaches 55,” the instructor told Joel, “start pulling back slightly on the yolk and you'll take off.”

“I say, ‘This is the first time I've ever flown. I don't really know anything about aviation.’ He's there next to me. I remember he told me this later on, because he was my instructor for the year, and he's like, ‘At 500 feet, you looked over and you were smiling,” Joel says. “You were like, 'Dude, we're flying!'"

“That's so geeky. Are pilots generally geeks?,” I ask. “I feel like pilots are like brosephs. I imagine ‘Top Gun.’”

Joel smirks. He says some flight schools encourage a sort of ‘Top Gun’ elitism, but Joel never subscribed to it.

“The way that I really see it is that being a pilot is what I do, it's not who I am. See, for a lot of people, it classifies who they are,” he says. “Some people, it's all, ‘Aviation, aviation, aviation.’ When I go out at night with friends, I'll tell them a little story here or there but it’s not everything.”

Joel graduated after 11 months of classes. After graduation and a few years working for a small jet company in Miami, Joel applied for his first commercial piloting job, which he got, after a grueling interview process (“a total fraternity mindfuck”), in September of 2000.

In Miami, he’d met his wife, a student at University of Miami, and the two moved up to Boston, where they live now. Joel commutes to Newark for his job.

I make a face, but Joel says it’s not that bad. Some pilots commute to Newark from the West Coast.

“Wait, so you were a year in to your first job at a major airline when September 11th happened?” I ask.

Joel nods. He says he was on an overnight in Houston. He even remembers the hotel and his room number. Not due back at the airport until 5 p.m. that night, Joel, the first officer, was asleep. His captain called him and asked if he was watching the news. “And I was like, ‘No. I'll see you later. I'll see you for lunch. Call me later.’ And he said, ‘No! Turn on the news!’”

“Are you like, ‘Maybe he had a heart attack, I don't know.’ Are you trying to come up with scenarios?” I ask.

“Yeah, and we just don’t understand what’s happened,” he says. “I mean, I'm just on the phone with the captain and no one knows.”

I ask if he considers his job to be stressful. I say that if I mess up at my job, no one cares.

“Yeah,” Joel says. “If I fucked up, people don't come home.”

“Right,” I say. “Is that a thing that causes the stress?”

“Not really,” he says, “because I know that I will make the right decisions.”

I tell him sometimes things are out of his control.

“You can't think about it like that. You want to think that everything is in your control because once you let something out of your control, you lose,” he says.

What really stresses Joel out, he says, are minutia, like the requirement that every pilot over 40 years of age have a physical every six months. “If something goes wrong, that’s your livelihood,” he says. They’re also required to retire at 65.

The pay scale for pilots is based on seniority rather than merit: the oldest pilots are paid more than, let’s say, the most capable pilots. And Joel says the benefits pilots enjoyed in the 1960s (as depicted in ‘Mad Men’ or ‘Catch Me If You Can’) are being slowly taken away. Pilot used to be able to fly anywhere for free – on standby. Now, it’s done by class levels and a waiting list. Those are small inconveniences though. Generally, Joel loves his job.

“When I go to work it doesn't really seem like work. It just seems like fun. When I was working in a hotel, I was still behind a desk. I still had to meet quotas, I had to make calls, and I had to make meetings. I can't do that because I'm not built for that,” he says. “I need to be involved in what's actually happening.”

Joel is now a captain. On the airplane, there is no one more involved in what’s happening than he is.

“How often does something go wrong and the passengers have no idea?” I ask. I’m already regretting it.

“There’s like, small things that have happened,” he says. “Once we were coming out of Montreal coming back to Newark, and the landing gear didn't come up. Okay, it doesn't sound like a big deal, but it is a big deal for the reason that you can't go above a certain altitude when it's up. It induces a huge amount of drag, so you'll use a lot more gas, which you didn't plan for that and basically you wouldn't be able to make it to your destination.”

“So what do you do?” I ask.

Joel says he runs a bunch of checklists to try to evaluate what happened. They get vectors from the tower and fly, basically in circles, attempting to fix the problem lest they have to turn around and land. Passengers, meanwhile, believe they’re on their way to their destination.

After 10 minutes of burning gas, the landing gear came up. Joel calculated that they had enough fuel left to make it to their destination. He asked his first officer, "Do you feel comfortable with that?" Joel says he always checks with his crew because of something he read in Malcolm Gladwell’s book ‘Outliers,’ which has a fantastic section on the communication between pilots in the cockpit.

In some countries, the captain makes every decision and it’s considered rude for the first officer to counter him or her. Those countries usually have more plane crashes.

“What was a big problem you had?” I ask. I’m hoping he’ll say, ‘Nothing.’

Joel hesitates a bit and then starts in on a story about bringing people from Newark to the middle-of-nowhere Canada during a snowstorm. He was sure the flight was going to be cancelled but it wasn’t. After flying for hours with no visibility, fuel was dangerously low. Joel thought they might run out and crash. There were no airports where he could emergency land and the passengers had no idea how dire the situation was.

Finally, the tower called and told him of a smaller airport they could land at, one that his airline didn’t ever use. They make the landing and Joel is relieved just to have lived.

“Now the issue is, now it gets more into logistics, where they don't have Customs at this airport, so I've got to keep my people on the plane,” he says. “And so now the lav is getting disgusting, because it's already been four hours.”

I make a face. Joel laughs. “It’s kind of a tight plane, so, you know, they're not so happy,” he says.

“It's funny that they're not happy, when you're like, ‘I just fucking saved all your lives!’ I say.

Joel says it’s just because they don’t know the severity.

“You try to keep them informed as much as you can without letting them know exactly, ‘Listen, we were basically almost on fumes here,’” he says.

Joel then called the dispatch guy at the tower who recommended they land at this unfamiliar airport and he told Joel to keep everyone on the plane for twenty more minutes while they sort out paperwork. Joel calls the guy “a knucklehead.”

“Half an hour goes by, I call them back. They're like, ‘Oh, you've just got to wait a little bit longer.’ Another 15 minutes go by, I keep on calling them. It's like, ‘What's the story here?’ I said, ‘This is ridiculous.’ ‘Oh, just wait a little bit longer.’ Keeps on going on. We're on the ground here. People are starting to freak the hell out,” Joel says.

Finally, the people are unloaded from the plane, super unhappy. The paperwork is done. But then, two more Air Canada flights come in and have first priority. This takes another hour and a half. Instead of going ahead to their destination, they’re told to go all the way back to Newark. Some passengers who wanted to get to their original destination rented cars; others booked different flights. Only 20 passengers stayed. They used the flight’s passenger manifest to check people back in (because they didn’t have their tickets), which took another 45 minutes. Then, it’s another two‑hour flight back to Newark.

“So I'm speaking to the dispatch guy, who I wanted to put through the window, and he's like, ‘You know what? We probably should have canceled your flight,’” Joel says. “I was like, ‘Do you think?!’"

“At what point do you tell passengers, like, ‘This is your captain speaking: We're fucked right now?’” I ask.

Joel laughs, “Uh, probably right before it's about to happen.”

“Well,” I say. “I'm never flying again.”

Joel rolls his eyes. He says with delays, he always keeps passengers informed, but with safety issues, it’s usually better that they don’t know.