Silent Voices and Evan in the Chinese Garden

First, the link is here, and everything seems to be working perfectly. People in the USA and the UK have seen it, and perhaps people in Australia, Africa, and New Zealand soon will. I’ve received great praise from WalkingMarj, kd, and Damonii, for which I am deeply grateful. If you feel it has meaning for you and for people you know, feel free to share it any way you customarily share things. 

We also welcome criticism. We can’t make changes to it now, but we do care to hear what people think, how they react, how it lands for them. We have some concerns, but I will save them till after more people have seen it. Donna and I are very, very grateful to everyone who worked on it with us, and I am moved by the excellence of each performance, especially from the actors who had never acted before, and who thought they were volunteering to do one or two public readings in church basements, and who stayed with us through the pandemic into the production of a movie. I am convinced that everyone who worked on it did the best they could: the actors, the editors, the people who promoted it before they even got to see it; the sound, the photography, the lighting. So many people’s work went into it. Donna and I hope that it will eventually result in changes in policy that may save lives and spare other families the suffering that cannot ever be described.

And here is Evan. Here he was hopping along on the stone mosaic floor of the garden which he thought was an obstacle course (‘you only step on the round ones’), but what fascinated him most was the koi. We were almost alone in the garden, so we didn’t have to hurry, and he watched the fish with great fascination. (See Extra.) Here’s another of his monologs: “See the black and white one? It looks like a cow. I’m going to name it Cow-fish, and that one over there, I think she’s a girl, so her name is Cow-a-fish. The ‘uh’ in the middle of her name means she’s a girl, and if you don’t have an ‘uh’ you’re probably a boy. And look! Over there is a pink-faced Cow-fish. Listen, you can hear them talking to each other. They speak Bubble. It’s their language, and they all understand each other. They say, ‘Hey, cow-a-bubble, look, there’s a bit of food over here!’ And then she says, ‘Thanks, George-bubble, I missed that.’ They’re brothers and sisters and family of each other. You see the little one, they call it Goldie because that ‘y’ sound is for babies and little kid fish.”