A gift can be an act of love, or it can be a stand-in for love. Sometimes it’s a mixture of both. Here I tell a story of my family’s acquisition of not one but two dream homes in California in the 1970s, a time during which we were clearly living — and loving — beyond our means.
This story overlaps heavily with another one, “The Rock Stars Next Door” (aka “Snake/Mouse” on the “Edgeplay” episode of RISK!). Both share some identical scenes, and as a pair they represent an experiment in borrowing/overlaping story elements to tell two totally different stories that occurred in the same place (Mill Valley, California) and time (the early 1970s).
This story was performed on December 10, 2013 at the Local Stories storytelling show at Three of Cups in Manhattan. The theme of the evening was “Gifts.”