The Story Nobody Verified

Father's Day, 1982, and I am sitting on a 747 bound for Seoul, South Korea, chatting it up with friends from the theatre and our director, Dr. D. Our small, scrappy little troupe of twelve had won a bid to travel from Seattle to Seoul and then to Okinawa, performing for US military troops stationed throughout both regions. In 1982, there were over a hundred military installations in South Korea alone. We were going to see all of it.

The night before I left, Doreen (aka Mom) happened to catch a segment on the evening news about American girls in Seoul being abducted and forced into trafficking. She spent the next two hours in a panic, weighing out the odds of calling Dr. D to have me pulled from the cast entirely. All because of a story she heard on the news.

A story!

I had spent months in a studio, rehearsing choreography, running scales, and dreaming my way toward a career on Broadway. This trip was the chance of a lifetime, the kind of thing a 21-year-old performer doesn't pass up. And yet there was Doreen, suitcase half-packed on my bed, calculating risk on behalf of us both.

Mic (aka Dad) came to my rescue, as he often did. He reminded her that I was smart enough to keep myself out of trouble, that I would be with a group, that Military Police would be assigned to our troupe throughout the entire trip, and that a single story on the evening news was not a reliable measure of what was actually happening in the world. More to the point, he said, you can't always believe everything you see on the news.

I boarded the plane.

What I remember most about that flight was settling into my seat and watching the Seattle skyline disappear beneath the clouds, feeling a particular mix of excitement and nerves. I was flying to the other side of the world. It felt surreal. And somewhere in that moment, an anxious thought crept in, what if the stories were true? After all, I had seen worse things in movies. I had read worse things in books. The story had found its way in, even after I thought I'd left it on the ground.

Stories are like that, tend to find their way in, squeezing out what’s real, masquerading as Truth.

I see this frequently, in my own life and in the women I work with. A story gets told, often by someone we love, sometimes by the culture at large, and it plants itself firmly as a fixture. We hear that we're too old to start over. That real love doesn't happen after 50. That what we built over 30 years is the most we can reasonably expect. That the life we have, hard as it's become, is safer than the unknown. And we carry those stories around as if they're facts, as if someone sat down and verified them, as if they were ever anything more than someone else's fear in our ear.

Doreen wasn't wrong to worry. She was just being a mother. But her worry was built on a story she had no way to verify, and if Mic hadn't stepped in with something steadier, I might have spent that summer answering phones at an insurance agency instead of standing on a stage in Seoul, watching the faces of men and women so far from home light up at the sight of a little music, a little nonsense, and a reminder of home.

The trip was extraordinary. I came home changed, in ways I couldn't have predicted. Just a little more certain that what I couldn't see yet was not the same as what wasn't there.

That is what I think about on Father's Day today.

Mic and his belief in me. The steady one. The man in the room who says she's smart enough. She'll be okay. You can't always believe everything you hear.

If you had someone like that in your life, you know what it meant. And if you didn't, I hope somewhere along the way you learned to be that voice for yourself.

Happy Father's Day to the fathers, the stepfathers, the men who showed up, and to every person who has ever been steady for someone standing at the edge of something unknown.