For a couple years now Nick Thune and I have had a few mutual friends, and we finally ran into each other in LA last week. I found Nick to be seriously funny. We talked a bit about comedy and he shared some great stories from his career, including his first appearance on the Tonight show, in which an AIDS awareness commercial aired right before he came on. I’ve thought for a long time performing comedy is one of the hardest things you can do, and even harder to do well. And yet Nick makes it look easy. Turns out he is in Portland this weekend for The Bridgetown Comedy Festival, including a show at The Baghdad theater on Friday night. I’ll be catching the Saturday show at Mt. Tabor because I’ll have come into town that day, otherwise I’d be at all three of his shows. All that to say, check out Nick Thune if he comes to your town.
Doing some editing on the book this morning. Today I will send in a draft that will be printed as galleys, paperbacks essentially that will be sent to the press for review and to key book buyers. The book still has rough spots, but I will clean most of them up today, then spend the next week or two really polishing it into the form we can actually publish. So I’ll be sharing some excerpts with you here and there as I come across something I find interesting. By the way, this is most likely the book cover we will use. It may change a bit, but it won’t change much. I’ll create another post next week explaining why it looks the way it looks. It’s pretty fascinating, actually. For now, here is the beginning of a chapter: Chapter Twenty-Five: The Thing About a Crossing It’s like this when you live a story. The first part happens fast. You throw yourself into the narrative and you’re caught in the water, the shore is pushing back behind you and the trees are getting smaller. The other shore is inches away and you can feel the resolution coming, the feeling [...]
One of my favorite people in this world is my roomate Justin Zoradi. Justin is bunking with me until he and his girl Trisha get married this August. He’s only been in the house for a month or so, but already the place has a better feel just because he is around. Justin and Trisha moved to Portland a couple years ago and started a non-profit called These Numbers Have Faces, a partnership between American micro-investors and students in South Africa. Essentially, anybody willing to invest in a student can provide a college scolarship for about $23 a month. Incredible. Just down the street at Reed, students pay nearly 40k per semester.And yet the life changing affects of a college education mean just as much in South Africa as it does here. Many of the students Justin is working with in SA are the first to attend college. If you think about it, most Americans get some kind of scholarship, you know, either from our parents or from the government or from a program that cuts us a deal. It’s awesome that Justin has provided a means for us to give back to the world in such an efficient way. [...]
As I’ve mentioned, this week we launched the new Mentoring Project website at www.thementoringproject.org. Thanks to all of you who have visited the site and told your friends about it. We are recruiting ten-thousand mentors through one-thousand church based programs. We already have eighty mentors, seven churches and over 300 people are giving small monthly donations to keep us going. Our vision is huge, and we are supported by a grass roots campaign of people just like you. If you give a monthly donation, or are planning on giving, would you mind clicking on your photo-booth or webcam application and uploading a video to you-tube to tell us why you give? I will then feature it on this blog and on our donation site itself. We hear such beautiful stories about why this issue is important to people, and we want the world to hear those stories directly from you guys. Make sure to lead the video with your name and location (if you are comfortable) and then tell us why providing mentors for fatherless kids is important to you. You can let me know about your video through the comment option here on this blog entry, and I [...]
My roomate, Justin, teaches at a school in a rough neighborhood here in Portland, and it happens to be a school that partners with The Mentoring Project, a mentoring program I started a couple years ago. We are now mentoring 65 kids and are rapidly expanding our reach. We provide mentors to kids through church-based programs and believe strongly the church holds a big chunk of the solution to the fatherlessness crisis in America. One of the many ways I get feedback about our program is through Justin. He actually sees our mentors showing up at his school to spend time with their kids. A story he told me last night took me back thirty years to similar memories from my own life. One of the kids at Justin’s school has a dad who has been issued a restraining order. Our mentors name is Ross Hallbach and for the sake of privacy I’ll refer to his mentee as David. Ross was recruited through a church’s partnership with TMP, and then trained by our staff. Ross has been mentoring David for about six months and shows up for an after school program once each week (though they spend time together outside [...]
