Friends! Through an odd quirk of calendaring I have a whole bunch of stuff premiering this month, as well as a couple of Exceedingly Rare public appearances, one of which is potentially humiliating. I’ll save that one for last.
HERE THEY ALL ARE. Or as they say in certain parts of Philadelphia, here all they are.
This Sunday, October 14, SET APART: THE JIM ABBOTT STORY premieres on Fox at 4:00pm, right after the 1pm NFL game. I executive produced the film through my company Written Out Loud. For you non-sports fans, Jim was born without a right hand, and went on not only to Freakin Pitch in the Major Leagues, but throw a no-hitter for the Yankees in 1993. It’s a remarkable story about an amazing human, and I’m quite lucky to have been a part of telling this story.
Bonus content for Yale-affiliated peeps: our friend Andy Siegel and his son Grover are prominently featured in the doc, and you shall be honor bound to adore them. Resistance is futile.
On Sunday Oct 21 at 9pm, a documentary I directed about a real-life, you’re-not-going-to-believe-this-guy’s-story American hero, the immigration attorney Luis Mancheno, premieres on DirecTV/Audience Network, as an episode of a docuseries called “REFUGE.” I won’t spoil Luis’s story except to say that in his early 30s, Luis has basically lived a life worthy of Victor Hugo. If you don’t get DirecTV/Audience, I’ll work on ways to share a streamable version.
OR! YOU COULD JUST GO THE EXTRA MILE and come see me live and in person at a screening at the Fairfield Theater Company on Monday October 22. OK, technically, this screening is actually a presentation of a different episode of the REFUGE series, but it’s a similarly amazing story about a family of Syrian refugees who survived President Assad's barbaric 2013 chemical weapons attack and made it all the way to Connecticut.
I’ll be hosting a Q & A after the screening, along with Claudia Connor, CEO of CIRI (the local CT organization that resettles refugees and immigrants). Claudia is awesome, FTC is awesome, and I would love to see you. Admission is free, it's super kid-friendly (and a great current-event teaching tool). Doors open at 7pm, screening starts at 7:30, and the film is only 30m long, BTW, so it’s a totally cheap babysitter night.
Finally, on Tuesday October 23, in an event whose importance far eclipses that of the refugee crisis, I’ll be singing a bunch of Police songs in a bar with my grown-up School of Rock band. I’ve been blogging quite a bit about School of Rock lately, in all my posts about our Storytelling School. Suffice it to say SCHOOL OF ROCK is the absolute best. The other moms and dads in our Police-esque cover band are genuinely pro-tier musicians, and I promise that a few of our songs will genuinely kick your ass. In between the other ones. :) But seriously - if you can make it to the Acoustic Cafe at 8:00pm, Tues 10/23, I'd love to see you.
Oh so whew. That’s a lot. But chunks of stuff premiering all in a row like this doesn’t happen very often in life. If you can tune in or attend something in person, please say hi, and thanks very much in advance.
Josh
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