id Theater’s NYC Sit In!

Presents:

SHANGHAI KADDISH by Larry Loebell

at Jimmy’s No. 43

43 E. 7^th Street Downstairs – Manhattan, between 3^rd and 2^nd Avenues

Admission is free but there is a one drink minimum per person.

Come for the reading, stay for food and talk afterward

https://uarts.ticketleap.com/member/list_events.aspx?event_company_id=18E87106-EAC7-4425-9ED3-3DBB3C60749&

The Philadelphia Inquirer

Constitution Center is a stage for timely theater

By Dianna Marder

Inquirer Staff Writer

You know a play is timely when the director consults newspapers, TV, radio, and the Internet constantly to see if the script needs updating.

Indeed, the Living News production at the National Constitution Center contains scenes on gay marriage, immigration rights, and gun laws that are, as they say, ripped from the headlines.

Living News, which begins its third year Monday, is an ever-changing museum exhibit designed with eighth- to 12th-grade school groups in mind; its $14 ticket price includes pre- and post-production curriculum materials.

The 25-minute play, followed by a half-hour discussion, is written by a team of theater professionals (including Barrymore Award-nominated playwright Larry Loebell), and is aimed at sparking conversation about ordinary individuals and their relationship to the U.S. Constitution.

The project takes its cues, as well as its name, from the Depression-era Living Newspaperproject, which was part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), one of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s programs aimed at creating jobs and boosting public morale.

While the Public Works Adminstration built dams and bridges, and the Civilian Conservation Corps created hiking paths and camping cabins, the Living Newspaper was hiring writers, actors, dancers, set decorators, and lighting and sound designers for such shows as Arthur Arent’s One Third of a Nation, about the vast number of Americans left hungry and homeless in the wake of the crash of 1929. Triple-A Plowed Under, written in 1936 by a team of authors, dramatized the plight of Dust Bowl farmers and suggested that farmers and workers unionize. About a dozen plays made it to the stage in Living Newspaper’s 1935-39 lifespan, but interest in the project continues. The plays are archived at George Mason University in Virginia, and two months ago Jackalope Theatre in Chicago produced a homage to the project with its Living Newspapers Festival, featuring four new plays done in the New Deal style.

But in fact, Living Newspaper’s biting social commentary style was based on an even earlier model, the experimental theater of the Bolshevik Revolution and the epic theater style of Bertolt Brecht. Like its predecessors, Living Newspaper preached a one-sided liberal gospel that had critics crying “socialism!” and that proved to be its ultimate undoing.

The Constitution Center’s Living News, on the other hand, presents questions but leaves the answers up to the audience, says Nora Berger-Green, who, as theater programs producer, is the force behind this and other center presentations.

“The WPA project is an inspiration for ours,” she says, “but we’ve adjusted the concept.”

For one thing, paper was dropped from the title because news now comes from so many sources, she says. But there was a more important consideration.

“In general, theater asks questions, but tends to have a perspective on those questions. As a museum, it’s important for us to be nonpartisan. We want to encourage active participation but not tell people how to do that or what to think. Being balanced is our mission.”

Living News is staffed with artists already active in regional theater. Artistic director David Bradley has directed more than 20 plays at Malvern’s People’s Light & Theatre Company. Delanté G. Keys has acted with Curio Theatre, Allen’s Lane Theater, Interact, and Azuka Theatre companies; Felicia Leicht, with Plays & Players and Shakespeare in Clark Park. Stephanie Lauren is a former Walnut Street Theatre apprentice and appeared in Theatre Horizon’s Romeo and Juliet.

All scan the news daily for relevant material that might be integrated in post-play discussions.

That’s what happened in January after a 17-year-old observant Jew strapped on tefillin (small leather boxes attached to leather straps, worn for morning prayers) during a flight from New York to Kentucky, arousing suspicion among the flight crew and leading to an emergency landing in Philadelphia.

The current script addresses freedom of religion, gun control, gay rights, immigration, and privacy concerns, with a scene about school integration on ice for now.

Always, the student perspective is foremost. For example, the gay-marriage scene is written from the viewpoint of an adopted teenager with two dads – an idea that originated with students in Chris Taranta’s eighth-grade math class at Julia R. Masterman school.

Bradley and Loebell had visited the school last year seeking student input before deciding how to introduce the issue, Taranta said. “That gave the students ownership over a piece of the play. So it was not surprising gay marriage was a major topic of debate in post-performance discussion we attended.

“There were a couple of students who bucked the overwhelming majority and stated that they were against gay marriage for religious reasons,” he said. “One was a girl who rarely spoke in my class; it was delightful that she felt comfortable enough to take that risk and also that her comments were so well-received and dealt with respectfully by her classmates, almost all of whom disagreed with her.”

He added, “It was the kind of theater experience one wishes for one’s students.”

Our Jake won his AKC conformation championship by the time was three.  Unlike his father, Jake seemed to like the show ring; he was a great performer.  He possessed perfect lines, a great stance, and he always looked happy in competition, head high, eyes bright, tail wagging.

Jake was raised in a family with another dog, a truly crazy older bitch, Sasha, our first dog.  Sasha had the dog equivalent of a nervous breakdown when she was about five, and was a patient of the University of Pennsylvania Veterinary Behavior Clinic for the rest of her life.  She was an early dog user of Prozac, which helped her control her impulses, and her tendency to guard the real estate around her on a couch or bed by snarling or biting.  Jake tolerated Sasha, knew the degree to which he could engage with her.  He was a member of her pack, but too easy-going himself to ever want to challenge her.  He was cool.  Nothing phased him.  He grew up to be a truly great dog.

Jake is the puppy you wanted to wake up to on Christmas morning as a kid, the dog you saw yourself whistling for on long walks through fields of wheat grass you imagined waving through the perfect version of your crummy, dog-less adolescence, the dog you wanted in your city apartment who would wait endlessly for you, never have accidents, and always keep you safe.   He is the dog you wanted in bed with you on extremely cold nights, the dog you wanted to swim with on a perfect day in the Adirondacks, the proud face who leaned into the wind on the prow of the motorboat you took upriver to your favorite swimming spot, the companion you took without hesitation to the summit of a mountain.  He would not quit and he would never complain.

In our real world of city living, Jake was our walking companion, our head-on-lap-DVD- watching-book-reading-couch-potato-sidekick.  He slept in our bedroom, came into bed in the morning to lick us awake.  He was our ball player, our dock diver, our stick carrier.  He was our foot warmer, our grandchild pillow, our sideshow performer.  He was a trickster.  He was a stealer — of food and of hearts.  He was loyal and brave.  Once, when a nasty, chained Bearded Collie broke its restraint and attacked Diane, knocking her down, Jake came to her defense, chasing the other dog away, and biting its lip to show he meant business.  It was his only fight, a decisive victory.  Other dogs seemed to know not to mess with him though he never showed the slightest hint of aggression.

Jake is dying of lymphoma now.  His body and intestines are riddled with tumors.  He has had two courses of chemo-therapy but the cancer did not remit.  He can no longer keep food down.  He is fading before our eyes.

I wish we could talk to each other.  We do communicate, of that I am certain, but I would like him to know how stellar he is, how much fun it has been to have him in our lives.  I wish there was a way to comfort him, though I recognize that he may not need or desire it, certainly does not understand it in exactly the way I mean him to.  The vet tech who draws his blood told me to remember that he does not know he is sick.  I think she is wrong.  I think we often give dogs less credit than they deserve.  I think he knows things.  Whatever is in his breeding that makes his response to his decline less dramatic than my response to it – the instinct to shuck signs of pain to fool his pack into thinking he is healthy so they will not turn him out or turn on him, the bred-out shock reflex that allows retrievers to plunge into freezing water to rescue shipwrecked sailors – this breed of domesticated dog is a human creation as much as a natural one, and his intelligence is partly in his ability to respond to his creators with a kind of equanimity that is, at times, clearly in opposition to any reasonable definition self preservation.  I wish now I was sure we did right by him trying to prolong his life medically, trying to reduce whatever pain we assumed he felt.

Eleven years is a relatively short time in a human life, less, these days, than one seventh.  I have been pretty much beside myself for weeks, weepy and sad, grieving already for him in his decline, knowing how short a time he has left, how hard it will be for me when he is gone.  I have said only partly in jest, that I like this dog a lot better than I like a lot of people.  He’s a trooper, schlepped to vets and hospitals for tests and treatments.  For blood tests, they draw from his jugular, and he licks the techs’ faces while they are stabbing him in the throat with needles.  As close to death as he is, he still gleams like a shiny bright bear.  Through all his sickness in the last few months he has wagged his tail and licked our faces, has eaten with intermittent gusto though his weight has dropped precipitously, has chased the ball when was feeling up to it, has annoyingly and surprisingly continued to hump our other dog, Stella, after his walks.  The vet told us that at some point he would simply stop eating, stop being continent, but that his heart would not stop.  There is, we were told, rarely a dignified home death for dogs with cancer.   Allowed to go on, they starve themselves, dehydrate, and die painfully.  We will not allow that.   Yet it is nearly impossible to contemplate his exit.  How can he be leaving us so soon?

Posted 12/22/09

Jake Deezel, 9/14/98 – 12/24/09.

I have crossed paths with Ira Einhorn three times.  The first, in 1968 or 1969, at the old Bandbox Theater in Germantown, where he had been invited to speak on some topic – probably related to expanding consciousness.  My impressions of him from then are mostly visual.  He had long hair.  He spoke volubly and fast, a storm of energy and passion.  I do not remember his words, but my sense is that I thought he was smart.  I was a high school junior, 17 years old.  I thought we were members of the same tribe and that, perhaps, he was one of its leaders.

The next time I saw him was in 1970 at the first Earth Day.  I was in the crowd.  I had earlier done my assigned task of picking up and bringing to the exhibition area of the Earth Day site on Philadelphia’s Belmont Plateau, a collection of diseased lungs in formaldehyde which demonstrated variously the deadly effects of environmental pollution and smoking on the human breathing apparatus.   Ira was the master of ceremonies.  He was on stage, a small figure at a great distance across the lawn.  Earth Day was a gathering of the tribes to which I then belonged – weary anti-war warriors and the first wave of ecological activists.  The movement to make a better world held multiple tasks, and I remember feeling pleased that mass activism had coalesced into this second front of resistance to the forces of ravagement and greed.  But in the moment, what Ira said or did mattered little to me.  I was happy to be outside, in the energy of the crowd on a lovely spring day in our great city park.  From the stage, speakers talked about the whole earth as our Eden, reminding us of our responsibility to protect and ensure paradise.  I had no idea that there was backstage wrangling for control of the event or that some of the political or academic leadership of the ecology movement resented Ira’s presence.  When my girlfriend arrived, the day was complete.  We wove our bodies together on our blanket, as hundreds of others around us were doing.  We were all doing our part by being present.  I felt, in the peace of that day, that something might have shifted, that some critical mass might have been reached where people began to realize that saving the planet from chemical poisoning and not making war on each other were of a single piece.  I thought, at that first Earth Day “Celebration,” because that is what it was called, that the good people of my city were harbingers of some larger social change.  I was 19.   The national guard shootings of students at Jacksonville and Kent State were less than a month away.

Ira calls himself “the most famous inmate in Pennsylvania.”  Like many things Ira says about himself, this is hard to verify.  Mumia is in prison in Pennsylvania somewhere as well.  And there may be others equally famous.  As a temporary member of New Paradise Laboratories, an experimental theater company, with Artistic Director Whit MacLaughlin and company members Jeb Kreger, and Mary McCool, I visited Ira in jail yesterday.  He lives in a cell with a roommate in a new medium security facility in Houtzdale, PA.  He has been sentenced to life imprisonment without parole for the murder of Holly Maddaux in 1977.  Among the unusual aspects of his case are the facts that he lived with her body in a trunk in his apartment for two years before his arrest in 1979, and that he jumped bail before his trial and fled to Europe where he managed to live for many years without detection.  His whereabouts were discovered and he was extradited in 2001.

We went to see Ira because we are working on a theater piece about Philadelphia in 1960’s and early 70’s, and we felt it would be valuable to talk to him about that time.  It would be foolish to pretend that Ira was not significant in the local counter-cultural scene during that time, or ignore him because of his subsequent crime, though we considered it.  Some people will undoubtedly think we should not have talked to him, not appeared to sanction his importance then because of what happened later.  Mindful of those concerns, we set certain ground rules.  We did not want to talk to him about anything that happened after his arrest – really nothing after his stage appearance on Earth Day.  But like the paradox which suggests that if you tell someone not to think about pink all they will do is think about pink, even as it remained un-discussed, Holly’s murder hovered over our conversation.

We have been using a phrase which Ira coined as the working title for the piece we are creating.  That phrase is one of Ira’s many self descriptions: Planetary Enzyme.  Ira meant by this phrase that he was the catalyst for the connection of many disparate elements of the local community and in the larger global progressive and business communities during the 1960’s.  That he knew and spoke regularly to leaders in business, politics, policing, and academics is indisputable.  The importance of his influence on the connections between individuals and institutions is harder to verify.  That the kind of networking Ira engaged in between 1964 and 1970 anticipated the face-to-face networking explosion of the 80’s, which itself anticipated the vaster networking enterprise of the internet, is likewise indisputable.  That Ira contributed to the idea of it all is less verifiable.  Ira is a supreme self-justifier, self-promoter, self-aggrandizer.   According to him, many connections of importance which happened inter-personally at the highest levels of leadership in Philadelphia in those years, were caused by his intercession.  That he seems to have been a tool for the local captains of industry, who used him to understand the booming generation they were about to need to market their wares to, seems to evade him.  That he saw the explosion of sexual possibilities and drug use in the 1960’s as not only an avenue to achieve greater personal pleasure but also as a cultural metaphor for the desire to escape the dreary horrors of war or the seemingly unavoidable degradation of our planet is true.  That he had anything more important to say or do about that than smoke lots of dope and have lots of sex is questionable.

The State Correctional Institution at Houtzdale is a new facility but it operates in much the way other prisons I have visited for research operate.  (I researched prisons during the 1980’s as the writer of Let the Doors be of Iron, the Ed Asner-narrated documentary about the history of Eastern State Penitentiary.)  There is an indifference on the part of the employees to all issues except as they effect security.  Minimal efforts are made to attend to the comforts of the inmates, and sensory deprivation is built in to the design of most modern prisons.  Windows in the visiting area in Houtzdale, a large room filled with solid institutional furniture and vending machines, are high off the floor.  Out of them, only sky bisected by razor wire is visible.  Children visiting their fathers roam the room doing what children do, not awkward about the restrictive nature of the setting. The oddest feature of the room is a hanging rack of backdrops of woods, streams, and farms against which families can have a digital picture taken by a guard. The children pose as if this is absolutely normal.  All of the men wear brown uniforms cuffed with yellow, a kind of weird motley which quickly identifies them as inmates.  The uniforms are ill fitting and odd.  Despite this, Ira does everything he can to make us comfortable.  After an hour-long delay getting in – we were listed as media but did not have media credentials and the guards were wary of what a theater company called New Paradise Laboratories might actually make – Ira greets us like we are being let into his home, like we were delayed because of faulty directions he gave us.  He wants us to believe in his clout, his stature, even here.  He apologizes profusely before we take our seats to talk.   It is disarming and absurd.  It is a glimpse into his delusion.  And it is sad, on the human level, that this is what any person is reduced to: sterile environment, lack of stimulation, and the inability to have simple human interactions like the exchange of hospitality without the overlay of restriction.  I feel for the young mothers whose children play around me in the noisy room, more than I do for Ira, in part, I know, because I do not know the stories of the crimes their men have committed.

Talking to Ira it occurs to me that in some strange way, his disappearance was a good career move.   By 1979 his interests had gone kooky.  He had become a shill for Uri Geller, trying to get the scientific community to investigate the proposition that a man could bend a spoon without touching it, and that mind control might have a military or political utility.  But the world had already moved beyond him.  His style of free-love boosterism and ranging speculative intellectualizing was already out of vogue.  Ira was nearing 40.  The boomers who were interested in him a decade before had moved on.  By disappearing when he did he was somehow able to remain the Ira of old, committing yet another goof on the squares, outsmarting the cops, surprising us all.

It is also clear to me, sitting across from him, that Ira is a sociopath.  He is controlling and manipulative, not really interested in the give and take of conversation as much as he is in constantly taking the temperature of the attention of his guests to see if they are staying with him.  He tells us that to display broad knowledge and not be taken as a dilettante he must be a virtuoso in every area.  He is not daunted by the fact that this is an utter impossibility.  He speaks with a commanding facility on a broad range of topics.  On subjects that I know well (theater, literary subjects, history) he has at his instant recall references to obscure books that I have not read that seem to put him on the cutting edge.  But it is a dodge.  The edge, for his purposes, has probably always been a more workable place than the center.  He has theories and ideas.  But in the end, his theories are shallow, his ideas are thin.  He is not a virtuoso thinker.  He is a virtuoso talker.  More than once in our meeting he presented an idea as his own that we all recognized as borrowed.  He was probably a virtuoso seducer.  But because he has no need of the person sitting across from him other than as a mirror of himself, he is dangerous.  It is easy to see how people fell into his vortex.  He aims his full energy directly at his listener when he is speaking.  If one is easily flattered, easily swept up in the energy of a man of passion, he might be very hard to resist.  He is affable.  He is clever.  He is amusing.   Before his crime and flight, when his PR was all good, he must have been easy to trust.  Perhaps, even though he is reported to have been abusive, he might have been easy to come home to.

In the present it is nearly impossible to listen to Ira talk about his life and not feel creeped out.  He speaks in two ways about himself.  Using the visual and sensual deprivation of the prison visiting room around him as his prop, the first way he talks about his life is as if it were cleaved in half: the good part — which occurred before “they took my life from me”  – and bad part, after.  The “they,” it becomes clear, is the original arresting cops, the detective the Maddaux family hired who finally convinced the police to go into his apartment two years after Holly’s disappearance, the CIA, who Ira still apparently contends had it in for him, and later, Lynn Abraham and the Philadelphia prosecutorial establishment and Pennsylvania legislature who were dogged in their pursuit of his extradition and conviction.  But he also talks about his life a second way.  In this version, it is trisected.  The first part is in Philadelphia, the second in Europe, and the third is now. In this version there is a seamless continuum as if, at a certain point he had simply up and moved away, as if he were taking a new job or relocating for family reasons.  This seamless version does not include Holly or his flight. They are simply omitted. This version includes his time as a social guru in Philadelphia, his move to Europe and his marriage, his happiness in France, his wife’s stellar cooking, and the vast, star-filled French sky.

The delusional are the world’s most fervent believers.  Ira has a kind of religious belief in himself.  As the now-captured, allegedly “most famous prisoner in the state,” he is able to revert to his old self, telling stories as if he were a retired  general recounting the famous campaigns in a war he believes could sill be won if only he could lead again.  He speaks as if there were a shelf of trophies lost when “his life was taken” which attest to his valor in the culture wars.  Missing among them are his journals, turned over by the enemy district attorney to Steven Levy who wrote a “disparaging” book about him.  He talks about sex in ways which are both insightful about the change in openness which occurred in the ‘60’s, and wholly retrograde. When he talks to us about sex he turns and looks at Mary.  He says that women used to come to his door and beg to “suck my cock.”  He brags that he has had many women but drops it when we don’t pursue it.  That opens to door to thinking about Holly who is off limits and yet always present.

We spend five hours talking to him.  The entire time we are with him we reach no moment that feels like regret, nothing that remotely seems like remorse.  But for all of us, one piece of the conversation stands out.  Ira tells us, early in our talk, about his theory of shock.  He is talking about mind control, a subject that brings us perilously close in the chronology of his interests to the moment when Holly was murdered.  He tells us that shock “is a mechanism whereby the body takes the rational mind out of commission” because “the mind works too slowly to do what the body needs to do to protect itself” when it has been put under extreme stress.  This excursion into Ira’s understanding of biomechanics is on the specific subject of the relationship between the body and the mind, and our changing understanding of it during that time of experimentation with drugs and the expansion of consciousness. But around the table, the four of us register this as something else, as the self-justification of a man who has once upon a time, long ago, snapped and murdered a woman he professed to love.  The theory suggests to all of us a hint of blaming the victim for causing the shock that sets the body explosively off.  Everything that follows in the conversation, useful information, intellectual bullying, affable reminiscences, now takes another shape.  In being the Ira of old, arrested in his development as well as in actuality, he reveals himself.

Driving home, we talk about him, share our impressions, which are remarkably similar.  I am struck by the fact that I have in some ways continued to live in the tribe I joined in my youth, though it has changed as I have aged.  It has morphed, deepened, broadened, splintered and reformed along the way.  There are essential truths I learned in the joyous and open days of my youth that continue to propel my art and my life, and there were foolish notions discarded.  I realize I am with another branch of my tribe in the present, working with this theater company that seeks to illuminate paradise on stage every night it performs.  It undertakes an enterprise that is brazenly full of hope for joy, insightful and open to new insight, and remarkably un-deluded about the potential for sadness and hurt in the world.  It has verities, and it encourages change, revision, speculation.   It seeks to embody the scope of life’s meanings, and it accepts that there are mysteries.

As we left Ira in the prison waiting room, he followed us as far toward the security door as he was allowed under the prison’s security rules.  At the parting point, he surprised me by clasping  my hand.  Shaking hands is what civilized people do when they part.  It is a gesture of respect and closure, a physical act that suggests an equality of fellows.  Outside the sliding gates of the visitor’s area, I duck into the men’s room and wash my hands.  I am not acting out of the kind of shock Ira has described.  This is a conscious decision.  We are not equal.  I am 54 years old.  My country is back at war.  My outrage feels all too familiar.  My tribe is responding, slowly perhaps, haltingly, but responding.  And Ira is where he belongs.

2005

Between 1996 and 2003, my wife and I hosted five high school exchange students, four from the former Soviet Union and one from France through an organization called Academic Year in the USA (AYUSA.) The four from the former Soviet Union came here through a program called Freedom Support Act, fully funded by our government to promote better understanding between our countries, and to seed the former Soviet countries with young people who have first hand experience with America.

I will not attempt to address all of the positive political and cultural outcomes I think the Freedom Support Act program engenders. But I will point out one remarkable thing. This program assumes that virtually any student chosen to come here from the former Soviet Union placed in virtually any home in the United States will have a positive experience. It sounds like incredible hubris when you think about it, a kind of American pride stretched to an absurd extreme. But after experiencing our local group of host parents over the past several years, I’m basically convinced that it’s true. We host parents were rich and poor, city, rural, and suburban, liberal and conservative. But our students did not see our fine distinctions. They saw the essential American-ness of us, experienced American culture in our schools and cities and malls and religious institutions and parks, and learned that we are not the same as they see on TV, or perhaps are characterized in the news they hear about us at home, but we do have a national character. Discovering it is the reason they are here.

Host families are screened before students are placed, and the students are chosen very carefully. The agencies responsible for bringing them here have counselors and community representatives that the kids can talk to if problems arise. The Freedom Support Act students get insurance coverage and an allowance (though there are costs associated with having a teenager in your house, believe me.) But these kids are the cream of the crop. They are interviewed in their home countries by teams of American and local teachers. They need top grades, and they need top recommendations to even be considered. Their spoken and written English must be first rate. They are evaluated for their likely fitness to spend a year away from home and they are asked to write essays about why they want to spend a year in the US. Of roughly 80,000 students from all over the former Soviet Union who apply, about a thousand are chosen to come here. All of the kids we have hosted attended Central High School, Philadelphia’s premier academic high school. All of them did extremely well, getting mostly A’s in their courses. All have been involved in extra-curricular activities. Our French student won the city public league tennis championship. One of our Russian students acted in the community theater and another was a stage manager. One of the kids took horseback riding lessons, mucking out stalls at the stables early in the morning to pay for it. They were all fantastic students.

But the reason I am writing this is to tell you that however valuable the experience was for the kids who come here, it was equally enriching for us. With these kids, we added a family member for a year who brought humor and light to our house, and with whom we have made life-long bonds. The little we felt we did for these kids — mostly just including them in the fabric of our lives, taking them to the places we went and including them in our activities — was seen by them as a gift of riches, and they returned the gift by being the kinds of kids all parents wish for — focused, engaged teenagers with an almost insatiable hunger for information, activity, and involvement. I won’t pretend that there are no trials associated with having an adolescent in your home for a year. There are. They are growing and questing creatures, sometimes stubborn and misguided, who need real guidance at times. And at times, their foreignness was an issue for them, at school and in the community. We had two teenagers in our home on September 11th 2001, and helping them understand what was happening and how we and our friends and neighbors felt about it was interesting and at times challenging. But my wife and my son and his wife and I have felt at all points we got more back for our efforts than we were ever asked to give. Through the eyes of our students, we got to see other worlds, and we got to see our world and ourselves reflected in their eyes.

In her essay about why she wanted to come to America, one of our students wrote, “to be a little bridge between your country and mine, between your family and mine.” If you are considering hosting an exchange student, don’t hesitate. Enriching traffic crosses that bridge. In both directions.