For the Better. Forever.

Little sweetheart, we're working on the live Of Love and Loss and at its center is something we call the "Choral Text Passage". It's largely based on my memorial speech for you but delivered by both Jason & I (and later, Kim) in turn and unison. There's a part of it - where I was talking about your acting - that I've wanted to rewrite, so this morning I had a go at this. It's below. I'm not sure how I'm going to break it up but this is the new section. Thinking of you, always... 

...This isn’t the main thing, so I don’t want to linger, but I have to say this: she was the truest artist I’ve ever known. Breathtakingly gifted. When we met, she was playing - inhabiting - the central role in "Tir na nOg" - a play about a young girl in the West of Ireland who grows to adulthood and further adventures in Dublin. She burned that stage to cinders every night. For six weeks. With three broken toes. She’d careened barefoot into some stair unit backstage during a quick change in the middle of the Final Dress and half her left foot swelled up and went purple. Her doctor told her she’d have to quit the run. Not a chance. He didn’t know who he was dealing with. Neither did the audience. Not unless they happened by the stage door after and saw her striding away in her short air fracture boot.

When she joined this band, everything changed. For the better. Forever. I loved writing for her and she was the best musician I’ve ever known. Her vocals, like every part of her, were connected directly to her soul. And she had total telepathy. I’d play something on guitar and she’d meet me there the moment I arrived.

One more thing about her acting. A year after we first met and became inseparable, she got a job, down the coast in Carmel, doing “The Blue Room”, David Hare’s reworking of “La Ronde” where two actors, one male, one female, play all ten parts. Good actors, great ones, are supposed to be adept at one of two things - transformative character work, disappearing into a role; or the deepest kind of emotional connection, shocking us with their naked honesty. Summer could do both. Simultaneously. She did that night. In the round. A foot from the audience where you can’t hide anything or fake it. I sat there between Linda - her mom - and Coy - her friend - and I think they literally had to pick my jaw up off the floor. I couldn’t move after. She was that good. She is like the Supermoon - once in a generation...