What's my motivation?

photo by Alison Davy

As an adoptee, family for me has long been a concept that I’ve felt I could rise above. If a child can be efficiently moved from one set of parents to another, then why all the fuss about where one came from, nationality or even the nature of one’s self? For many years it all seemed so simple.

South is a hummable response to my journey of searching for - and meeting - my birth mother. What started as something like intellectual curiosity tumbled for me like a log rolling down a hill, picked up momentum and ultimately became a personal odyssey. The dramas were small on the outside, but I found myself questioning my most basic assumptions of family and birthright. The emotions that I felt over the course of a year of phone calls, navigation between two clans and actually meeting a person who was eerily familiar in spite of being a total stranger screamed more or less into my ear to be shared, but how? I’d become acquainted with the standard search and reunion texts of Springer, Winfrey and Dr. Phil, but they all felt a bit vulgar… in a bad way. And so, a musical!

The whole trip for me was undeniably nautical; it felt lawless and far from terra firma. It was also a journey back in time, so it had to be a period piece. Since I’d met a number of unusual and helpful people along the way it would be a road trip. And because I’d always hoped – ultimately in vain – that my biological parents would be itinerant Cuban gymnasts, I went with Latin flavors of music, which I’ve always loved. I wanted to hit every permutation of family connection and abandonment: people leave, are taken, torn from one another, welcomed, feted, sold and freed and in the end we find our true families where we may. I hope that South reflects the curiosity, hope, hilarity, shock, acceptance and joy that may happen on a voyage such as this one. I also hope to have made some songs worth singing along the way.