I love fall! The crispness in the air, the crunch of leaves underfoot, the opening of the theatre season! This year I've had to modify my expectations. Instead of doing a family Broadway evening, we saw the sights of Manhattan by night on a cruise with Classic Harbor Line. It was relaxing, enlightening, and a bit thrilling to be doing something so out of our daily routine. When we can back out in the world, I am sure many of us will value the events we attend and excursions we take more highly.
One excursion I hope we will all take (if we haven't already) is the short trip to the voting booth. Or the postbox, drop box, or local election office. There are many variations this year for getting your ballot to where it needs to go. It can be confusing! Fortunately, FiveThirtyEight.com has aggregated all the latest info here.
Voting is one of the most important things we can do as citizens, but our highest turnout for presidential elections in the past fifty years was just over 58%, in 2008. So we all need to pitch in and help family and community members make a plan to vote and act on it. If you need more info, check out TAG10WomenVote .
I wrote my play It's My Party! about the passage of the19th Amendment, largely because that story is so unknown. Every time it's performed or read, audience and cast alike tell me that they learned so much about American women's decades-long struggle to win the vote. On one hand I find it irritating-bordering-on-infuriating that this is all news to them! But I have seen enough U.S. History textbooks to know how cursorily the subject is covered - if at all!
Since I have always believed that hearts and minds can be opened through experiencing art more effectively than through other ways of learning, it was with great delight that I read this in the Columbus and Starkville, Mississippi Dispatch last week:
"[Robyn] Medeiros . . . said being a cast member of It's My Party! motivated her to register to vote in this year's election. 'When I turned 18, I was so overwhelmed by the transition to college life that I didn't want to add another thing to my plate. I was feeling similarly this year. But after learning about what Alice [Paul] and Lucy [Burns] went through to achieve this right, I couldn't pass it up. There's definitely a power to it, to have a say in how government should be run.' "
So run, walk, bike, drive, hop; get your ballot in the ballot box however you can. To make sure your vote is counted. Because short-distance trips are sometimes the most rewarding.
