__________________________________Don’t Forget to Sing...
By Stephanie Kemp
May 22, 2024
Last night I had a dream that my college roommate, Christine, and I were at Shutters on the Beach in Santa Monica drinking tiny bottles of shitty airplane wine on our balcony. (This means her balcony - she is fancier than me, plus I am a Los Angeles resident who can’t currently afford to stay-cay at Shutters.)
We were laughing about that time her husband set a palm tree on fire during my old boyfriend’s wedding to a person that wasn’t me. In the dream, Christine was apologizing for the shitty wine, before I reminded her that I brought it because the last time we drank wine at Shutters it was on her dime and we took down eight glasses (each) of overpriced Chardonnay, forgetting that we could order by the bottle and that we should probably have eaten something.
We also forgot that we don’t like Chardonnay.
The fire was an accident.
The boyfriend was a childhood friend of Christine’s, who also went to college with us.
There were a trillion other amazing people at the wedding who I had become friends with through Christine, two or three who may have been sad I wasn’t invited. (No judgment - who wants an ex girlfriend at the wedding? Plus I am not very social anyway, despite appearances and first impressions.)
These things actually happened (except for the drinking from tiny shitty airplane bottles part) and this is not an entirely new dream.
Christine has been a best friend since we met freshman year in Tommy Burkett’s English class. I liked her immediately but we didn’t talk for months. She was always tan and wore dangling fish earrings under a fantastic tumble of golden curls (including bangs that somehow looked good on her).
She was shy, I was not.
For the first few weeks of class I worried every time Tommy Burkett called on her. I thought she would be too nervous to answer the question/s...I wondered if she’d read the book...I couldn’t tell if she loved or hated reading, or if she loved or hated college.
I didn’t know anything about Christine, except that there was something about her that I liked.
I could tell she was smart.
The few words she did say showed she was funny.
We hung out with different crowds.
(And she had always read the book.)
Then one day I told her I liked her earrings (still the fish, still the tan) and we never stopped talking.
The rest was history:
We were roommates for the next three years.
She was from Greenwich and came from the world’s closest family. (She was also the middle of three daughters and had a massive group of best friends.) When I visited her in Connecticut and met her family, she told me (in front of them, as well as their housekeeper, Vinnie and their cat, Mitten), that she “was adopted - which you could probably have figured out by yourself.”
Ignoring this while unpacking groceries, her mom asked us to drive Vinnie to the bus, which Christine absolutely didn’t want to do but did it anyway because I made her. I wanted to ask her all sorts of questions about her glam mom, supersmart dad, and cool sisters - who looked like identical twins separated by a few years - all of them with gorgeous black hair and none of whom seemed to to bump on any part of her adoption comment, which she had clearly made a million times before.
(I also wanted to ask why she was so opposed to driving Vinnie to the bus and why she didn’t properly pronounce the T sound in Mitten, but I never got around to it because we got distracted buying snacks at the gas station.)
I immediately wished I could live in Greenwich forever.
And that was even before I saw the spring break picture.
Nighttime (starry sky).
At the Beach (in some place called Antigua).
Solo cups (in abundance).
An 8x10 black and white photo of a gaggle of beautiful people wearing no shoes and breezy clothes with coral necklaces and handmade friendship bracelets (maybe with some dashes of gold). Laughing. They all looked so happy. And relaxed. And fun. Even the boys looked normal and seemed to be totally lacking that weird high school boy energy I had somehow managed to cultivate in my own pre-college life. I wanted to be all of them. They were so connected.
I had so many questions about so many things……(”Which one is Annie?”.... “How come you call her Missy if her name is Jane?”.... “Plate like dinner or Plait like a braid?”.... ”Is his last name actually Burger?”)
Christine invited me into her world and some of her best friends became lifelong friends of mine.
The kind of friends that change your life landscape.
The kind you laugh your head off with and never feel disconnected from, no matter the physical or communicative distance. (Did I mention that I’m an extroverted introvert?)
I always had a golden ticket to their festival of fun because Christine gave it to me.
She is sunshine and swear words in human form. The best kind - the kind that laughs at herself, the kind that takes the right things seriously and kicks the dumb things to the curb.
The kind that shows up for her family and friends - no matter the reason, the hour, the distance.
She works hard and plays hard at everything.
She is also a cryer, even though she knows herself - and her boundaries - well enough to not always topple into tears (like I do):
......Sometimes she is cracked in half by life altering things like 9/11 (which she watched unfold from her living room window and then offered her home as a base for anyone who needed it for as long as they needed it).
......Sometimes she cracks about ridiculous things like the outcome of The Bachelor.
......Always she is cracked open by the good things or hard things or beautiful things that happen to the people she cares about.
Every day she shows up in….
…really nice clothes and perfectly straight hair (both post collegiate developments that almost make me want to shop outside of Target and brush my own hair twice a week, using a better brush).
...lots of cashmere and gorgeous boots I can’t steal because they are too small for me.
...earrings that have been upgraded from her days of casual fishing...(but she is still tan, as she has remained a committed traveler and seasonal celebrant of every summer’s sun.)
If it’s the weekend, she might wear very clean sneakers and leggings (that actually look good on her) with a black puffer, hair in high pony, eyes under aviators.
As she heads out to meet friends or go for a trillion mile walk in Central Park, she will probably call her niece to make a plan to eat afternoon caviar and potato chips at a post covid pop up pod owned by an atypical (for the United States of America) presidential type who shall not be named.
There will be champagne.
She could be a total asshole with all that she is and has, but instead she is the world’s best daughter, sister, aunt, friend, partner…(Her husband is also the best, even though he did set that palm tree on fire.)
The only thing that was ever missing from Christine’s beautiful and fun and full life of massive grace and gratitude was her birth family.
She wanted to find them.
And we spent many of those wine fueled nights talking about her birth mom.
She always existed, somewhere out there.
__________________________________
There are so many things I want to tell you about my friendship with Christine (how we worked together at Elle Magazine after I got her an interview there, enabling me to take credit for setting her massive career into motion and thereby also allowing me to accept her offer/s to pay for most of our wine ever since), and so many things that I don’t (like when I liked a boy that she liked first and almost biffed our entire friendship, except that she refused to let that happen).
So many of the things that make her amazing are not my stories to tell. (One of which she was brave enough to share with my daughter, who will never forget it and be better and stronger and safer for having heard it.)
But this story I am about to tell is impossible, so I have to write it down. It started when I woke up this morning (you remember - the morning after I had that dream about my roommate and her balcony and the tiny wine and burning tree?) to this text from Christine:
Hello there stranger! Do I have major news for you!! I have found my birth family. Long, long story short. A first cousin popped up on my 23 and Me. After doing a lot of digging I found them. Sadly, both my parents have passed. My birth father wrote a popular business/self help book. You might have heard of it. Who Moved My Cheese. And the best news of all. Wait for it. I have a full blooded brother. (My parents ended up getting married) And I actually met him this past weekend up in Maine. Plus an aunt, uncle and 2 first cousins. To say I’m happy is an understatement. He is the kindest, most humble and thoughtful person ever. I adore him so much it actually hurts. Here are a few pics of my gorgeous birth mom and from the weekend. Lots to fill you in on! Love you!
I had to read the text about six times to fully understand what I was reading. And the photos took my breath away.
Christine is the spitting image of her mom.
I had read her dad’s famous cheese book.
She has - and has met - her full blood brother.
I called her immediately.
This is where the day began.
And now, I am trying to write all of this down before I forget…….
...all the details she shared.
...the way her voice sounded.
...how happy and relieved and soul fueled and heartbroken she is.
(Her mom never stopped trying to find her.)
In the midst of all this sharing and weeping and laughing and telling and texting more pictures and answering a million of my questions, I asked,
“What was your mom’s name?”
“Ann Donegan Spencer,” she said. “She was a writer, too. She wrote a series of Value Books for kids…. But I have to go to work now.... Love you! I’ll call you later!”
___________________________
Value Books?
Like the full set of Value Books that are sitting next to me on the shelf in my tiny cabin in the woods?
The full set that my husband read when he was little and never stopped thinking about?
The ones that inspired me to write and make films for Sesame Street about things like Kindness, Creativity, Friendship?
The ones that motivated me to put poems to my daughters’ pictures under the banners of Independence? Empathy? Bravery? Curiosity? Determination? Community?
The ones that made me create a series of docu-poems about…
Moms?
Resiliency?
(A new one about) Generosity?
The Value Books by………………………..Ann Donegan Spencer?
___________________________
I sent Christine a picture of her mom’s complete set of books and said, “Um….you should probably call me back.”
She did. And then we laughed and wept and swore some more, unraveling these unexpected strands of her beautiful new reality.
My friend found her birth family.
She couldn’t wait to tell her mom and dad and sisters and husband this last twisty part of the story about The Value Books and the often invisible lines that always connect us.
She also couldn’t wait to tell her brother.
My friend has a brother.
____________________________
Before we hung up again, almost out of emotional room in our human containers, Christine said, “We need to write this down!”
“It would be an amazing book or a movie!” (It would.)
“Please start writing it. You are the perfect person to do it!“
________________________________
This is me starting it, even though I’m quite sure it is not my story to tell.
That’s why it grew into this love letter to my friend.
Christine wants to call her story Don’t Forget to Sing When You Win.
(Then she told me to listen to a song called “Don’t Forget” and demanded that I watch a show called Welcome to Wrexham - “It’s like a real life Ted Lasso!” - when I have more space in my human container and/or figure out how to work my Apple TV. I will take this command with a grain of salt, as the last show she made me watch was the one about that psychic from Long Island.)
Sometimes I think Christine is trying to kill me, but given the weighty events and tone of the morning, I obviously listened to “Don’t Forget.”
Here are the lyrics to what I now call, “Christine’s Song.” (I will clearly have to run this name change by someone named Jon Hume, after I listen to his song a hundred more times):
… Don't forget where you came from
Don't forget what you're made of
The ones who were there
When no one else would care
… When everything don't go as planned
You know these hills like the back of your hand
These are the streets you came from
Mountains high and valleys low
It don't matter where you go
Don't be afraid to walk on
… Sometimes you got to do it your own way just to find
That every road you roam will one day lead to home
… Don't forget where you came from
Don't forget what you're made of
The ones who were there
When no one else would care
Don't be afraid to cry now
Even when the world comes crashing in
Don't forget to sing when you win
… So raise a glass high in the air
For all the ones we wish were here
We hold in our hearts forever
'Cause summers pass and seasons change
Only time can't be replaced
The moments we had together
… Sometimes you gotta do it your own way just to find
That every road you roam will one day lead you home
… Don't forget where you came from
Don't forget what you're made of
The ones who were there
When no one else would care
Don't be afraid to cry now
Even when the world comes crashing in
Don't forget to sing when you win
Don't forget to sing when you win
(And just like that, my friend Christine has once again not only not killed me, but totally succeeded at creating more space in my human container.)
I will keep writing……
Starting with:
The Value of Optimism: The Story of Christine Matteis Gibson*
*and her brother (Her Brother!), who I absolutely cannot wait to meet.
![]()
Last night I had a dream that my college roommate, Christine, and I were at Shutters on the Beach in Santa Monica drinking tiny bottles of shitty airplane wine on our balcony. (This means her balcony - she is fancier than me, plus I am a Los Angeles resident who can’t currently afford to stay-cay at Shutters.)
We were laughing about that time her husband set a palm tree on fire during my old boyfriend’s wedding to a person that wasn’t me. In the dream, Christine was apologizing for the shitty wine, before I reminded her that I brought it because the last time we drank wine at Shutters it was on her dime and we took down eight glasses (each) of overpriced Chardonnay, forgetting that we could order by the bottle and that we should probably have eaten something.
We also forgot that we don’t like Chardonnay.
The fire was an accident.
The boyfriend was a childhood friend of Christine’s, who also went to college with us.
There were a trillion other amazing people at the wedding who I had become friends with through Christine, two or three who may have been sad I wasn’t invited. (No judgment - who wants an ex girlfriend at the wedding? Plus I am not very social anyway, despite appearances and first impressions.)
These things actually happened (except for the drinking from tiny shitty airplane bottles part) and this is not an entirely new dream.
Christine has been a best friend since we met freshman year in Tommy Burkett’s English class. I liked her immediately but we didn’t talk for months. She was always tan and wore dangling fish earrings under a fantastic tumble of golden curls (including bangs that somehow looked good on her).
She was shy, I was not.
For the first few weeks of class I worried every time Tommy Burkett called on her. I thought she would be too nervous to answer the question/s...I wondered if she’d read the book...I couldn’t tell if she loved or hated reading, or if she loved or hated college.
I didn’t know anything about Christine, except that there was something about her that I liked.
I could tell she was smart.
The few words she did say showed she was funny.
We hung out with different crowds.
(And she had always read the book.)
Then one day I told her I liked her earrings (still the fish, still the tan) and we never stopped talking.
The rest was history:
We were roommates for the next three years.
She was from Greenwich and came from the world’s closest family. (She was also the middle of three daughters and had a massive group of best friends.) When I visited her in Connecticut and met her family, she told me (in front of them, as well as their housekeeper, Vinnie and their cat, Mitten), that she “was adopted - which you could probably have figured out by yourself.”
Ignoring this while unpacking groceries, her mom asked us to drive Vinnie to the bus, which Christine absolutely didn’t want to do but did it anyway because I made her. I wanted to ask her all sorts of questions about her glam mom, supersmart dad, and cool sisters - who looked like identical twins separated by a few years - all of them with gorgeous black hair and none of whom seemed to to bump on any part of her adoption comment, which she had clearly made a million times before.
(I also wanted to ask why she was so opposed to driving Vinnie to the bus and why she didn’t properly pronounce the T sound in Mitten, but I never got around to it because we got distracted buying snacks at the gas station.)
I immediately wished I could live in Greenwich forever.
And that was even before I saw the spring break picture.
Nighttime (starry sky).
At the Beach (in some place called Antigua).
Solo cups (in abundance).
An 8x10 black and white photo of a gaggle of beautiful people wearing no shoes and breezy clothes with coral necklaces and handmade friendship bracelets (maybe with some dashes of gold). Laughing. They all looked so happy. And relaxed. And fun. Even the boys looked normal and seemed to be totally lacking that weird high school boy energy I had somehow managed to cultivate in my own pre-college life. I wanted to be all of them. They were so connected.
I had so many questions about so many things……(”Which one is Annie?”.... “How come you call her Missy if her name is Jane?”.... “Plate like dinner or Plait like a braid?”.... ”Is his last name actually Burger?”)
Christine invited me into her world and some of her best friends became lifelong friends of mine.
The kind of friends that change your life landscape.
The kind you laugh your head off with and never feel disconnected from, no matter the physical or communicative distance. (Did I mention that I’m an extroverted introvert?)
I always had a golden ticket to their festival of fun because Christine gave it to me.
She is sunshine and swear words in human form. The best kind - the kind that laughs at herself, the kind that takes the right things seriously and kicks the dumb things to the curb.
The kind that shows up for her family and friends - no matter the reason, the hour, the distance.
She works hard and plays hard at everything.
She is also a cryer, even though she knows herself - and her boundaries - well enough to not always topple into tears (like I do):
......Sometimes she is cracked in half by life altering things like 9/11 (which she watched unfold from her living room window and then offered her home as a base for anyone who needed it for as long as they needed it).
......Sometimes she cracks about ridiculous things like the outcome of The Bachelor.
......Always she is cracked open by the good things or hard things or beautiful things that happen to the people she cares about.
Every day she shows up in….
…really nice clothes and perfectly straight hair (both post collegiate developments that almost make me want to shop outside of Target and brush my own hair twice a week, using a better brush).
...lots of cashmere and gorgeous boots I can’t steal because they are too small for me.
...earrings that have been upgraded from her days of casual fishing...(but she is still tan, as she has remained a committed traveler and seasonal celebrant of every summer’s sun.)
If it’s the weekend, she might wear very clean sneakers and leggings (that actually look good on her) with a black puffer, hair in high pony, eyes under aviators.
As she heads out to meet friends or go for a trillion mile walk in Central Park, she will probably call her niece to make a plan to eat afternoon caviar and potato chips at a post covid pop up pod owned by an atypical (for the United States of America) presidential type who shall not be named.
There will be champagne.
She could be a total asshole with all that she is and has, but instead she is the world’s best daughter, sister, aunt, friend, partner…(Her husband is also the best, even though he did set that palm tree on fire.)
The only thing that was ever missing from Christine’s beautiful and fun and full life of massive grace and gratitude was her birth family.
She wanted to find them.
And we spent many of those wine fueled nights talking about her birth mom.
She always existed, somewhere out there.
__________________________________
There are so many things I want to tell you about my friendship with Christine (how we worked together at Elle Magazine after I got her an interview there, enabling me to take credit for setting her massive career into motion and thereby also allowing me to accept her offer/s to pay for most of our wine ever since), and so many things that I don’t (like when I liked a boy that she liked first and almost biffed our entire friendship, except that she refused to let that happen).
So many of the things that make her amazing are not my stories to tell. (One of which she was brave enough to share with my daughter, who will never forget it and be better and stronger and safer for having heard it.)
But this story I am about to tell is impossible, so I have to write it down. It started when I woke up this morning (you remember - the morning after I had that dream about my roommate and her balcony and the tiny wine and burning tree?) to this text from Christine:
Hello there stranger! Do I have major news for you!! I have found my birth family. Long, long story short. A first cousin popped up on my 23 and Me. After doing a lot of digging I found them. Sadly, both my parents have passed. My birth father wrote a popular business/self help book. You might have heard of it. Who Moved My Cheese. And the best news of all. Wait for it. I have a full blooded brother. (My parents ended up getting married) And I actually met him this past weekend up in Maine. Plus an aunt, uncle and 2 first cousins. To say I’m happy is an understatement. He is the kindest, most humble and thoughtful person ever. I adore him so much it actually hurts. Here are a few pics of my gorgeous birth mom and from the weekend. Lots to fill you in on! Love you!
I had to read the text about six times to fully understand what I was reading. And the photos took my breath away.
Christine is the spitting image of her mom.
I had read her dad’s famous cheese book.
She has - and has met - her full blood brother.
I called her immediately.
This is where the day began.
And now, I am trying to write all of this down before I forget…….
...all the details she shared.
...the way her voice sounded.
...how happy and relieved and soul fueled and heartbroken she is.
(Her mom never stopped trying to find her.)
In the midst of all this sharing and weeping and laughing and telling and texting more pictures and answering a million of my questions, I asked,
“What was your mom’s name?”
“Ann Donegan Spencer,” she said. “She was a writer, too. She wrote a series of Value Books for kids…. But I have to go to work now.... Love you! I’ll call you later!”
___________________________
Value Books?
Like the full set of Value Books that are sitting next to me on the shelf in my tiny cabin in the woods?
The full set that my husband read when he was little and never stopped thinking about?
The ones that inspired me to write and make films for Sesame Street about things like Kindness, Creativity, Friendship?
The ones that motivated me to put poems to my daughters’ pictures under the banners of Independence? Empathy? Bravery? Curiosity? Determination? Community?
The ones that made me create a series of docu-poems about…
Moms?
Resiliency?
(A new one about) Generosity?
The Value Books by………………………..Ann Donegan Spencer?
___________________________
I sent Christine a picture of her mom’s complete set of books and said, “Um….you should probably call me back.”
She did. And then we laughed and wept and swore some more, unraveling these unexpected strands of her beautiful new reality.
My friend found her birth family.
She couldn’t wait to tell her mom and dad and sisters and husband this last twisty part of the story about The Value Books and the often invisible lines that always connect us.
She also couldn’t wait to tell her brother.
My friend has a brother.
____________________________
Before we hung up again, almost out of emotional room in our human containers, Christine said, “We need to write this down!”
“It would be an amazing book or a movie!” (It would.)
“Please start writing it. You are the perfect person to do it!“
________________________________
This is me starting it, even though I’m quite sure it is not my story to tell.
That’s why it grew into this love letter to my friend.
Christine wants to call her story Don’t Forget to Sing When You Win.
(Then she told me to listen to a song called “Don’t Forget” and demanded that I watch a show called Welcome to Wrexham - “It’s like a real life Ted Lasso!” - when I have more space in my human container and/or figure out how to work my Apple TV. I will take this command with a grain of salt, as the last show she made me watch was the one about that psychic from Long Island.)
Sometimes I think Christine is trying to kill me, but given the weighty events and tone of the morning, I obviously listened to “Don’t Forget.”
Here are the lyrics to what I now call, “Christine’s Song.” (I will clearly have to run this name change by someone named Jon Hume, after I listen to his song a hundred more times):
… Don't forget where you came from
Don't forget what you're made of
The ones who were there
When no one else would care
… When everything don't go as planned
You know these hills like the back of your hand
These are the streets you came from
Mountains high and valleys low
It don't matter where you go
Don't be afraid to walk on
… Sometimes you got to do it your own way just to find
That every road you roam will one day lead to home
… Don't forget where you came from
Don't forget what you're made of
The ones who were there
When no one else would care
Don't be afraid to cry now
Even when the world comes crashing in
Don't forget to sing when you win
… So raise a glass high in the air
For all the ones we wish were here
We hold in our hearts forever
'Cause summers pass and seasons change
Only time can't be replaced
The moments we had together
… Sometimes you gotta do it your own way just to find
That every road you roam will one day lead you home
… Don't forget where you came from
Don't forget what you're made of
The ones who were there
When no one else would care
Don't be afraid to cry now
Even when the world comes crashing in
Don't forget to sing when you win
Don't forget to sing when you win
(And just like that, my friend Christine has once again not only not killed me, but totally succeeded at creating more space in my human container.)
I will keep writing……
Starting with:
The Value of Optimism: The Story of Christine Matteis Gibson*
*and her brother (Her Brother!), who I absolutely cannot wait to meet.
