CONNIE CHIN: Driven by guilt and good intentions, I signed myself up for a full-year Mandarin intensive, and this led to my flunking out of college.

KEITH SERRY: And literally, dozens turn on their heel and stare, because I am clearly the only dad within eyeshot.

KIM CAPONE-SPRAGUE: But even after all of the bridal showers, and baby showers, and housewarming parties, something was still off.

I still had all this fear, doubt, and insecurity.

THERESA OKOKON: Tonight's theme is "Bucket List."

The phrase "bucket list" could mean a number of different things to a number of different people.

Ultimately, when you make a bucket list, you are creating a list of your dreams.

Tonight's storytellers are sharing their stories about reaching for their dreams by checking another item off of their list.

♪ ♪ CHIN: My name is Connie Chin.

I grew up outside of Boston, and I've been a dancer, and a consumer brand marketer, a mom, and I'm C.E.O.

of a nonprofit called Global Arts Live.

We present world music and dance.

What kind of impact can an organization like Global Arts Live have on a city like Boston?

The city of Boston has a lot of presenting organizations, but not that many that focus on the art of people of color and people from all across the world.

Mm-hmm.

So that's the niche that we really fulfill.

- Mm-hmm.

Do you feel like dance has an impact on the way that you approach business?

Being an artist definitely has an impact on how you operate in the business world.

Dancers, artists, they, they understand the discipline, they understand the preparation.

And in my life, it's been some years when I almost was in denial that I was a dancer, when I was just being a businessperson.

And then now, I'm getting to bring it back together so that I can... You know, people will say, "Oh, you were a former dancer," and it has a relevance right now in my life.

So, it's really nice that all the parts of my life are starting to come, are coming back together now.

♪ ♪ I was six years old when I received my first compliment for my language skills.

I was riding a public bus in Taipei, Taiwan, with my family, and my sister and I were chattering away.

Across the aisle from us were three elderly Chinese ladies staring at us.

And my mother overheard them say, in Mandarin, "Oh, those two little girls, they must be so smart.

They speak such good English."

They had no way of knowing this was the only language that we spoke.

(laughter) And we were too young to be embarrassed.

I had plenty of time later in life to be embarrassed.

With my Chinese face, I often get this question: "Do you speak any Chinese?"

Often, the speaker knows a little bit of Chinese, wants to try out a few phrases, or they only speak Chinese, and they need me to.

Every time I have to answer "no," it's a pang of kind of incompetence and guilt.

But it's technically not my fault.

My mother grew up in Shanghai, and she grew up speaking Shanghai dialect, which is incomprehensible to Mandarin speakers.

She only learned Mandarin and English in high school.

My father grew up in Corona, Queens.

(laughter) You know that Paul Simon song that goes, ♪ Me and Julio down by the schoolyard ♪ ♪ Rosie, Queen of Corona?

♪ It's that Corona, right?

(laughter) So, he grew up speaking Toisan village dialect at home with his parents, and a little bit of Cantonese for when they went and visited Chinatown, but mostly English.

He learned it in public school, and he practiced it with customers across the counter of my grandfather's hand laundry.

So my mother, speaking Shanghai and Mandarin, and my father, speaking Toisan and Cantonese, had no dialect in common.

You may have seen Chinese people do this.

They're exchanging characters, because the written language is the same across all of the dialects.

But my father never learned to write in Chinese, so my parents couldn't even do that.

They met in America, they courted, they married, and they raised their children entirely in English.

This seems like a good excuse, right, that I don't speak Chinese?

Not good enough.

Driven by guilt and good intentions, freshman year in college, I signed myself up for a full-year Mandarin intensive.

This class met four days a week at 8:00 a.m. (laughter) The first semester, I came out with a D. I went back for more.

The second semester, I finished with an F. (laughter) And this led to my flunking out of college.

(laughter) Can, can we say taking a year off to get my act together, and coming back and finishing later?

Which I did.

But it was painful that the entire East Asian Languages and Civilizations Department knew my parents as academic colleagues.

And my sister, one year ahead of me, graduated from that same department summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa.

(laughter) Mm-hmm.

She not only mastered advanced Mandarin, she took classical Chinese, she took a couple of years of Mongolian... (laughter) ...and she went on and threw in a little Tibetan just for fun.

(laughter) I did not make that up.

My sister could not have become a dancer, as I did later in life, but she is today a professor of East Asian diplomatic history.

But I didn't give up.

After college and the years that I was a dancer in New York, you could see me on the subway with my Walkman on, mouthing phrases from my conversational Mandarin adult education classes.

And I would go to sleep at night tracing characters on the ceiling.

Even today, on my bookshelf, you can see my college textbooks, my conversational phrasebooks, my flash cards, and my daughters' high school and college textbooks, because I made them study Chinese.

Mm-hmm.

(laughter) And next to that, until recently, my beautiful boxed set of 12 Rosetta Stone cassette tapes.

I could only bear to give those away to Goodwill last year because I had downloaded on my phone both the Duolingo and Babbel apps.

(laughter) But every time I saw that bookshelf, it was like a broken promise.

The net result is I think I have a pretty good ear and accent.

I know my four Mandarin tones.

(illustrating tones) All those four syllables, they mean different things.

I can't tell you what.

(laughter) But when a Chinese speaker asks me now, "Do you speak any Chinese?"

I can say confidently, colloquially... (speaking Mandarin) "A little bit."

But then the conversation goes on.

They're excited, I sound good, and I'm helpless and apologetic again because I have a vocabulary of about two dozen words.

And I'm still ashamed.

Fast-forward to about a year and a half ago, and I had just started my new job at Global Arts Live, presenting world music and dance.

At one of my first events, I went to the concert, and the singer was from Venezuela, and she did the whole concert in Spanish.

After the show, someone came up to me and said, "Great concert, loved the music, "but I missed so much, "and I felt left out and alienated because she didn't speak English."

I started apologizing, and my mind was spinning.

"Should I have made that singer speak English?

"Could we have printed translated lyrics?

What about instant interpretation?"

At the next concert, I got out my phone, and I pulled up one of my six translation apps to see if it would pick up sung words.

It, it didn't.

But I realized, I wasn't watching the concert, I wasn't listening to the music, and I was probably annoying everyone around me.

So I put away my phone, and in the next song, I let myself relax into the music, I let the beat into my body, I tuned in to the performer, and I soaked up that feeling of being immersed in a culture.

That sense of connecting cultures across continents through art seems so powerful to me.

And as I go about my work now, I get a visceral sense that music and dance are universal languages.

And the more I embrace that understanding, the more it doesn't seem to matter so much that I don't speak Chinese.

(inhales): What I'm working on instead is releasing my shame and accepting I am an American-born person, I have my own version of my Chinese heritage, and it doesn't have to include memorizing more than two dozen vocabulary words.

Thank you.

(cheers and applause) ♪ ♪ SERRY: My name is Keith Serry and I am a father, husband, producer, teacher, communicator, and storyteller from Montreal, Quebec.

And I understand that you produce a podcast called The Volume Knob.

Can you tell me a bit more about your podcast?

Yeah, The Volume Knob is a personal storytelling podcast where people tell stories about the way music makes them feel.

Mm-hmm.

I've been, um, fortunate enough to spend time with storytellers from all over the States and Canada, to tell stories about music and the impact that it's had on their lives.

Mm-hmm.

And it's, uh, it's kind of been my entrée into, uh, the world of personal storytelling.

And what role has music played in your life?

Music is everything.

Um, storytelling is about putting words to emotions that we understand through understanding the way our lives have moved.

Whereas, music has a power that it's sometimes beyond words.

When we don't have the ability to, uh, understand or put words to the way we're feeling, sometimes music can stand in for that.

♪ ♪ Last June, I was on the subway in Montreal, where I live, and I was there with my two children.

Miles was 14-and-a-half at the time, and Kate was just-turned 13.

And my wife and I have always said that these two children exhibit the personality traits that will make them incredible adults, and also, difficult teens.

(laughter) My son has a heart as big as all outdoors.

He is going to change the world, he is going to heal people, he is going to be the kind of teenager that the world hurts.

And my daughter?

Well, when Kate was two years old, she looked her mother dead in the eye and she said, "No, I da boss."

(laughter) And that is exactly the kind of woman we want in the world.

We want her to know herself.

We want her to assert herself.

We do not want her to be afraid of herself.

We also do not want her fighting constantly when it's minus ten outside and she needs to wear gloves.

My wife and I, we have a parental philosophy.

She's a scientist, so it boils down to a ratio.

We call it the warmth-to-couch ratio.

We define our job as increasing the number of memories that make us feel warm and make us smile, and decreasing the number of memories that they will have to recount with their therapist... (laughter) ...when they get older.

More warm, less couch.

Today is a particular milestone for me as a parent.

We all know baby's first word and baby's first step.

I am very proud to be accompanying my children to baby's first rock show.

(laughter) And it's a really exciting night for me because it's not a rock show where they had to haul me along to some sort of teenage band that I didn't like.

We're going to see Phoebe Bridgers, and my kids and I all love Phoebe Bridgers.

And it's a very exciting night for me because... (inhales) I want them to be with me in nights like this, but I also want them to want to be with me in nights like this, and it's not always easy.

It hasn't always been easy because I used to be a courtroom attorney, and before they went to school, I didn't see them much.

I would go to work before they got up, I would go home after they'd gone to bed.

And I hated it.

I remember one night, I was in a partner's office, and I had to sneak out for ten minutes.

I excused myself to tuck them in by phone.

And I came back, and I must have had the body language that said that I wasn't very happy.

I don't have a poker face.

And the partner took me, with his hand on my shoulder, and he said, "Don't worry, Keith.

Eventually, they'll stop asking for you."

(audience murmuring) So, yeah, I want this to be special.

I want them to remember it.

I remember vividly my first rock concert: 1986, Platinum Blonde, Tamitik Auditorium in Kitimat, British Columbia.

They started with "Crying Over You"... Look it up.

(laughter) So we arrive at the venue, it's an outdoor venue, there are thousands of people, and I'm experiencing that feeling that I do have every time as a middle-aged man at a rock show.

I feel like I'm bringing up the average age and dragging down the average cool factor.

And in part, that's because I'm surrounded by thousands of mostly women, but also young men, who look the way Phoebe Bridgers' music makes you feel.

It's sad, and sophisticated, and smart, and maybe a little angry?

Um, but I don't get to sit in that feeling for very long, because about five songs into her set, she introduces "Kyoto."

And "Kyoto" is a brilliant song because it's a, a major-key discussion of a minor-key part of life.

It's about a woman and her relationship with her father, who has failed her, and how she has to understand that from the perspective of being an adult.

And she introduces the song by saying, "This one is for all the dads out there."

And literally, dozens of these mini Phoebes all around me turn on their heel... (laughter) ...and stare, because I am clearly the only dad within eyeshot.

And for a second, I think that maybe they think I'm an imposter.

That I don't belong there.

And then for a second, I think, maybe they're jealous of my kids, who get to hear her sing a song about a father who tried and failed.

But I don't get to live in either of those moments very long, because not long after the music starts, I have one child in this arm, and the other child in this arm, and we're jumping along with the music and we're scream-singing, "I don't forgive you, "but please don't hold me to it.

"Born under Scorpio skies, I wanted to see the world "through your eyes until it happened, and then I changed my mind."

And I get this strange physical sensation.

I'm floating above us.

I realize in that moment, physically, we are making a memory that none of us will ever forget.

Not my beautiful, sensitive boy, or my strong-willed, intelligent girl, or me, one dad just trying to do his best.

We're making a memory, and it's not a couch one, either.

It's a big, warm, smiley one.

Thank you.

(cheers and applause) ♪ ♪ CAPONE-SPRAGUE: My name is KiM Capone-Sprague.

I am from South Portland, Maine.

I live in a cute little house with my husband and our two children.

I am a social worker, I work in the field of recovery.

And I understand that you capitalize the M in Kim.

- It's true.

- Can you tell us about that?

- Sure.

The first time I did it, it was probably 20 years ago, and it was just a mistake.

But I looked at it, and I thought, "That looks kind of cool."

So I just started doing it.

And then, a little bit later, as I got to know myself better, I became aware of how the big K and the big M were protecting the little I, which is just a symbol of how I need protection.

That's lovely.

- Thank you.

What are you hoping that the audience takes away from your story?

Hope.

I hope that they hear a message of hope.

That things might be difficult and challenging right now, but this, too, shall pass.

There is another side that you can get to.

There's hope that things can get better.

♪ ♪ It is June 2008.

I'm 32 years old, and I'm headed to Dominica, a tiny island in the Caribbean.

I'm going to celebrate my boyfriend's best friend's wedding, and I'm really excited about this trip.

What could be better?

Beaches, sunshine, hanging out with this guy that I'm really into, and it was great, until it wasn't.

As soon as I met the bride and the groom and all of their friends, I started to compare myself.

I started to notice this fear, doubt, and insecurity welling up inside me.

On one of the worst days, I remember, we were hiking up this rainforest mountainside.

I weighed 265 pounds.

And I'm with all of these skinny people wearing bikinis, and they're seemingly unfazed as I'm gasping for breath... (breathlessly): ...after every fifth step.

I was so embarrassed.

And it wasn't just my size.

They all seemed to be doctors and lawyers who were world travelers.

I didn't feel smart enough, I didn't feel cultured enough.

I even started to wonder if my boyfriend was good enough.

And so, I turned to the only coping skills that I really had: food, alcohol, pot.

But the only way to get food in Dominica is by traveling up and down these windy, hilly roads, mostly on foot, unless you could hire a driver.

There are no bougie bakeries, there are no fast food, there's no convenience store.

So, thankfully, the driver was someone, if I asked nicely, could get me some pot, but the pot was barely keeping the edge off.

Towards the end of the trip, I started to notice that I was trying to turn the attention away from myself and my own inferiorities, and turn it towards my boyfriend.

I was telling all of the people that were on this trip everything that was wrong with him, and I wasn't very subtle about it.

On the last day, we were at the airport, and I could sense the distance and coolness between us, the tension.

And he turned to me and he said, "This has to stop.

"If this happens again, it's a deal breaker-- we're done."

And I'm ashamed as we fly home, and I don't understand how I could treat someone that I love so poorly.

I don't know how I got here, and I don't know that I can prevent it from happening again.

A few months later, we're back in Portland, Maine, we're living together.

We have our older son, Oliver.

Thankfully, we've put this Dominica trip behind us.

At this point, I'm working as a social worker, helping out a teenager who struggles with his own anxiety at school, and his teacher suggests to him the idea of writing a bucket list.

And so, I say to myself, "I'll write a bucket list, too."

And so I start jotting some ideas down: get married, have another baby, buy a house, feel comfortable and sexy in my 265-pound body.

And so, over the course of the next four years, I start accomplishing these tasks that I had set forward for myself.

I'm a person who's always been motivated by lists.

I think, "I can do this."

Enroll in grad school.

Check.

Have another baby.

My son Aiden was born.

Check.

We bought a house and we painted our front door yellow.

Check.

The happiest day of my life, I got married to my husband, Andy, on a boat in the middle of Portland Harbor, surrounded by my friends and family.

Check.

But even after all of the bridal showers, and baby showers, and housewarming parties, something was still off.

Even though I was accomplishing all of these things on my bucket list, I still wasn't happy.

I still had all this fear, doubt, and insecurity.

I didn't know what was wrong with me.

I couldn't figure it out.

I was still treating everyone around me just like I had when we were in Dominica.

My husband, lovingly, would bring me coffee in bed every morning, hoping that the caffeine and sugar would "soothe the beast."

But I was still blameful, I was passive-aggressive, I was resentful.

My kids were one and six, and I was irritated and impatient with them every day, thinking about the things that they did do and that they didn't do.

And all I wanted them to do was go to bed so that I could go down in the basement and get high.

The Dairy Queen down the street, I could not drive by without stopping and getting a chocolate Blizzard with peanut butter sauce and Oreos, sometimes two or three times a week.

Even though I was accomplishing all of these things on my bucket list, I thought that chasing that list, it would help me be happy.

But what I realized is that I was still really unwell.

I didn't know what was wrong with my life.

I didn't know how to fix it.

October 31, 2012.

I'm sitting in a coffee shop.

I'm eating a toffee oatmeal cookie, and I call up a friend of mine, and I say, "I'm miserable and I hate my life."

And she said, "You know what?

I've been doing this program for food addiction."

She says, "You've got to come to a meeting."

So, I went to a meeting, and that was the last cookie that I've ever eaten.

I learned two things right away in that food addiction program.

The first was that food can have the same addictive qualities as substances, like pot or alcohol.

And so that's why, when I put the pot down to go to grad school, the obsession to eat, the compulsion to eat, the irritability when I wasn't eating, it didn't go away.

The second thing that I learned-- and this is more important than all of those other things that I talked about, all of those bucket list items-- is the importance of integrity.

Up until that point, I wasn't doing the next right thing.

I wasn't doing what I said I was going to do.

And that caused a lot of discomfort and dis-ease within me.

And so, over the course of time, it was a process.

It took me probably ten years to get to the point where I realized that if I wasn't doing what I said I was going to do, if my actions were out of alignment with my values, then I wasn't showing up as a person of integrity, and that caused me to be really miserable.

In August of 2022, just this last summer, I crossed the finish line at an iconic race up in Maine called The Beach to Beacon.

It's a 10K, another item on my bucket list.

Check.

Incidentally, I did not accomplish that without sitting on my couch and scrolling through Facebook, chastising myself for not working towards my fitness goals and getting myself moving.

But I'm not the person that I was then.

I'm a person now who shows up for her family.

I'm a person that loves and respects them.

If I could talk to that woman in Dominica, I know that she would hate the woman who crossed the finish line.

She would have been jealous, and annoyed, and resentful at that woman, because that woman has all of the things that she wishes she had: commitment, follow-through, determination, integrity.

But if I could go back and talk to that woman in Dominica, I would say, "Have hope.

"Hang in there.

"Things will get better.

You, too, will get there."

Thank you.

(applause) ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪