SARA KAMINSKI: I look over and I can see the fear and the dread.

I focus on the one thing that's going to save her life.

BRANDON KAZEN-MADDOX: We're talking about how the people watched us signing to one another, the looks we got.

JEFF BELANGER: A friend of mine said, "We have this fundraiser coming up.

"We're going to climb Mount Kilimanjaro to raise money to fight cancer."

Yeah, I'm in.

♪ THERESA OKOKON: Tonight's theme is "One Way or Another."

♪ When life throws us a curveball, we immediately spring into action.

Sometimes we're prepared, and other times we've just got to improvise.

Whether we succeed or fail, we often find these physical, emotional, and intellectual strengths that we never knew we possessed.

And those are the moments that can change our lives forever.

Tonight's tellers are stepping into the limelight to share the moments when life put them on the spot.

♪ My name is Brandon.

Last name Kazen-Maddox.

Brandon is my name sign.

I am originally from Vancouver, Washington, which is on the west coast, but I live currently in New York City.

And I work as a professional American Sign Language, or ASL, interpreter and a professional artist as well.

And American Sign Language is a rich way of communicating.

Can you talk about how it influences your life?

I, I often like to say that my hands are the storytellers and my mind and my words are just kind of along for the ride.

I mean, I grew up speaking and signing at the same time, which we call SimCom, which is this, because there were hearing people and deaf people in my family, so everyone needed to understand what was going on.

And that's just my accent, in a way.

When you think about the story that you're telling us this evening, what were the challenges of putting together this bilingual story?

ASL is a very context-heavy language.

And so with this particular story and challenge, it had to do with fighting my instincts of expansion.

It was fun, though, because it's nice to be able to, to take a story that is rich and beautiful and descriptive and really be able to say it tightly.

♪ As a 15-and-a-half-year-old, I know that I love to do three things-- go shopping at the mall, practice driving, and hang out with my grandma.

One night after shopping with my grandma, I ask her if I can practice driving us back home.

My grandma's eyesight is not that great at night, so of course she obliges.

We get into the car, and I buckle my seat belt, adjust my mirrors, and turn on the dome light.

One important thing to know about my grandma is that she's deaf and we use sign language to communicate.

My grandpa is also deaf, and I actually have seven deaf people in my family.

My first language is sign language, and my first word was actually the concept for moon.

Growing up, I spent a lot of time with my grandparents, both full time and part time.

So, as you can imagine, our family dinners were very, very lively.

They were filled with American Sign Language, spoken English, and simultaneous communication, which is talking and signing at the same time, or SimCom, which is what I'm doing right now.

And that's... the point of that is to make sure that everyone in the room can understand what's being said.

Also, my grandma and I love to laugh.

So, as we're pulling out of the parking lot and onto the busy highway, we're talking about our experience at the mall, the people-watching, and how the people watched us, my white, middle-aged grandmother and me as a teenager signing to one another, the looks we got.

So the moment that we pull out onto the busy highway, I see that our car is filled with red and blue flashing lights.

My eyes dart immediately to the rear view mirror and I see a police car rapidly approaching our vehicle.

Immediately, I think about where we are in the world, and I was raised in rural Vancouver, Washington, which is a land that has its own racial tension.

And I have seen terrible things happen to Black and brown people, friends and family.

My own father, who's a Black man, was actually put in prison when I was 11 and was there for ten years.

So I already have a pre-established relationship with the police in that I should avoid them at all costs and know that they are a risk to my own freedom.

All of a sudden, I hear the sirens chirp, and I let my grandma know that I think he wants us to pull over.

So, after pulling over, the police officer comes around to the passenger side window.

He's a young white cop, and he motions for my grandma to roll the window down.

She does, and the first thing he asks is, "Are you two okay?"

We look at each other.

I interpret what he's asked, and we both say yes.

(chuckles) And then the second question is, license and registration.

My grandma understands this already, so she opens up the glove compartment and I pull out my permit and we hand the documents to the police officer.

While he's reviewing the documents, my grandma gives my thigh a squeeze and gives me a smile and lets me know that we're going to be okay.

My grandma is a sweet woman, but tough when she needs to be.

She always taught me that I need to respect authority but question the rules because the rules were not always set for deaf people in the world.

So we were always kind of bending them as time went on.

The next question the police officer asks is, "Do you know why I pulled you over?"

I look to my grandma and I interpret these words, and we both shake our head no.

He says, "Well, you were driving with a dome light on, "and you should know that that can be distracting and potentially dangerous for other drivers."

(inhales sharply) I interpret this for my grandma.

She looks toward me and I can see that the police officer's body language is getting a little uncomfortable because he doesn't completely understand the interaction between the two of us.

So I quickly finished my interpretation and look to the officer and say, "I can explain.

"You see, my grandma's deaf "and we use sign language to communicate.

"Light is really important in the deaf community "because we have to be able to see each other's eyes, "facial expressions, and hands to understand what's being said.

"Without the dome light, we have to rely on "random street lights that pass us and hopefully a really bright moon."

And so the officer understands this.

And then he asks me, "Well, how long have you been signing?"

My first thought is, why is that question important?

But I have not been able to have interactions with authority in that kind of confrontational way.

So instead I politely respond, "Well, sign language is my first language, and I've always known it."

He then considers this and says, "I'm going to have to ask you both to keep your dome light off for the remainder of your trip."

(sighs) Immediately, my internal dialogue rages because basically this man is asking me and my grandma to not talk until we get home.

However, I take a deep breath and remember what my grandma and my mom have taught me to say, which is, "No problem, officer."

So the police officer goes back to his car and we follow him back onto the highway, keeping our dome light off as instructed.

We wait until his tail lights have diminished, and immediately my grandma decides to turn the dome light back on so that we can resume our conversation.

Now, I don't know if I would have turned the dome light back on myself, but I'm glad that my grandma did.

Like I said, she always taught me to question the rules.

And as an artist and ASL interpreter, I encounter many situations where minority figures are asked to literally and figuratively dim their light to benefit the majority.

Because of my grandma, I've devoted my life to building systems that are inclusive, to shining light on underserved populations, to creating a world that is safe, equitable, and just for my grandma, for myself, and for all of us.

♪ KAMINSKI: My name is Sara Kaminski.

Everyone calls me Sara K. I'm from western Massachusetts, and I've been living in Newton and the greater Boston area for about the last 20 years.

I am an art director and a creative director.

And has storytelling always been a part of your professional life?

Yes, for many years I have worked in advertising agencies and design studios here in the Boston area.

I'm usually telling stories about brands.

I'm not usually talking about myself.

So how did you decide then to transfer from telling stories about a brand to telling a story about yourself?

So my daughter has anaphylactic food allergies.

Mm.

She is allergic to eggs, peanuts, tree nuts, sesame, and shellfish.

And so basically since the first bite of a waffle that she had with peanut butter on it when she was nine months old, we have had to explain what her food allergies are and what we need so that she can eat safely.

So I've actually been telling this story now for about ten years, but I haven't put together an example like this before.

This particular storytelling event is my first one.

♪ My daughter and I have an adventurous relationship with food.

(chuckles) A couple of summers ago, we went to Maine on our annual summer vacation.

It was July and the moon was rising over the Penobscot Bay and the first stars were starting to twinkle and it was the perfect night to go out to dinner at our favorite restaurant.

We've been there before and Cora made a beeline to the berry patch.

She couldn't wait to get up and see the black raspberry bushes with their giant boughs overarching loaded with black raspberries.

Her fingers were stained red and purple as our names were called from the side porch for dinner.

We've been here before.

We have talked to the chef.

We have talked to the kitchen team, the servers, the waiters, the expediters, the maître d' and they're ready for us.

Cora has received for her first course a Margherita pizza with fresh basil and tomato.

She moved on to a roasted duck and couscous, and her dessert for the evening is a melon sorbet topped with the same berries that have still staining her hands.

We don't go out to eat very often, so this is a really special night.

Cora manages anaphylactic food allergies, so going out to eat means that we have to have great communication with the entire restaurant team.

So everything that comes to the table tonight has been prepared exclusively for Cora and is delivered to the table exclusively for Cora, where our server confirms that her meal is free of eggs, peanuts, tree nuts, sesame, and shellfish.

And the night is perfect.

It's the perfect summer dinner.

And as our server delivers the check, there are three small bites on the tiny little check tray.

Two look like chocolate, one's a white something, and Cora has popped the white something into her mouth before I can even tell what it is.

Is it a marshmallow?

Is it a mint?

Ah, it's a marshmallow.

Perfect.

Her favorite.

So we love marshmallows in our house because they're one of the few candies, packaged candies that she can eat.

They're made up of corn syrup and gelatin and a whole bunch of artificial flavors and colors.

But she can eat them, and they're her favorite, and she's already asking if we can do s'mores back at the campfire at the hotel.

But I look over and I can see the fear and the dread.

She says, "Mom, I need help.

I need my EpiPen."

These are words that we have practiced before, and we have to move fast.

I haven't taken off the purse that's rubbing my sun... my sunburned shoulder the entire dinner, and thankfully it's on me and we run to the bathroom before the worst happens.

There's nausea rising.

There's trouble breathing.

She's crying, hives reddening.

And we go in and close the door, and she sits down on the toilet, and I do the one thing that I have to do right now.

I do not pause.

I do not provide comfort.

I focus on the one thing that's going to save her life, and that is delivering an EpiPen.

I reach into my purse, I pull out the twin pack.

I pull out one pen and take out the blue safety stopper.

I position her so that I can swing the EpiPen into her thigh so that I'm certain I'm delivering the full dose.

Tonight she jumps just a little bit, and the pen scrapes her leg and is bleeding.

And yet this child puts her hand on my hand holding the EpiPen in her thigh, and counts with me to ten, just like we have practiced.

I can hear the sirens.

And they're getting closer and I can see the red lights.

And now the diners are wondering, "What is going on?

That's so loud.

What's happening?"

And what they turn to see is a beautiful little girl on a gurney being strapped into an ambulance.

What caused this?

Well, it turns out that those store-bought marshmallows are completely safe.

But when you make marshmallows fresh by hand, they contain egg whites and a lot of sugar.

And tonight's anaphylactic response was due to the egg whites that were in a marshmallow smaller than the tip of my thumb.

Cora is fine.

Thankfully, and resiliently, she's okay.

I, on the other hand, have a really hard time forgiving myself because I cannot afford... we cannot afford to make these kinds of mistakes.

I have a really hard time trusting people.

I made a chef cry on one of my worst days because a piece of chicken came to Cora's table and it had green stuff on top, some kind of garnish.

We love green stuff in our family, but I couldn't tell if it was parsley or pesto, which contains nuts.

Every single day, we pack healthy, nutritious, beautiful lunches for Cora to bring to public school.

And last summer, when Cora went to camp in Maine, we found out that there was going to be a pajama party the following morning.

And so I madly baked up a couple dozen donuts and drove to Maine eight hours round trip so that Cora wouldn't miss out.

Now we grow our own garden, and we light our own campfires.

And Cora invites her friends over, and they take their marshmallow roasting sticks with the giant marshmallows on the end, and they take those sticks with those beautiful burning orange embers on the end, and they triumphantly write their names in the dark summer skies.

♪ BELANGER: My name is Jeff Belanger, and I'm a writer, a podcaster, and a TV producer, and I live just south of Boston.

And I understand that you are a bit of an expert on things that are unexplained.

Can you tell us more about that?

Yeah, so I started in my career as a journalist, a features writer, and I got hooked around Halloween looking for ghost stories, haunted places and legends and things like that.

And through a bunch of missteps, I somehow turned that into a career where I've written books on haunted places and strange legends from all over the world.

I work on television shows, and I have a podcast about them, so it's my favorite subject.

And what kind of stories do you most enjoy telling?

A lot of the subject matter I focus on revolves around death.

You know, what comes next?

Monsters, ghosts, things like that.

What you're really doing is you're asking the biggest questions humans have ever asked, right?

What happens after we die?

Do we know every creature that walks the earth with us?

And when we talk about these legends and lore that have stuck around, we get to ask those questions in a very safe way, that's not confrontational.

It's not like me saying, "Hey, I've got this religion, and I want to tell you about it," because you would squirm.

- Mm.

- You'd say, "Oh, no, what are the chances we're going to agree on that?"

But the story, the story is this thing.

It's like this malleable thing that gets passed back and forth.

Part of me goes into it, and part of you goes into it when you share it, and that's what I love about lore.

♪ It's late March of 2017, and I'm about 50 yards up the Lemosho Route Trail that leads to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro.

At 19,341 feet, it's the tallest peak on the African continent.

And I'm in my 40s and asking myself, "What am I doing here?"

Sure, I've been an amateur hiker for a lot of my adult life, but I have never tackled anything this big, and my head is swimming.

I mean, is my family going to be okay back home?

There's no wi-fi, no cell service.

It's going to take six days to get to the top, and that's going to require sleeping in a tent.

And if you gave me the option between sleeping on the ground in a tent and cutting off one of my fingers, I'd at least ask which finger.

But the worst part is I missed the first step.

I wasn't paying attention, that monumental moment.

I was going to take a picture of it, but I missed it.

And then I started thinking, well, was the first step 50 yards ago down the trail?

Or was it this morning when we left our hotel in Moshi?

Or was it three days ago when I boarded a plane in Boston to come over here?

The truth is, it's so far back, I don't know if I could identify it, but I do know a significant step in the journey that got me here right now.

Back in December of 2015, I was traveling to Connecticut to visit my brother-in-law, Chris.

Two years earlier, Chris was diagnosed with stage four cancer and given 18 to 24 months to live.

During that time, he and I got a lot closer.

We talked a lot about this dying process that all of us are going through.

It's just that Chris's ticket is going to get punched a lot sooner than mine.

And we got close.

I think it's the closest I'll ever come to having a brother.

So this trip to Connecticut isn't so much a visit as it is that big goodbye that so many of us complain we never get.

When I walked into his bedroom, I could see his skin was an unnatural color of yellow.

It's jarring, but it was also beautiful.

I mean, the way the sunlight was coming in through the corner windows and hitting him, he was just glowing like this golden man.

And we talked for hours.

It was one of the most profound conversations I've ever had in my life.

Even though in my head I know this yellow color is jaundice-- his organs are failing, he's literally dying-- but still, we talked.

Chris was telling me about these out-of-body experiences he was going through.

He said he was aware of being outside of his body and looking down at himself.

And I said, "Well, what do you think that means?"

And he said, "The best I can figure is "that there's something inside this broken machine that's getting ready to break out and stay out."

I gave him a hug before heading home, but I didn't say goodbye.

I didn't use the word.

And that was on purpose.

I think I believed him when he said something was going to break out of this broken machine.

And five days later, Chris died.

I struggled at his funeral as I looked at his five-year-old son, my nephew.

And I fought back tears the whole way through the eulogy I gave.

Losing Chris hurt-- hurt me, it hurt my family.

But I also felt a little selfish because it also made me feel antsy.

Chris was just a few years older than me when he passed, and I'm thinking, you know, in my own life, big things just shouldn't wait.

It was a stark reminder.

Six months after Chris passed, a friend of mine from the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society said, "We have this fundraiser coming up.

"We're going to climb Mount Kilimanjaro to raise money to fight cancer."

Yeah, I'm in.

The first few days of hiking Kilimanjaro are relatively easy.

I mean, sleeping on the ground in a tent, that sucks.

But the hikes I can handle.

We're going six to eight miles per day and traveling through elevations 10,000 feet, 11,000 feet and more.

The air gets so thin it's hard to breathe, and my muscles are sore from six days of climbing this.

The night we make for the summit, we leave at midnight.

Barafu Base Camp, 15,000 feet in elevation.

And it's cold.

Arctic cold.

I have on my Arctic gear.

I'm wearing a balaclava that covers my entire head except for the eyes.

I've got on a head lamp that illuminates about a three-foot radius around my feet, and all I can see is tan dirt and the feet of the climbers in front of me.

By 3:00 in the morning, it's so cold and so silent.

I'm as cold as I've ever been.

I was once at the top of Mount Snow in Vermont, where it was 60 degrees below zero.

This feels colder, and I'm struggling.

I don't know if I can go on, but turning back... (exhales) That would kill me.

Every hundred feet, it gets even worse.

My muscles are sore, my lungs are sore.

My chest is sore from breathing so deeply.

It's a flashback to childhood asthma attacks.

I, I have to pull the mask down in order to get enough oxygen.

But then my face gets so cold I put it back up and I have to alternate between breathing and being warm.

But soon I looked behind me, and forever in the distance I see this glowing ball of light, and I realize the sun is coming.

It's getting a little brighter, and pretty soon I can look up ahead and I can see the rim of the volcano.

6:30 in the morning.

Stella Point-- Kili's volcanic rim.

I turn around and I see the sun is now above the horizon, casting this golden glow on an endless sea of clouds just so far below me.

It was the same golden color I saw on Chris's face in his final days.

And he's with me right now.

I can feel him next to me.

He's there, watching the sunrise.

He's out of his broken machine.

I can't think, but I can feel.

And I snap a picture...

I snap a picture of that sunrise, this mundane event that's happened every day for millions and millions of years.

A mundane event that changed everything for me.

It left hope where just a few hours earlier I had none.

And even though the summit is another 500 vertical feet, another three quarters of a mile, another hour from where I'm standing right now, I know that making it is a foregone conclusion.

I'm not weak.

I'm not that kid with asthma anymore.

I'm strong, I'm worthy.

And even with so little air, I still find a way to take the next step.

THERESA OKOKON: Watch Stories from the Stage anytime, anywhere.

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