Music
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I wrote this years ago after a dear friend died, following a string of deaths around me. I sang it at a memorial for Jill May, a chronically homeless woman who's in my book, "The Lost and the Found" -- I had found her to be achingly sweet, sad and vulnerable as she struggled to find stability, and she was doused with gas and burned to death. After her killer was convicted, Jill's family and the lead homicide detective and I went to the spot where she died and held our memorial.
This is a song I wrote about Little Bit, a chronically homeless woman I met in 2003 with photographer Brant Ward when we profiled Homeless Island, the unhoused colony she lived with on a traffic island in San Francisco. She touched us deeply with her desperation and grit, and this song is about trying to get her to talk with us -- which she eventually did. She is in my book, "The Lost and the Found," and was a good friend of Rita Grant, one of the two main people in the book.
I wrote this song to highlight the terrible inequities in our country, which I've seen so many times as a reporter and which has grown worse with every decade. This is a tape of one of the bands I'm in, Finding Fable, rehearsing the song at Channel 7 ABC TV before performing it live.