Reborn in the USA

The coming-of-age story is also a story of a journey towards American citizenship, replete with growing pains, chess games, The Love Boat and Miami Vice, hoarded copies of Rolling Stone magazine, and repeat playings of John Mellencamp’s Scarecrow. It also involves a full-telling of the Liverpool College Breaking Crew, a middle-of-the-night meeting with Walter Payton and William “Refrigerator” Perry which changed my life and surviving the Beastie Boys' infamous 10-minute live show in Liverpool that ended amidst tear gas and a riot. It comes out right before July 4th, a day that means a lot to me as a newly minted American. It is, I hope, to borrow Mina Kimes' words, “a perfect story about what it means to pursue the American dream, and what that dream should—and still can—represent.”