1st Things 1st: STARTING tomorrow, Dec 9 - 15, New Dimensions Radio is featuring an interview with me on its worldwide broadcast schedule, "Changing the World, Seven Boys at a Time" Hosted by Michael Toms. Program 3320

You can hear it streaming for free on the New Dimensions website for two weeks or download it for a small fee beginning Dec. 1st. You can also hear it on a radio station close to you. . Go to Listening Options for a list of stations that carry New Dimensions.

This is a photograph of Robert Blair at my Charmichael's reading:

who with his wife Debbie started the West End School, a free boarding school in Louisville for underprivileged boys. Mr. Blair stole a tiny touch my spotlight speaking last week at Carmichael's Bookstore, in Louisville. I'm thrilled that he did! Together with Stand Up for Kids, a group new to Louisville, that reaches out to homeless teenagers. The evening was exciting, community groups meeting and opening new opportunites among themselves. So thank you Carmichael's, the West End School, Stand Up for Youth and the people who joined me at the bookstore:

My friend Carter is in that photo above! He come to Louisville and DID keep me company on the 6 hour deep nighttime in-the-rain on America's-truck-FILLED highways drive to Memphis, where I did appear on Live at 9 in the Peabody mall. I had 10 minutes before this band played on a stage set in a water fountain in the mall. They're from Nashville, and good. I don't know their band's name:

These are two of the wonderful people who came to my Davis Kidd reading in Memphis. Jeanette and Missie:

Jeanette is one of the people who runs Urban Youth Initiative (UYI) in Memphis, more of below, and Missie is Perry Pidgeon Hook's mother and a power.

These are some of the 100'ish or so people from Urban Youth Initiative I spoke with on Friday in Memphis, a church ministry of many groups in Memphis aimed at helping disadvantaged youth there. I have almost never been more welcomed, and more inspired. So thank you to Jeanette and all the people involved and affiliated with UYI, and Godspeed in your work:

The building we were in is a meeting hall and basketball court behind a church on Tulane Road, which seemed relatively rural to me, though in Memphis. The JUXTAPOSITIONS.... this is the Christmas tree in the lobby of the Peabody Hotel in downtown Memphis:

This is the Duckmaster in the Peabody Hotel, with some young adoring children, waiting for the ducks to parade from the fountain across the lobby red carpet into the elevator up to their luxury hotel apartment (so I heard). The juxtapositions in this amazing America of ours are heart rendering. From the poor and endangered, primarily African-American & Latino children ministered to by UYI in one part of Memphis to these duckies on parade....

and these photographs a bit too big, I should scale them down more, so I'm sorry I'm not taking more time to write a shorter letter.... Just some other Peabody photos, including an ivory pagoda a man in the antique store off the lobby says is "museum quality" and is from Osaka. It has an army of carved figured surrounding each level. It must cost, well, how many times the national median income?, pretty spectacularly beautiful it is...

and the pagoda is breathtaking. and the end....

In the timeless words of Tiny Tim, "God Bless Us, Every One!