Heather — An Invitation to Build Something Together

From Chris, February 2026

The Short Version

I need your help with the production equipment in your basement in Longmont. I need it inventoried, packed, and shipped to us at Sunshine Key in about two weeks. But more than that — I want to invite you into something that's already yours.

I'm asking you to gather a small crew: someone technical from your theater community, someone from Longmont Public Media, maybe someone from the makerspace. Get on a Zoom call with me, and we'll go through every piece together — what it is, what it does, what ships to me and what stays in Longmont for the community to use.

Here's why this is bigger than packing boxes.

The Stone Soup in the Bag

You know what happens when I walk into a room. I've got this bag — full of mics, cables, little boxes, prototype phones, USB sticks, SD cards, adapters. At North Naples Church a few weeks ago, an elder pulled me aside because he was worried about it. I had to open the bag and go through every piece:

"These little boxes contain the little audio mics. A lot of wires. There's a handle. This is just for USB cables."

"These are my prototype ii phones. I do like I program these with custom software."

"I just need lots of buttons. It's like the pedal that you pull on the organ."

I'm standing there in a church hallway, laptop overheating in my bag because it's been running GPU tasks all morning, trying to make technology legible to a man who just wants to make sure I'm not a threat. And I'm thinking — this is the story of my whole life. Monica Houston wrote about it years ago when she profiled me: this hippie shows up to a meetup with a bag full of things, and people don't know what to make of him.

But here's the thing — it's stone soup.

You know the story. A traveler comes to a village and nobody has anything to share. So he puts a stone in a pot of water and starts cooking. People get curious. Somebody adds a carrot. Somebody adds a potato. By the end of the night the whole village is eating together, and nobody can remember who brought what — just that the stone started the conversation.

That's what's in my bag. That's what's in your basement. Not finished products — ingredients. A stone and a pot. The ATEMs and the RODE Casters and the cameras and the mics are the stone. The community that gathers around them — your theater people, the LPM folks, the makerspace builders — they're the carrots and potatoes. The soup is what we make together.

When I step into this role — being on stage, doing things together with people — I'm going to wear the hat that Benjamin crocheted for me. Because it reminds me of all the humans I've been connected with, particularly my children. Benjamin, who makes things in secret and reveals them when they're ready. Who crochets with 13 types of yarn. That hat is my reminder of why any of this matters — it's not the technology, it's the people the technology connects.

Transmitir

Do you remember Mom driving you from Mexia to the theater? Multiple times a week, so you could be in plays. You were so young. She saw something in you — this spark for performance, for story, for being on stage — and she fed it. She drove you there and drove you home, over and over, because that's what moms do when they see their kid come alive.

That's transmitir. A Cuban family of 19 gathered around an RV in Naples taught me the word. It means passing wisdom through generations — not through lectures or textbooks, but through lived example. Through showing up. Through driving your daughter to the theater because you can see she belongs there.

Mom transmitted that to you. And you've been transmitting it ever since.

Sixteen years at Lubbock Community Theater. Building something from scratch, holding a community together through the power of people showing up to tell stories on stage. Then the fire took the house. And you moved to Longmont and started again — finding your way into the theater community there, carrying everything you learned in Lubbock with you.

That's three generations of transmitir:

Mom — saw the spark, drove you to the theater
You — built community theater in Lubbock, now building it in Longmont
Longmont — the community you're growing into, the next stage

What I'm building with my technology is the same pattern. I just do it with microphones and code instead of stages and curtain calls. But here's the thing I figured out recently — even the language I use for my technology came from you. The roles I built into my system: understudy, shadow, stage manager, company, troupe, greenroom, curtain call. Those are your words. I borrowed your vocabulary because it already described what I was trying to build — people who know their role, who hand off gracefully, who support each other, who serve the show.

You've been transmitting longer than either of us realized.

You're Already in This

Heather, two moments keep coming back to me.

The cassette tape. You remember? In the living room in Potosi — you had a cassette recorder and you captured Mom and her sister, the family, just talking. That recording burned in the fire.

"Heather, when we were little in the living room in Potosi near Mary, or Emily, she had had it playing with a cassette tape and she had recorded mom and her sister, her family, just talking. But that, just that little snippet of audio, so precious. Burned in the fire."

That tape is the reason I record everything now. I am trying to build what was lost — to make sure the voices we love don't disappear when the house burns down. Every mic I carry, every recording I make, traces back to your cassette tape.

The plane ticket. When Shalom and I were broke in Boulder — in somebody's basement, all done, no money, pregnant — I called you. And you bought me a plane ticket to Seattle out of your own sacrifice. That plane ticket is the pivot point of my entire career. Boulder to Seattle to every tech meetup to ii.coop. Without that ticket, none of this exists.

"I talked to my sister and I said, 'Heather, I'm down and out. I got nothing. Can you—' I tell her what I'm trying to do, and it's just — she buys me a ticket, a flight to get to Seattle. Out of her sacrifice."

You transmitted something to me in that moment too. Not theater — but the belief that showing up matters enough to sacrifice for.

The Left Eye and the Right Eye

Here's what I'm doing with Asher. I've set up a paired recording rig — one for me, one for him. Left eye and right eye. When we sit together and work — hacking, building, creating — we're both mic'd up, both capturing. His perspective and mine. Father and son, side by side.

"Trying to get to the point to get my instruments up so that I'm sitting here with my son and whatever comes in, we're like, absolutely, yes, and both mic'd up."

This is the model: mentoring by doing, capturing while doing, and stitching the raw material into story afterward. Not scripted. Not produced. Just two people — present, recording, building — and then composing the narrative from what was real.

I want to do the same thing with you. Not about code — about community theater. About what you've built, what you're building, and how the people around you in Longmont can build it together.

The Invitation

There's production equipment in your basement in Longmont — gear we left when we hit the road. Now I need some of it shipped, and I need your help figuring out what goes where.

What's in the basement:

3 Blackmagic ATEMs (video switchers — multi-camera production brains)
2 RODE Caster Pros (audio mixing boards — podcast/broadcast quality)
USB cameras and USB-to-HDMI adapters
Mics and mic stands — various types

Some of this ships to Sunshine Key. But some of it might be exactly what Longmont Community Theater and Longmont Public Media need. That's what we figure out together.

Gather the right people:

Someone technical from Longmont Community Theater — your world, your people, someone who knows production gear
Someone from Longmont Public Media — they'll recognize what an ATEM and a RODE Caster can do for community storytelling
Someone from the makerspace — the hands-on builder types who'll geek out over the hardware

Set up a Zoom call with me. I'll be on the other end, live. Here's how it works:

You and your crew gather around the equipment in the basement
I'm on the Zoom, recording my side — I can see what you're seeing, talk you through what each piece is, explain what it does
Your people record on their side — audio, video, whatever they've got
Together we inventory everything, figure out what ships to me and what stays in Longmont for the community

This is the left eye / right eye model. You're capturing from your side, I'm capturing from mine. Two perspectives on the same moment. We stitch it together afterward.

Why this matters beyond packing boxes:

The people in that room — from the theater, from LPM, from the makerspace — are exactly the people who should be working together in Longmont anyway. Theater knows story and audience. Public media knows production and distribution. The makerspace knows tools and building. Right now they're separate communities. Put them together in a basement around production gear with a shared purpose, and you've planted a seed.

I'm not in Longmont. I can't be there physically. But through this Zoom call and this shared recording, I can be present enough to help — to explain the gear, to show what's possible, to connect the dots between what these communities could build together.

The packing session IS the pilot episode. Your theater friends learn about production gear they might not have seen. The LPM person sees tools for community media. The makerspace person sees hardware they can tinker with. And we all get a first recording of something real — people figuring things out together, captured from both ends, ready to be composed into story.

Why Now

We're heading to Sunshine Key in about two weeks. I need the gear sorted before we arrive — that's when the next phase begins. So the timeline works: you have a couple of weeks to gather your crew, schedule the Zoom call with me, inventory the equipment, and ship what needs shipping.

But the gear is only half the reason. The other half is that you've been transmitting community theater for decades — from Mexia to Lubbock to Longmont — and now there's an opportunity to connect your theater community with the media and maker communities around you. The equipment in the basement is the stone in the pot. The people you invite are the ones who turn it into soup.

The next steps:

You reach out to your theater tech person, someone at LPM, and someone at the makerspace. Tell them you need help sorting production equipment and your brother wants to explain what it all does over Zoom.
We schedule the Zoom call. I'll be recording my end. They record theirs.
We go through everything together. I'll walk you through each piece — what ships to Sunshine Key, what's useful for Longmont.
Pack and ship what I need. Keep what serves the community.
Send me the recordings. I'll show you what we can do with raw footage and audio when we stitch it together.

You once bought your broke brother a plane ticket because you believed in what he was trying to do. This is the same ask, smaller scale: get some friends together, turn on a mic, and call me.

"This isn't supposed to be a computer science project, it's a humanity project."

Love,
Chris