August 01, 2016 
Jane 
Karla Ortiz and her mother, Francisca Ortiz
Last week I found myself riveted to the TV during the Democratic National Convention—for a number of reasons. One of them, though, was the number of potential book projects. For example:
Karla Ortiz: Karla is an eleven-year-old American citizen living in Las Vegas, but her parents are undocumented and, as a result, live in fear of deportation.
Lauren Manning, a former partner at Cantor Fitzgerald, is one of the most catastrophically wounded survivors of 9/11. She battled enormous odds of survival, spending more than six months in the hospital, and fought through the next decade to recover from burns over 82.5% of her body.
Anastasia Somoza
Anastasia Somoza from New York City was diagnosed with cerebral palsy and spastic quadriplegia when she was born and is an advocate for Americans with intellectual and developmental disabilities.
Kate Burdick: a staff attorney at the Juvenile Law Center in Philadelphia.
Jelani Freeman, who grew up in foster care in Washington D.C. Since receiving his law degree, he has worked to bring opportunity to kids at risk.
Mothers of the Movement (L-R: Maria Hamilton, Annette Nance-Holt, Gwen Carr, Geneva Reed-Veal, Lucia McBath, Sybrina Fulton, Cleopatra Cowley-Pendleton, Wanda Johnson, Lezley McSpadden)
Mothers of the Movement: Geneva Reed-Veal, the mother of Sandra Bland; Gwen Carr, mother of Eric Garner; Sybrina Fulton, mother of Trayvon Martin; Maria Hamilton, mother of Dontre Hamilton; Lucia McBath, mother of Jordan Davis; Lezley McSpadden, mother of Michael Brown; Cleopatra Cowley-Pendleton, mother of Hadiya Pendleton; Annette Nance-Holt, mother of Blair Holt; and Wanda Johnson, mother of Oscar Grant. Each of these women could have a meaningful book (one of them has already published) but I think a book by or about all of them could be very compelling.
Khizr & Ghazala Khan
Erica Smegielski, whose mother Dawn was the principal of Sandy Hook Elementary and was killed while trying to protect her students. Erica is an advocate for common sense gun violence prevention.
And finally Khizr Khan whose son Humayun S. M. Khan was a University of Virginia graduate and who enlisted in the army. Khan was one of 14 American Muslims who died serving the US in the ten years after 9/11.
Did you see any others who might be great subjects, or authors of potential books? Let me know.
Well, obviously you could throw a donut in the general direction of any of these people and land a viable book deal… (As opposed to Trump’s Bunch, where you could bounce a rock off of most anyone there and just waste a perfectly good rock) And I must confess I’ve kind of red-lined on all the personal drama stories from whatever part of the spectrum-everybody’s got ’em, and the only reason they aren’t bankable is the relative anonymity of the people they happened to. Pray allow me to illustrate: Once upon a time, back when Dr. Strangelove was being seriously considered as a running mate for Barry Goldwater, my elementary school in San Antonio TX used to hold an annual Civil Defense Emergency drill (to break up the mad social whirl of our monthly fire drills, which were kind of fun) which consisted of them playing a scary doom-wail air raid siren over the loudspeaker and then leaving our mostly clueless teachers to explain to a bunch of 4th graders what plans were afoot for World War III. (These drills were no joke-people on both sides of the Iron Curtain were making serious plans..!) Anyway, our teacher explained that after the scary siren, we’d all line up and march out of the school just like a fire drill, whereupon my friend Blaine piped up and said, “Hey, why don’t we just go downstairs to the basement where the cafeteria is? They gotta big sign down there that says FALLOUT SHELTER!” My friend Will agreed, pointing out that we could take our favorite books from the school library with us and eat chili dogs till the danger was past. Our teacher glared at them and said, “Oh, no, children-in a Civil Defense Emergency we will march outside and you will all be SENT IMMEDIATELY HOME!” My buddies stared at me in shock; expert testimony was clearly needed. So I jumped up and pointed out that the Japanese had played a siren just like the one we’d just heard when GIGANTIS THE FIRE MONSTER rose out of Osaka harbor on the Shock Theatre Late Show and judging
by what happened to most of the city soon after, home was the last place you wanted to head for in a Civil Defense Emergency. In spite of our superior grasp of facts on these matters, my friends and I were arrested on the spot and sent to the Principal’s Office for being smart alecks. Our principle was an ominous, unsmiling woman with eyes like Dracula’s Daughter (I spent way too much time watching the Shock Theatre Late Show in those days) who clarified matters wonderfully by brandishing a large wooden paddle the size of a surfboard and promising that if we ever smarted off about Civil Defense procedures again she’s make us wish we’d been hit by a hydrogen bomb… We said, Yes maam, thank you, maam, we can see ourselves back to class, thank you very much, and marched away knowing that someday while we were getting stomped into radioactive ash by Gigantis The Fire Monster or whoever his Soviet stand-in was, our principle and home room teacher would be safely down in the cafeteria Fallout Shelter eating up all the chili dogs and reading our favorite library books. I offered to tell this story on Hillary’s behalf, but she won’t return my phone calls…