The Way Home Looks Now was initially inspired by my dad coaching my brother’s team. It was the early 1970s, and a girl wanted to join the team, and the way my dad handled it — and I’m not gonna give too much away here — was something that I always admired about what he did and how he thought, and and even though it was handled a bit differently, memorializing his values and what he was kind of showing me by doing what he did.
Oh, so for The Way Home Looks Now I visited the Little League Museum in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. I went there originally just to see the stadium to see if it was as I had seen it on TV, but they also have this fabulous museum where I saw news clippings that I had been looking for because, you know, as you know, in The Way Home Looks Now one of the issues is girls playing baseball, and I kept looking, and I couldn’t find the thing where people were, like, you know, a girl shouldn’t play baseball because blah, blah, blah.
And it was there where I actually saw things where people were saying things like, “Girls shouldn’t play baseball because if they get hurt then a male coach would have to touch them,” or “Girls shouldn’t play baseball because there are no bathrooms for them.” Like, these were completely unsolvable problems, and they also had some great video clips I hadn’t been able to find showing some of Taiwan’s games and some of their kinda highlights, so that was a real treat for me to see all that.