TUS01505- June – Lost and Found – Part 2

Marc Moss: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Tele Something podcast. I’m your host, Marc Moss, founder and executive director of Tele something. The next tele something event is October 7th, 2025. The theme is, welcome the Wild Side. You can learn about how to pitch your story and get tickets@tellussomething.org. This week on the podcast,

Aunvada Being: I asked him if he wanted to open up and he jumped at it.

He was thrilled and that was shocking to me and also terrifying and I’m, I wish that maybe I had been a bit more terrified.

Jilnar Mansour: Here I am in a refugee camp in Palestine with four other Americans, and what we’re doing is we’re witnessing the let up of a curfew. Curfew is something that was happening then and is still happening now, where people are not able to leave their home for hours or.[00:01:00]

Days at a time.

Marc Moss: Four storytellers share their true personal story on the theme. Lost and found.

Steve Schmidt: I take position on the left side of the doorway. My partner fills in the position of the right side of the doorway, and we fill this space naturally. Our guns are drawn because we’re searching this residence and I yell,

Lauren Tobias: sir, on the sixth day, I, I got a phone call and there was three kids on the other line and they were calling from the Wolf Point Pizza Joint.

I was like, hello? They were like, all they said was, we found your dog.

Marc Moss: Their stories were recorded. Live in person on June 30th, 2025 at Ogren Park at Allegiance Field in Missoula, Montana. Closing out Pride Month. On this episode of the podcast, we’re trying out something a little different. Tell us something.

Board member Beth Ann Osteen generously offered to bring in a professional sound engineer to better capture the feeling of a live event. We’re going to try to keep the essence of the live evening by [00:02:00] using the storyteller introductions as I introduce the storytellers the night of the event. As usual, I’ll give a little teaser the story before the storyteller shares their story.

We’d love to hear from you what you think. Shoot me an email and let me know how you like the new format. You can email me at info@tellussomething.org. Love it, hate it. Let me know what you think. Thanks. Huge thanks. Goes out to the Greater Montana Foundation who encourages communication on issues, trends, and values of importance to Montanans.

We are so grateful to the Greater Montana Foundation for their support to make the June event possible. Tell us something acknowledges that this land where Ogre Park, uh, ogre Park now stands is the ancestral territory of the Salish and Kalispell peoples who have stewarded it for generations.

Summertime is traditionally the prime time for indigenous peoples to [00:03:00] gather various berries and roots that are in season while the bitter bitterroot are already harvested. Now is the time for processing and storing any remaining bitterroot that have been gathered. Another staple Camus bulbs are being dug and prepared for storage.

Huckleberry’s, serviceberries, and choke cherries are ripening and being harvested for immediate consumption and for drying to preserve in winter. We take this moment to honor its land and the native people and the stories that they share with us to honor them, you can support the ongoing efforts of the Confederated Salish and Kni tribes by learning about their cultural initiatives and advocating for indigenous rights.

More information can be found@kskt.org. Woo.

Tell us something. Stories sometimes have adult themes. Storytellers sometimes use adult language. Please take care of yourselves from a childhood crush to a series [00:04:00] of unexpected turns on Vada being shares her story, following her lifelong journey of self-discovery and the difficult choices she made along the way.

Listen to an vada as she navigates a societal expectations, personal struggles, and ultimately finds her true self amidst unforeseen losses. Onda calls her story. Skittles. Thanks for listening.

Aunvada Being: Since I was a little girl, I knew that I liked girls, and when I thought to do this, a picture of myself came to my mind At Girl Scout Camp, I’m in Pocahontas, hiking boots and shorts, a flannel and a bucket hat. It was pretty cringey, but still one of my favorite things to wear.

Um, when I [00:05:00] was about seventh grade, I met this girl. She was throwing Skittles at me as on the bus, and she became one of the dearest loves of my life. Uh, we spent three years together. Having a blast. Uh, and early on in that time, when we were about 12, we were at a party, at a friend’s house. It wasn’t really our age party.

Her brother was throwing one, and there I met a man and his name was not necessary, but for the sake of the story, Brad. So at that party, he gets a camera and he interviews me about my interest in girls. And it was a very inappropriate situation. He was much older than I was, but I didn’t understand where that was gonna go.

About three years later we’re 15 years old. Sarah and I and Rascally, we’ve, we started drinking and, uh, really kind of [00:06:00] becoming,

oh, chaotic little messes really. And, uh, hard to control. So this guy appears in my life again and I. He offers to, you know, take care of me, uh, and wanted me to move in. I thought, I am a nut for a, I should probably take him up on this, uh, or I’m, it’s gonna probably go pretty poorly for me. I moved in with him and I thought, this is gonna be fine.

I’m gonna have a 1950 style life and, uh, it’s just gonna be, you know, beautiful blue birds and sunshine all the time. And it was nothing like that at all. Uh, it was very chaotic. It was violent and difficult for me to understand from my young perspective. And what was more difficult for me was that I found out [00:07:00] over those years that he was not okay with the fact that I liked girls, which was pretty difficult for me because then I had to accept that.

I was going to be in this relationship forever without that opportunity to ever, uh, have that experience again. Uh, my 21st birthday came around and all I wanted for that was to go to the strip club, and we did. It was great. I drank a ton, got to go up on the stage, uh, and it was a blast. She invited me home.

I was thinking that’s what was gonna happen. And I got down off the stage and Brad says, we need to go. And I get in the car and I was still thinking, this is great. And then I found out he did not, he did not think it was as great as I did at all. Uh, in fact, he had seen the way I looked at her and realized I would never look at him that way.[00:08:00]

And so for about a year after that, things got much worse and I spent. All that time trying to convince him that I loved him and thought he was attractive. But now I really wonder whether I was trying to convince myself of that or not. And so, look at the divorce. I lost my son in that as well. And I don’t go too deeply because that’s its whole story in its own.

But it broke me. It was hard. I was just barely 21 and I went rampant. I ended up pregnant again. And, uh, ironically or not, I had found out two weeks after breaking up with the guy, um, and we broke up because I was making out with a girl at the MMA fights. Uh, you know, if I just learned from my lessons. [00:09:00] So.

Two years go by. I have my daughter and I, there’s a girl I was very interested in that time, but didn’t pursue it. And then I almost dated another woman. But this man came into my life and my daughter called her dad. And I had not had examples of how to have a, a female female relationship in my life. So it didn’t even seem possible to be able to introduce that.

I went back into this heterosexual relationship, uh, with a guy and I spent about eight years with him. And because of the effects from the first relationship, he had no idea about my interest in girls. Not at all. Uh, we got married and I felt pretty secure. So one day I thought, you know. [00:10:00] I’m gonna have to say something or I’m not gonna make it.

I was losing myself completely, and I did, and I asked him if he wanted to open up and he jumped at it. He was thrilled. And that was shocking to me and also terrifying. And I’m, I wish that maybe I had been a bit more terrified because I spent about two years fielding a lot of text messages, asking if it was okay that he had sent pictures to them.

Uh, it was crazy and I, I lost my mind. I was sad. Three kids and a husband, a second one, and I didn’t have what I was realizing I needed.

So two years go by and we meet a girl and about one month in. [00:11:00] Uh, he left me for her, which was not what I was expecting when I opened up the relationship at all. I, I, I broke completely after that. Like I found out I was getting a divorce very suddenly and I couldn’t pull myself together. I didn’t expect to lose two relationships.

I didn’t expect to have kids like scattered, uh, amongst these different homes. I, I lost everything that mattered to me. Everything that I thought defined who I was as a good lady, my, my kids, my husband, my dog, my kid, my things. All of that was gone in all of this, and that is its own long story about how it all got lost, but.

What I [00:12:00] found when I lost everything was that I had covered up everything that allowed me to glow with all of these things that people said I needed to have, to be able to be okay.

So when I, uh, pardon me,

when I came back here to Missoula after what felt like an odyssey, but was really just a year, I ended up at the Tell Us Something event coming home, and it, it was very literal for me to come home to Montana, but then also to hear all these stories. It was pride Month that I. Could identify with everything that people were saying.

And I spent this last year thinking about it all [00:13:00] and thought about everything that I had applied to myself and questioned whether it did actually apply to me, whether I agreed with the people who’d said it, whether I agreed with the statements and I didn’t. I said it, and here I am now. And what I found was that once I lost everything, I found myself.

Marc Moss: I must apologize to Anada for mispronouncing her name when I introduced her the night of the show. You’ll hear me do that here, Anada. I’m so sorry. Thank you for your grace. Avada. Being Avada was blessed with a creative [00:14:00] Western spirit she was born in and has lived in Missoula for 35, up for 37 years.

She’s keenly aware of the vast history of all the lands we walk and is deeply grateful to walk them. She picked magical Missoula as her home after spending a year living off grid near the garden of the Gods in Colorado. In our next story, NAR Mansour, a Lebanese American volunteer in the volatile heart of a Palestinian refugee camp confronts the harrowing realities of a strict curfew set by the Israeli Defense forces.

Amidst chaos and desperation, she recounts an extraordinary act of quick thinking and unexpected alliance leading to a moment where vulnerability becomes a powerful tool for survival. Listen to Zulnar share the difficult choices that she made and the blurred lines of impact versus intention in a story that she calls Who made your breakfast?

Thanks for listening.[00:15:00]

Jilnar Mansour: Here I am in a refugee camp in Palestine with four other Americans, and what we’re doing is we’re witnessing the let up of a curfew. Curfew is something that was happening then and is still happening now, where people are. Not able to leave their home for hours or days at a time. At this point, I think people were on curfew for 11 or 12 days.

And so we were watching people running from one direction to the other, trying to exchange goods. There were no new resources or no new resources in the area, uh, often [00:16:00] and at that time ever. So this would be like someone running to the next village to exchange rice for a flower that had not been peed on by the Israeli Defense Force or the IDF.

So we have people in different villages and, uh, we’re witnessing this chaos. Nah, we hear. Next is Yaha Yan and the soldiers are screaming you animals, you animals. They’re going to stop the curfew. It’s only been a matter of an hours. So there’s been a security breach and now the soldiers want people to go in to whatever home, a stranger’s home, and they’re being called animals so quickly.

Well, in advance of this trip, we had done some affinity training. This was the Michigan Peace team. They had recruited me to travel to [00:17:00] Palestine after seeing me speak about the conflict there for so many years, putting on human rights conferences at law schools. And I thought they were wild for recruiting me.

Um, I had spent time in southern Lebanon, a year and a half under occupation by the Israeli Defense Force. And, um, the odds were differently against me traveling in this. But I definitely thought it was time for me to see what it was I spoke about and what I studied about. So I decided to go, and here I am, we also had done this affinity training on how to make quick decisions, um, in tricky situations.

So I huddled, uh, the people together and I said, it’s, we gotta get the women and children home back to their village. [00:18:00] Everybody quickly said, yeah, that sounds like a great idea. And one guy that had, uh, recruited me the hardest and um, thought that there’d be some rom-com love story of him having me in his life and, uh, traveling to Palestine with a Middle Eastern woman.

So he was kind of against it. He wasn’t in charge and whatever, uh, democratically I won. And this is the story about me creating a checkpoint in the land that they call Israel or Palestine. I quickly turned and found a woman of beauty and knew that I needed her help. And so I grabbed this woman with long red hair from Brooklyn and said, come with me.

And she, she came with me. And as we walked over towards the soldier, I asked her to ask the soldier, uh, who made his breakfast, and she did. [00:19:00] And he conveniently answered his truth, which was that his mother made his breakfast. It was easy to slip it to a space of vulnerability and humanity with him. And in that conversation, he let us know that him and most of his friends pray each morning that they’ll never have to use their gun.

You see in Israel. Men and women are conscribed to three years of military service and during that time they must carry their artillery. It was an interesting fact. So he was ready to help negotiate something that was less than violent. So now we have lines of women and children on both sides of this file of soldiers and they’re checking paperwork and, well, I, I got my way, but I created a checkpoint.

So women and children got home presuming something [00:20:00] didn’t happen to them on the way home. This was during the second Intifada or the second uprising 25 years ago. One of the other things that I did on this trip was, and many of the volunteers, we. Held our passports outside of ambulances for the U-P-M-R-C or the Red Crescent or Red Cross in order for the ambulances to be able to get to the homes to help, uh, people.

Turns out when you’re locked in your home, uh, a lot of babies are made or domestic violence happens. So we would protect the ambulances and make sure they could get back to the clinic to care for people with our American passports, it was, uh, something we were hoping, uh, would, would create safety.

So I helped babies be [00:21:00] born, essentially, and I look back on that experience and I know in both situations where I created a checkpoint and helped babies get born, I had the best of intention. And there’s a part of my life dedicated to studying impact over intention. Uh, in many ways, I think that maybe our actions are not responsible unless we know how it impacts ourself, others, and the whole.

But I know that those babies are 25 years old now and able to see themselves or their loved ones be blown up. I don’t know what is right or what if I did was right. I do know what I saw.

Thank you.

Marc Moss: Nar Mansour. NAR is a [00:22:00] person who creates spaces for all to be loved and heard in order to stop generational violence. Nar is the daughter of an immigrant. She is a survivor. NAR stands for love. As we were working Jill NA’s story, she shared with me more about what the experience was like for her, how she came to decide to go to Palestine, and some interactions with children there.

That stuck with her.

Jilnar Mansour: When I asked my dad to go to Palestine, well, when the Michigan Peace team approached me about going to Palestine, I was like, you guys are crazy. You guys have a privilege that I don’t have to travel in that way. But I’ve already been to the Middle East and I’m on list when I travel in Lebanon.

I’ve never taken citizenship there, but I’ve been offered it. But I do travel in Lebanon on a Lebanese ID card, and I have tried to cross into the country they call [00:23:00] Israel from Southern Lebanon. This is that bad neighborhood. So this causes concern. You get on a list when you try and cross that border. Oh, and my folks tried a couple of times when I was a child to cross me over the border.

I wasn’t allowed, uh, either way. So finally I convinced myself I wanted to go to Palestine to be able to be of witness to that which I speak about. And so I told my father that I was going, I asked his permission. He never said no. He never said yes. He never said no. So, because he never said no, it was a yes for me.

He said, I, I need to talk with them. And my father is very image oriented. Mm-hmm. And so the woman who was gonna be the base operations person in the US for a trip, my father is not one to speak [00:24:00] Arabic in front of non-A speaking people ever. And that day, for whatever reason, he decided to start to speak to me in Arabic, very rudely.

And so he said, what are you gonna do for my daughter? And she said, well, we have these affinity trainings and you know, we’ll call a lawyer if we need to, if she gets somehow detained over there. And my dad’s just rolling his eyes just, it’s like the peanuts mom talking to him. He’s just like, whatever. And he looked at me and, and then looked at her and he said, in English, there’s nothing you’re gonna do for her.

And then he looked at me and he said,

so he said, my daughter is a soldier of peace. She’ll be helping you. That’s when I received my yes to go. But he remained pretty firm that [00:25:00] I knew. What I was getting into more than they knew what they were putting me into. And I was never confused as a young person that I was gonna go make change. But I think many people that I traveled with thought they were gonna do something.

I just wanted to witness what was going on. So I become a little bit differently versed. Just like in war. There’s war theory, right? There’s ways to go to war. These children pick up on these things and they know their children. So I say, aren’t you afraid of being shot? They said Anyone would hesitate to shoot a child, and by that time, I’m quick enough to be gone.

That’s what they banked on. Another child told me

he witnessed his best friend get shot and blown up. [00:26:00] They picked up a ball, it had gunpowder in it. He touched his friend and the sniper shot and it blew the kid up and that kid wanted to be a freedom fighter. Coming

Marc Moss: up after the break,

Steve Schmidt: I take position on the left side of the doorway. My partner fills in the position of the right side of the doorway, and we fill this space Naturally.

Our guns are drawn because we’re searching this residence. And I yell, sir,

Lauren Tobias: on the sixth day, I, I got a phone call and there was three kids on the other line and they were calling from the Wolf Point Pizza Joint. I was like, hello? They were like, all they said was, we found your dog.

Marc Moss: That’s next on the Tell Us Something podcast.

Remember that. The next tell us something event is October 7th. You can learn about how to pitch your story and get tickets@tellussomething.org. Thanks to our media sponsors, [00:27:00] Missoula events.net and Missoula Broadcasting Company. Learn more about Missoula Broadcasting Company and listen online@missoulabroadcastingcompany.com.

Thanks to our in-kind sponsors Float Missoula. Learn more@floatmsla.com and Joyce of tile.

Joyce Gibbs: Hi, it’s Joyce from Joyce of Tile. If you need tile work done, give me a shout. I specialize in custom tile installations. Learn more and see some examples of my work@joyceoftile.com.

Marc Moss: Remember that the next tell us something event is October 7th.

You can learn about how to pitch your story and get tickets@tellussomething.org. Alright, let’s get back to the stories. You are listening to the Tell Us Something podcast. I’m Marc Moss opening up the second half of this episode of the Tell Us Something podcast. Steve Schmidt is a rookie police officer in Kansas City in 1997.

Steve responds to a seemingly routine recovered property [00:28:00] call that quickly escalates into a tense and dangerous encounter of a burglary in progress. What unfolds is a story of split second decisions, unexpected revelations, and a profound moment that would forever shape his understanding of duty perception, and the weight of a single choice.

Steve calls his story, get down on the ground. Do it now. Thanks for listening.

Steve Schmidt: It was 1997 and I was driving my car in South Kansas City when my radio began to speak to me. 5 44. 5 44 From Banister and Hillcrest. Go ahead. 5 44, respond to the area of a hundred and sixth and wall end on a reported recovered property call. Now I was a very, very young police officer. In fact, two years prior to this call, I graduated from the Kansas City, Missouri Police Academy.

[00:29:00] Nine days after turning 21 years old. I looked like I was about 15 and a half years old, and that I was just wearing a really authentic looking police Halloween costume. So I respond to the area of 106 and wall end where I’m greeted by a family, and we go through the typical, you don’t look old enough to be a cop thing.

They hand me over a duffel bag that they had found at the edge of their property that they thought might’ve been involved with a purse snatching in the area. I looked through the contents of this duffle bag and one thing stands out, and that’s an envelope with a name and address on it. So I check with dispatch and I see if there’s been any burglaries at that particular residence in the last 30 days or so.

They said there hasn’t been. So I said, hold me out at that address. Let me check with the homeowner. So I drive about three or four blocks away to this split level home where the main living residence is all on one level and the bedrooms are above the garages. [00:30:00] And I walk up to this house and I notice that the deadbolt is still in the locked position and the dwarf frame is splintered in towards the inside of the residence, meaning the door has been kicked in and it’s been recently burglar burglarized.

So I call for a second car because we’re gonna have to go inside and search this residence for any burglars that might be left inside. So I call for my second officer and he shows up and we do a procedure called holding the air, which means we have priority for any radio traffic on that particular frequency in case there’s an extreme emergency on the inside.

All the other officers know that we’re searching this house and it’s really important and pretty dangerous. So my officer partner shows up. We walk up to the front door and we open the door and we yell, police, is there anybody here? And I don’t hear any answer. We do a search of the main living area of the house, and I don’t see any [00:31:00] signs of burglary whatsoever, and I’m quite confused the fact that the VCR is still there because back in 1997, VCRs were the probably one of the most common things stolen from burglaries.

We still have the upstairs to search. So I begin to make my way up the flight of stairs and I see a bedroom on my right hand side. I see a bedroom straight ahead, and I see another doorway on the left. I peek into the first room and I see a suspect laying face down on the bed sleeping. The first signs of burglary I see are directly behind this individual where a dresser drawer is pulled out and sort of cockeyed a bit, and there’s some clothes thrown.

I take position on the left side of the doorway. My partner fills in the position of the right side of the doorway, and we fill this space naturally. Our guns are drawn because we’re searching this residence, and I yell, sir, he wakes up, gets up on his hands and knees, deer in the [00:32:00] headlight look, looking at me.

Do you live here? Yes. I don’t really like the way he answered that question, so I ask it again. Do you live here? No. Okay. We need you to get down off the bed now. Get down off the bed. He hops off the backside of the bed and he’s holding a T-shirt in his hand and he starts to say, I need to go outside. I need to go outside.

I need to go outside. He walks to the end of the bed and pretty much the, the width of a queen size bed is all that separates us. And if you imagine. A running back on the one yard line with one second left in the fourth quarter, and they’re given the ball trying to score that touchdown. This guy charges us.

We both have our handguns out. I know that in order for him to reach out and grab my handgun, he has to drop this t-shirt first as he hits us. Both my partner and I holster up [00:33:00] simultaneously and we hit the back wall. We drop to the ground and he starts pushing and kicking. I need to go outside. I need to go outside.

I’m on the radio assist, assist, assist, and I have visions of top gun in my head going, eject, eject, eject. Because all I want to do is get outta there. We fall down the flight of stairs. I’m on top of the suspect, the suspect’s on top of my partner. We land at the base of the stairs, glass breaking from a nearby coffee table.

I am trying to get this individual’s hands behind his back, and I am just not strong enough. My little 15 and a half year old sized body just isn’t gonna do it. I let go of his left arm, I get a handcuff on his right arm, and I just yell, relax, and he just magically goes limp. And I get the handcuffs on. I get on the radio 5 44.

We got one party in custody. The house is still hot. Keep the officers coming because when I yell, assist, assist, assist on the radio, all the officers in the area drop everything they’re doing and they come rushing to [00:34:00] our aid. I run back upstairs to search the other rooms that are upstairs and this is where I see most of the evidence from the burglary.

Nobody else is in the house. I clear the air, I go downstairs. I said, we have one party in custody. Start me in an ambulance because this individual sustained a small cut on his arm from the fall. I begin to try to investigate who this guy is, and I’m asking him all these different questions, and he’s not telling me his name in any way, shape or form.

And in fact, all he keeps saying to me is, put your socks on. Put your socks on. And I’m like, thanks man. I appreciate it. As he’s sitting on the floor, I’m like, thanks, I appreciate it. I got my socks on and I go, are, are you on drugs? And he’s like, yes. And I’m like, okay. That was probably one of the dumbest questions I’ve ever asked anybody.

Like I knew he was on drugs, and I wish I remembered the exact line of questioning I had for this individual because one thing [00:35:00] led to another as I was trying to figure out who he was, and I asked him, what’s your mom’s name? And he goes, Theresa Williams. And I freeze. My partner looks at me and is like, what’s wrong?

I’m like, dude, Theresa Williams, that’s the name that was on the envelope in the duffel bag. Four blocks away that brought me here. This guy lives here and he’s not on drugs. I don’t know about you, but this is the closest I’ve ever come to shooting somebody and my partner goes, if you would’ve shot, I would’ve shot.

I go into the kitchen, I look through some paperwork, and I find some information about who his parents are. I get ahold of his dad, who’s a principal of a local high school in Kansas City, and I call him and I say, there’s been an incident here at the house. You need to come here. Your son’s [00:36:00] okay. We already had an ambulance for the, the, the son, and he was in the back of the ambulance being taken care of.

Dad gets there. And I’m explaining everything that happened that got, that led to me being in his house. And I’m to the point to where we were walking up the steps, I peeked inside and I saw him sleeping in the bed and I asked him, I was like, sir, do you live here? And he said, yes. And I said, I didn’t like the way he said that.

So I asked him again, sir, do you live here? And he said, no. And he goes, hold on a second. Let me tell you a little bit about my son. My son is 33 years old and he has autism. He gets dropped off by a cab every single day. He has a garage door opener in his backpack, and he’s enter, enter the house through the garage door.

He goes into the kitchen, he makes himself a sandwich, and then he goes upstairs and lays down in one of the three bedrooms and goes asleep until we get home. If you ask my son a yes, no question, he will always respond with yes. If you [00:37:00] ask him that question again, he assumes the only reason why you’re asking him that question is the second time is he must have got the the first one wrong.

So he is gonna answer no. So, do you live here? Yes. Do you live here? No. And I’m thinking, how are we supposed to figure this out when I have a burglary suspect in front of me

not pulling the trigger? That day was the best decision I’ve ever made in my entire life. If I would’ve harmed that guy,

I would not be here today.

The headline in the newspaper across the country the next day would’ve been two white officers shoot an unarmed, autistic black man in his own home, and I would not have been able to live with that.

It’s been 28 years, and I think about this guy [00:38:00] often. I have so much love for him and his family, and I hope life has been kind to him. And if he was here today,

I would just wanna say, I’m sorry, I scared you.

Marc Moss: Steve Schmidt, also known as Schmidty, starting from his small town origins in Malta, Montana. Schmidty is dedicated to positive change. With eight years experience as a police officer in Kansas City, Schmidty has developed strong skills in law enforcement and community engagement, all while connecting with thousands of fans as a professional mascot.

Now based here in Missoula, Schmidt Schmidty [00:39:00] leads Drive Safe Missoula, a traffic safety initiative within Missoula Public Health. That’s focused on saving lives through education. His expertise extends nationally where he speaks on influencing behavior and leveraging AI for road safety and public health.

Schmitty stopped by the tell us something studios in the days following the event to share more about his story. Hey, I’m Marc Moss. Thanks for listening to the Tele Something podcast. We just heard from Schmitty, his story he told on June 30th, 2025 at Ogre Park, at Allegiance Field, and I caught up with Schmitty later after the fact.

I, I’m here with him now in the tele something studios. Hey, Schmitty.

Steve Schmidt: Hey Mark. How are you? It’s

Marc Moss: great to be here. Thanks for coming and thanks for initiating this. You, you’ve said you wanted to fill in some gaps.

Steve Schmidt: Yeah. You know, it was interesting going through the entire process of learning how to tell this story, which I think was so important [00:40:00] during that process.

Of course, when you get out there and you’re in front of everybody and you’re trying to stay at a time, you forget a few things, and there were some key elements of my story that I would love to share with people because I think people walked away with a few big question marks in their head about what the story really was all about.

Yeah, and if you just listened to the story, one thing that I failed to mention in front of the group of people was that we believe this individual. Uh, interrupted a burglary in progress and speaking with his dad about his autism and all of that stuff. He didn’t even have the ability to understand that he interrupted a burglary in progress.

So when he arrived home using a garage door opener, he comes into the house and he goes into the kitchen. He makes himself a sandwich and then goes and lays down in one of the bedrooms upstairs and waits for his parents to get home. That when the garage opened is when we believe the actual burglars that were inside the house.

Bolted out the front door, which is why so much of the house was left [00:41:00] undisturbed is they didn’t have that much time to really go through everything. So it was a really interesting situation, of course, being there live and trying to put all this into place and, and then reflecting on it basically over the last 28 years of what that scene was really like and how scary it must have been for that guy, you know, with us being there yelling at him in his bedroom and the fact that if those burglars that were in there, uh, thankfully most burglars aren’t out to really hurt people.

They, they try to go into places when people aren’t there and thankfully they left, but thankfully they didn’t do anything to harm this individual either,

Marc Moss: you know? Yeah. And I’m, I was always so curious, you could have responded to that situation in so many different ways.

Steve Schmidt: Yeah, absolutely. And that’s a scary thing.

You know, I think I may have mentioned like when we were falling down the stairs and I was putting the assist out on the radio and I was yelling, assist, assist, assist. You know, it was images of the top gun movie, eject, [00:42:00] eject, eject that were going through my head because I was so scared at that moment. I mean, I wanted to get out of there and it was weird how I’m like looking back on it that evening why my brain responded that way and how I had those images in my head as we are falling down the stairs and I’m on the radio yelling, assist, assist, thinking that there’s still other people in the house.

Who are going to come out of the house and be shooting at us as we are falling down the stairs and trying to put all of that information together. It was just a really

Marc Moss: crazy moment. Right, and you still didn’t know, had no idea that he wasn’t actually right. Perpetrator?

Steve Schmidt: Yeah. Yeah. We thought he was the burglary suspect that for one reason or another, here he is in the house and he was acting very strange.

So it made sense that if he was on drugs, maybe he stayed behind for one reason or another, stranger things have happened. Then of course, I’m not thinking at that moment when I see this individual laying on the bed that, okay, so if this [00:43:00] is the burglar, then how did the duffel bag with the contents end up four blocks away?

Like, you don’t think about those questions in that moment. Right. Um, but you know, as things settled down and we were asking him questions and trying to figure out who he was, those things are the things that started to pop into my head, which ultimately led me to ask him. What’s your mom’s name? And then when he said his mom’s name, you know, I just froze.

I mean, I was just, you know, sick to my stomach automatically. I mean, this is the closest I’ve ever come to pulling the trigger on somebody. And thankfully our, you know, our training, the constant ongoing training that we have to deal with these situations allowed me the ability at such a young age to make the right decision at that time, to not pull the trigger, which I think was vitally important, you know?

Marc Moss: Yeah. Clearly we never hear this story. Yeah. We always hear the story of, of the cop that made the wrong decision.

Steve Schmidt: Right. That’s what makes the news.

Marc Moss: And how do we get [00:44:00] more of this story? How do these cops who have made the wrong decision, or how the cops that haven’t yet made the wrong decision because they haven’t been placed in this circumstance.

Steve Schmidt: Yeah.

Marc Moss: How do we get them that kind of training or you know, like I, it just blows my mind, you know? And some people, some of the listeners don’t know that my dad was a cop, so I’m very familiar with police training and what’s required and decision making. And in tough circumstances, he was on the police force in cities about the size of Missoula in Ohio near Akron for 40 years as a detective, and also out on the streets and.

It’s not easy work.

Steve Schmidt: Right, right. It’s not easy work in any way, shape or form. And most of the issues that I have seen over the last several decades when it comes to police officers making the bad call or you know, really negative press related to police officers, I always chalk it up to, well, there was a failure in training [00:45:00] that occurred that allowed this to occur the way it did.

And so I wonder how departments really focus on, analyze these situations internally to utilize the worst case scenarios or the worst case situations that are being broadcast maybe nationally. How do they utilize that as an opportunity to learn to make their departments better? And I was really impressed with the Kansas City, Missouri Police Department.

Not that I had anything to ever compare it to, but I was impressed with how well they analyzed situations from any use of force report to any sort of major interaction from citizen complaints. How do we utilize this to make our department better? And obviously, this was a long time ago when I was wearing the uniform and behind the badge, and it was before police officers had body cameras and.

We were just starting to get video cameras in our cars and it was still being recorded on VHS [00:46:00] tapes. And it was interesting how many officers were upset with the fact that they’re gonna be on tape because they would think that, oh, well this is just gonna be utilized to punish me when I do things wrong.

And I always had that concept of. You know what? I’m super excited that this is being recorded because one, I want my supervisors to be able to see all the good that I’m doing because just like the news doesn’t see it, my supervisors didn’t get to see it because they weren’t on every single call with me, right?

They might be on one call a week with me, and I have 28 calls a day that I was going on. So this’ll be an opportunity that they would be able to see the good work that I’m doing and utilize that maybe as a training opportunity for other young officers coming up. But I was really excited about the fact that if I ever made a mistake that it could be recorded, and not only myself, but every other officer had an opportunity to learn from it because we learned most from our mistakes.

And I would’ve a new [00:47:00] recruit student next to me in the car and I’d be like, Hey, what did we learn most from, we learned most from our mistakes? Well, then let’s go mess some stuff up. As long as it doesn’t result in a, you know, a hundred thousand dollars lawsuit and nobody gets injured or killed tonight, then let’s go say the wrong thing.

You know, not intentionally, of course, but let’s appreciate the fact that we said the wrong thing to the wrong person at the wrong time. And now we learn from that. And now we’re gonna have a 30 year career where we’ll never make that same mistake again. Yeah. So let’s mess it up now, learn the most we possibly can and, and make ourselves better, and then let’s share those lessons with everybody else so you don’t have to drive down this same exact road that I drove down to learn these hard lessons.

You know? And so that was the, the culture that was built into our environment in Kansas City that I was so impressed with is that everybody said, Hey, look, let’s, we’re all learning and we’re all gonna make mistakes. Let’s go. And it was.

Marc Moss: Closing out this episode of the Tell Us Something podcast. [00:48:00] What begins as an unlikely friendship for Lauren Tobias with a free spirited dog on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation in northwestern Montana takes a heartbreaking turn when the dog mysteriously disappears.

Days of agonizing searching lead to a devastating discovery, a poignant makeshift funeral, and an outpouring of community support. Just as grief settles in a shocking revelation, sends everything spiraling into an unbelievable twist. Lauren calls her story off leash. Thanks for listening.

Lauren Tobias: I never thought I’d have a dog. I, it’s not that I don’t love dogs, obviously, it’s that I just like the guilt of anyone who’s a dog on her nose. The guilt of just like watching them stare at you in your house, uh, it was just like too much for me. Um, so when I moved to the [00:49:00] Fort Peck reservation in 2018, late 2018, um, my perspective on dog relationship kind of got blown out of the water.

Um, anyone who, um, maybe in the, who’s listening in the audience might know, um, the relationship that people have with dogs there is just very symbiotic and, um, people consider the members of the community. It, from the outside, I might look like, um. It might look like they are just like, don’t have homes, but actually like people take, take care of them and it’s their meaningful parts, parts of the community.

And so when I, I met many, many dogs while I was living there. Um, I spent about four years and, uh, this one particular dog stood out to me. She was a big poofy, white, [00:50:00] fluffy dog, and she had a slap happy personality. I would see her on the streets with like this pack, this like mi um, miscellaneous pack with dogs.

And every time she saw me, she would like jump on me and like greet me. And we had this like, developing relationship over the course of months. And she would do this thing where I swear she like, knew that she could make people laugh. Um, direct eye contact and like a foot long tongue, just like. Hanging out of her mouth.

And, um, she would like dip her shoulder butt would just flop down to the floor like a seal’s tail. And then she would just like get on her belly to ask for belly rubs and she would just like still be making eye contact with you. And so that’s how I like met her. And, um, eventually she kind of started following me, like in town and we sort of developed a courtship and after a couple months decided to make it official, [00:51:00] which meant that I got her vaccinated and slapped a collar on her.

Um, and a week later she told me that she was pregnant and I was not the father. And so, um, that was our first experience together. So my whole thing about the guilt and the dogs, um, we had this very fluid relationship. And we never went there just for the record. Um, um, so she, we, we had this like, come and go.

She would just sort of like sit on my porch all day and she would kinda like knock on the door. She wanted to come in in the house, she’d knock on the door if she wanted to leave, she’d wander around all day. So, um, it was kind of perfect, like we just had developed trust and then through like the raising of her babies, like we developed even more of like this really [00:52:00] natural, beautiful trust.

And, um, she was like my best friend. It sounds like cliche, but it was true. Everyone in town that knew me knew that she was my dog. And um, so yeah, we spent probably about a year that she was kind of like with me. Um, and so because of our, the nature of our relationship, when she didn’t show up home one night, I didn’t really think very much of it.

Um, and then two nights went by and I was like, you know, she’s done this before, you know, it’s probably no big deal. Um, three nights, four nights go by and I’m like, okay. Like I let her out of the house with a collar, without a collar on because I like didn’t always put a collar on her when she was, um, leaving the house.

’cause we had just kind of come in and out. And so I was like, she probably got lost. And, um, I hung up posters all over Wolf Point. Those of you who know Wolf Point, probably like, didn’t take that long to cover the town. It’s pretty small, small town. But um, on the sixth [00:53:00] day I got a phone call and, uh, it was from, there were three kids on the other line and they were calling from the Wolf Point Pizza joint, uh, like the, the, the dial phone there.

And they were like, I was like, hello? Uh, they were like, all they said was, we found your dog. And I was like, oh my God. Like, where can I come get her? Like, yes, thank you so much. Like, I’ll be right there. And I was just met with silence on the other line, and this was like literally the first time throughout the entire six days where I was like, like maybe something’s wrong.

Like maybe she’s, something happened to her. I never considered it. She grew up around cars and she was always really good around, you know, cars and stuff. So I never thought that that was like a possibility. So I run across town, I drive across town, I pick them up and they, I’d ask them to show me where she was.[00:54:00]

And when we start walking up to the train tracks, I was like, like, oh my God. Like, no way. Um, so I walk up and I see, I walk up and I see her body deflated and, and lifeless and just like formed to the, uh, reels of the track. And yeah, sorry, that was really graphic. Um, so the kids are still with me and they’re like, this is the most interesting thing that’s happened to us all day.

We just located your dead dog off of a missing poster sign. So we’re like, here for this. And I was like, can you please leave me for a second? And so they did. And they left me for like, you know, 10 minutes. And then I saw them circling back and I was like, okay, I think we’re in this. And I’m like, okay, if I was, I, you know, if I’m remembering myself as a child and I had done that, like sleuthing, like I’d probably be pretty invested too.

So I was like, all right, you can come with me. And they were like, what are you gonna do? I’m like, [00:55:00] I don’t know. Do you have any ideas? Never been in the situation before. So, um, they came with me. I went back to my house, I grabbed a bathrobe, went back to the train tracks. I wrapped her up 65 pounds, picked her up, put her in my trunk.

Uh, did the only thing I could think to, you know, thank the kids. Went to the McDonald’s drive through, dog still in the back of my trunk. Um, and, and then I took them home and I go home. And now I’m like alone for the first time making phone calls. Uh, and I’m getting text messages from people I didn’t even tell, sending their condolences.

Um, and I made a, an appointment the next morning with the Wolf Point Crematorium. They said they’d make an exception and Cree made a dog, um, the next day. So my friends who live downstairs, three friends came upstairs. They were devastated because they like, loved her too. They knew her spirit. Um, [00:56:00] and we had like probably the most beautiful funeral and ceremony that I’ve ever been to.

We took her body out of the trunk, we put it on her bed, uh, outside in like this kind of mud room. And we, um, put her toys around her, her treats, sweet grass, sage. They, they kind of burned sage and we were drinking whiskey, laughing, uh, crying. And there was like also this moment I wanted to stamp her paw print.

I was like, which arm am I gonna get tattooed? Um, I wanted to stamp her paw print on something like sentimental. The closest thing I could find was my ukulele. I can’t get into that side quest right now. But basically it was like some ped tremors, um, a uh, nail polish, navy blue nail polish. And my friend’s CSI knowledge about like rolling it, which like was not intuitive at all.

It was like a mess. But it gave us like the first belly laugh of, of like the 24 hours. And, um, so I went to [00:57:00] bed, got a really terrible night’s sleep. And I wake up the next morning, I’m flipping pancakes. I’m still, I’m still crying. And, um, I, it’s the first thing I’ve eaten since the McDonald’s the day before at like 3:00 PM and I get a text message on my phone and I see a picture.

Someone forwards me a Facebook post and I see a picture of my dog. Um, I know I’ve lost credibility of saying this, but it was her, the, the picture. I’m like, why, why is someone sending me this? I look at the caption and it says, and anyone know who sweet dog this is? Like, she showed up on my porch today. I look at the timestamp.

It was yesterday, so I’m like, maybe it’s an old picture. I don’t know. And so I message her, find her address. Then my friend mush from the night before the funeral comes banging on my door and it’s like, have you seen [00:58:00] this? Her text message, like she just got it forwarded to you. And, and so I’m like, shut the fuck up.

Like, I don’t know, like, please don’t get my hopes out. We’re like, drive. So I’d like make her get in the car with me. We drive six miles to get to this person’s house and we open the door out. Comes running my actual dog.

This is Fluffer.

Um, she’s seven years old now, and we’re a pet therapy team. Um, uh, yeah. And so she, nothing happened. She was just pumped. She was like, wow, haven’t seen you in a week. Like, what’s up? Like, I’ve been through a lot. Like, whew. She didn’t like look like she lost weight because she just, you know. [00:59:00] She’s chilling.

She probably made some friends. And so anyway, the the de ma of this story is, um, I still have the dog in my closet, you know?

Um, yeah. So the appointment to get her cremated was like in an hour. And so I did the best thing I could do. I took real fluffer in the rod daylight. It was April. So the ground was really hard. I tried, I promise I did my best. I know this is not environmentally friendly, but I like took a, the bathrobe, the dog dug a shallow grave in the hills of Wolf Point.

Um, and yeah, I, that was it. And then, um, I invited the kids to come on an adventure with Fluffy and I, and they got to meet her and hear the things I was telling about. And, um. [01:00:00] Yeah, now we’re just living life and that’s, that’s my story of Lost and Found. So thank you.

Marc Moss: Closing out her evening. Tonight is Lauren Tobias. When Lauren moved to Montana from the suburbs of New York City nine years ago, in search of some peace and quiet she never could have expected she’d be making home here. She loved visiting the many nooks and crannies of Montana via highways, gravel, tire, track, roads, hiking trails, bike paths, and her favorite and eight cedar plane.

During her time here, she’s been called to infinitely learn from how to recognize what’s under the hood of her car to self-expression through photography, to embracing a queer identity, to picking up beer league, ice hockey in her thirties. Those last two things [01:01:00] are related only by pure coincidence she assures me.

Lauren has found more life here than she could have ever imagined. She spent COV living on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation, learning a more holistic history of our country and about the incredible culture and decolonization efforts of indigenous nations. You are listening to the Tell Us Something podcast.

I’m Marc Moss. Remember that the next tell us something event is October 7th. You can learn about how to pitch your story and get tickets@tellussomething.org. You can find us on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and Blue Sky and visit Tell us something.org to explore 14 years of our story archives and let me know what you thought of the new format.

You can email me at info@tellussomething.org to share your [01:02:00] thoughts.

Welcome to the Tele Something podcast. I’m your host, Marc Moss, founder and executive director of Tele something. The next tele something event is October 7th, 2025. The theme is, welcome the Wild Side. You can learn about how to pitch your story and get tickets@tellussomething.org. This week on the podcast, I asked him if he wanted to open up and he jumped at it.

He was thrilled and that was shocking to me and also terrifying and I’m, I wish that maybe I had been a bit more terrified. Here I am in a refugee camp in Palestine with four other Americans, and what we’re doing is we’re witnessing the let up of a curfew. Curfew is something that was happening then and is still happening now, where people are not able to leave their home for [01:03:00] hours or.

Days at a time. Four storytellers share their true personal story on the theme. Lost and found. I take position on the left side of the doorway. My partner fills in the position of the right side of the doorway, and we fill this space naturally. Our guns are drawn because we’re searching this residence and I yell, sir, on the sixth day, I, I got a phone call and there was three kids on the other line and they were calling from the Wolf Point Pizza Joint.

I was like, hello? They were like, all they said was, we found your dog. Their stories were recorded. Live in person on June 30th, 2025 at Ogren Park at Allegiance Field in Missoula, Montana. Closing out Pride Month. On this episode of the podcast, we’re trying out something a little different. Tell us something.

Board member Beth Ann Osteen generously offered to bring in a professional sound engineer to better capture the feeling of a live event. We’re going to try to keep the essence of [01:04:00] the live evening by using the storyteller introductions as I introduce the storytellers the night of the event. As usual, I’ll give a little teaser the story before the storyteller shares their story.

We’d love to hear from you what you think. Shoot me an email and let me know how you like the new format. You can email me at info@tellussomething.org. Love it, hate it. Let me know what you think. Thanks. Huge thanks. Goes out to the Greater Montana Foundation who encourages communication on issues, trends, and values of importance to Montanans.

We are so grateful to the Greater Montana Foundation for their support to make the June event possible. Tell us something acknowledges that this land where Ogre Park, uh, ogre Park now stands is the ancestral territory of the Salish and Kalispell peoples who have stewarded it for generations.

Summertime is traditionally the [01:05:00] prime time for indigenous peoples to gather various berries and roots that are in season while the bitter bitterroot are already harvested. Now is the time for processing and storing any remaining bitterroot that have been gathered. Another staple Camus bulbs are being dug and prepared for storage.

Huckleberry’s, serviceberries, and choke cherries are ripening and being harvested for immediate consumption and for drying to preserve in winter. We take this moment to honor its land and the native people and the stories that they share with us to honor them, you can support the ongoing efforts of the Confederated Salish and Kni tribes by learning about their cultural initiatives and advocating for indigenous rights.

More information can be found@kskt.org. Woo.

Tell us something. Stories sometimes have adult themes. Storytellers sometimes use adult language. Please take care of yourselves from a [01:06:00] childhood crush to a series of unexpected turns on Vada being shares her story, following her lifelong journey of self-discovery and the difficult choices she made along the way.

Listen to an vada as she navigates a societal expectations, personal struggles, and ultimately finds her true self amidst unforeseen losses. Onda calls her story. Skittles. Thanks for listening.

Since I was a little girl, I knew that I liked girls, and when I thought to do this, a picture of myself came to my mind At Girl Scout Camp, I’m in Pocahontas, hiking boots and shorts, a flannel and a bucket hat. It was pretty cringey, but still one of my favorite things to wear.

Um, when [01:07:00] I was about seventh grade, I met this girl. She was throwing Skittles at me as on the bus, and she became one of the dearest loves of my life. Uh, we spent three years together. Having a blast. Uh, and early on in that time, when we were about 12, we were at a party, at a friend’s house. It wasn’t really our age party.

Her brother was throwing one, and there I met a man and his name was not necessary, but for the sake of the story, Brad. So at that party, he gets a camera and he interviews me about my interest in girls. And it was a very inappropriate situation. He was much older than I was, but I didn’t understand where that was gonna go.

About three years later we’re 15 years old. Sarah and I and Rascally, we’ve, we started drinking and, [01:08:00] uh, really kind of becoming,

oh, chaotic little messes really. And, uh, hard to control. So this guy appears in my life again and I. He offers to, you know, take care of me, uh, and wanted me to move in. I thought, I am a nut for a, I should probably take him up on this, uh, or I’m, it’s gonna probably go pretty poorly for me. I moved in with him and I thought, this is gonna be fine.

I’m gonna have a 1950 style life and, uh, it’s just gonna be, you know, beautiful blue birds and sunshine all the time. And it was nothing like that at all. Uh, it was very chaotic. It was violent and difficult for me to understand from my young perspective. And what was more [01:09:00] difficult for me was that I found out over those years that he was not okay with the fact that I liked girls, which was pretty difficult for me because then I had to accept that.

I was going to be in this relationship forever without that opportunity to ever, uh, have that experience again. Uh, my 21st birthday came around and all I wanted for that was to go to the strip club, and we did. It was great. I drank a ton, got to go up on the stage, uh, and it was a blast. She invited me home.

I was thinking that’s what was gonna happen. And I got down off the stage and Brad says, we need to go. And I get in the car and I was still thinking, this is great. And then I found out he did not, he did not think it was as great as I did at all. Uh, in fact, he had seen the way I looked at her and realized I would never look at him that way.[01:10:00]

And so for about a year after that, things got much worse and I spent. All that time trying to convince him that I loved him and thought he was attractive. But now I really wonder whether I was trying to convince myself of that or not. And so, look at the divorce. I lost my son in that as well. And I don’t go too deeply because that’s its whole story in its own.

But it broke me. It was hard. I was just barely 21 and I went rampant. I ended up pregnant again. And, uh, ironically or not, I had found out two weeks after breaking up with the guy, um, and we broke up because I was making out with a girl at the MMA fights. Uh, you know, if I [01:11:00] just learned from my lessons. So.

Two years go by. I have my daughter and I, there’s a girl I was very interested in that time, but didn’t pursue it. And then I almost dated another woman. But this man came into my life and my daughter called her dad. And I had not had examples of how to have a, a female female relationship in my life. So it didn’t even seem possible to be able to introduce that.

I went back into this heterosexual relationship, uh, with a guy and I spent about eight years with him. And because of the effects from the first relationship, he had no idea about my interest in girls. Not at all. Uh, we got married and I felt pretty secure. So one day I thought, you [01:12:00] know. I’m gonna have to say something or I’m not gonna make it.

I was losing myself completely, and I did, and I asked him if he wanted to open up and he jumped at it. He was thrilled. And that was shocking to me and also terrifying. And I’m, I wish that maybe I had been a bit more terrified because I spent about two years fielding a lot of text messages, asking if it was okay that he had sent pictures to them.

Uh, it was crazy and I, I lost my mind. I was sad. Three kids and a husband, a second one, and I didn’t have what I was realizing I needed.

So two years go by and we meet a girl and about one month [01:13:00] in. Uh, he left me for her, which was not what I was expecting when I opened up the relationship at all. I, I, I broke completely after that. Like I found out I was getting a divorce very suddenly and I couldn’t pull myself together. I didn’t expect to lose two relationships.

I didn’t expect to have kids like scattered, uh, amongst these different homes. I, I lost everything that mattered to me. Everything that I thought defined who I was as a good lady, my, my kids, my husband, my dog, my kid, my things. All of that was gone in all of this, and that is its own long story about how it all got lost, but.[01:14:00]

What I found when I lost everything was that I had covered up everything that allowed me to glow with all of these things that people said I needed to have, to be able to be okay.

So when I, uh, pardon me,

when I came back here to Missoula after what felt like an odyssey, but was really just a year, I ended up at the Tell Us Something event coming home, and it, it was very literal for me to come home to Montana, but then also to hear all these stories. It was pride Month that I. Could identify with everything that people were saying.

And I spent this last [01:15:00] year thinking about it all and thought about everything that I had applied to myself and questioned whether it did actually apply to me, whether I agreed with the people who’d said it, whether I agreed with the statements and I didn’t. I said it, and here I am now. And what I found was that once I lost everything, I found myself.

I must apologize to Anada for mispronouncing her name when I introduced her the night of the show. You’ll hear me do that here, Anada. I’m so sorry. Thank you for your grace. Avada. Being Avada was [01:16:00] blessed with a creative Western spirit she was born in and has lived in Missoula for 35, up for 37 years.

She’s keenly aware of the vast history of all the lands we walk and is deeply grateful to walk them. She picked magical Missoula as her home after spending a year living off grid near the garden of the Gods in Colorado. In our next story, NAR Mansour, a Lebanese American volunteer in the volatile heart of a Palestinian refugee camp confronts the harrowing realities of a strict curfew set by the Israeli Defense forces.

Amidst chaos and desperation, she recounts an extraordinary act of quick thinking and unexpected alliance leading to a moment where vulnerability becomes a powerful tool for survival. Listen to Zulnar share the difficult choices that she made and the blurred lines of impact versus intention in a story that she calls Who made your breakfast?[01:17:00]

Thanks for listening.

Here I am in a refugee camp in Palestine with four other Americans, and what we’re doing is we’re witnessing the let up of a curfew. Curfew is something that was happening then and is still happening now, where people are. Not able to leave their home for hours or days at a time. At this point, I think people were on curfew for 11 or 12 days.

And so we were watching people running from one direction to the other, trying to exchange goods. There were no new resources or no new resources in the area, [01:18:00] uh, often and at that time ever. So this would be like someone running to the next village to exchange rice for a flower that had not been peed on by the Israeli Defense Force or the IDF.

So we have people in different villages and, uh, we’re witnessing this chaos. Nah, we hear. Next is Yaha Yan and the soldiers are screaming you animals, you animals. They’re going to stop the curfew. It’s only been a matter of an hours. So there’s been a security breach and now the soldiers want people to go in to whatever home, a stranger’s home, and they’re being called animals so quickly.

Well, in advance of this trip, we had done some affinity training. This was the Michigan Peace team. They had recruited me [01:19:00] to travel to Palestine after seeing me speak about the conflict there for so many years, putting on human rights conferences at law schools. And I thought they were wild for recruiting me.

Um, I had spent time in southern Lebanon, a year and a half under occupation by the Israeli Defense Force. And, um, the odds were differently against me traveling in this. But I definitely thought it was time for me to see what it was I spoke about and what I studied about. So I decided to go, and here I am, we also had done this affinity training on how to make quick decisions, um, in tricky situations.

So I huddled, uh, the people together and I said, it’s, we gotta get the women and children home back to their village. [01:20:00] Everybody quickly said, yeah, that sounds like a great idea. And one guy that had, uh, recruited me the hardest and um, thought that there’d be some rom-com love story of him having me in his life and, uh, traveling to Palestine with a Middle Eastern woman.

So he was kind of against it. He wasn’t in charge and whatever, uh, democratically I won. And this is the story about me creating a checkpoint in the land that they call Israel or Palestine. I quickly turned and found a woman of beauty and knew that I needed her help. And so I grabbed this woman with long red hair from Brooklyn and said, come with me.

And she, she came with me. And as we walked over towards the soldier, I asked her to ask the soldier, uh, who made his breakfast, [01:21:00] and she did. And he conveniently answered his truth, which was that his mother made his breakfast. It was easy to slip it to a space of vulnerability and humanity with him. And in that conversation, he let us know that him and most of his friends pray each morning that they’ll never have to use their gun.

You see in Israel. Men and women are conscribed to three years of military service and during that time they must carry their artillery. It was an interesting fact. So he was ready to help negotiate something that was less than violent. So now we have lines of women and children on both sides of this file of soldiers and they’re checking paperwork and, well, I, I got my way, but I created a checkpoint.

So women and children got home [01:22:00] presuming something didn’t happen to them on the way home. This was during the second Intifada or the second uprising 25 years ago. One of the other things that I did on this trip was, and many of the volunteers, we. Held our passports outside of ambulances for the U-P-M-R-C or the Red Crescent or Red Cross in order for the ambulances to be able to get to the homes to help, uh, people.

Turns out when you’re locked in your home, uh, a lot of babies are made or domestic violence happens. So we would protect the ambulances and make sure they could get back to the clinic to care for people with our American passports, it was, uh, something we were hoping, uh, would, would create safety.

So I helped [01:23:00] babies be born, essentially, and I look back on that experience and I know in both situations where I created a checkpoint and helped babies get born, I had the best of intention. And there’s a part of my life dedicated to studying impact over intention. Uh, in many ways, I think that maybe our actions are not responsible unless we know how it impacts ourself, others, and the whole.

But I know that those babies are 25 years old now and able to see themselves or their loved ones be blown up. I don’t know what is right or what if I did was right. I do know what I saw.

Thank you.

Nar Mansour. [01:24:00] NAR is a person who creates spaces for all to be loved and heard in order to stop generational violence. Nar is the daughter of an immigrant. She is a survivor. NAR stands for love. As we were working Jill NA’s story, she shared with me more about what the experience was like for her, how she came to decide to go to Palestine, and some interactions with children there.

That stuck with her. When I asked my dad to go to Palestine, well, when the Michigan Peace team approached me about going to Palestine, I was like, you guys are crazy. You guys have a privilege that I don’t have to travel in that way. But I’ve already been to the Middle East and I’m on list when I travel in Lebanon.

I’ve never taken citizenship there, but I’ve been offered it. But I do travel in Lebanon on a Lebanese ID card, and I have tried to cross [01:25:00] into the country they call Israel from Southern Lebanon. This is that bad neighborhood. So this causes concern. You get on a list when you try and cross that border. Oh, and my folks tried a couple of times when I was a child to cross me over the border.

I wasn’t allowed, uh, either way. So finally I convinced myself I wanted to go to Palestine to be able to be of witness to that which I speak about. And so I told my father that I was going, I asked his permission. He never said no. He never said yes. He never said no. So, because he never said no, it was a yes for me.

He said, I, I need to talk with them. And my father is very image oriented. Mm-hmm. And so the woman who was gonna be the base operations person in the US for a trip, my father is [01:26:00] not one to speak Arabic in front of non-A speaking people ever. And that day, for whatever reason, he decided to start to speak to me in Arabic, very rudely.

And so he said, what are you gonna do for my daughter? And she said, well, we have these affinity trainings and you know, we’ll call a lawyer if we need to, if she gets somehow detained over there. And my dad’s just rolling his eyes just, it’s like the peanuts mom talking to him. He’s just like, whatever. And he looked at me and, and then looked at her and he said, in English, there’s nothing you’re gonna do for her.

And then he looked at me and he said,

so he said, my daughter is a soldier of peace. She’ll be helping you. That’s when I received my yes to go. But he remained pretty firm that [01:27:00] I knew. What I was getting into more than they knew what they were putting me into. And I was never confused as a young person that I was gonna go make change. But I think many people that I traveled with thought they were gonna do something.

I just wanted to witness what was going on. So I become a little bit differently versed. Just like in war. There’s war theory, right? There’s ways to go to war. These children pick up on these things and they know their children. So I say, aren’t you afraid of being shot? They said Anyone would hesitate to shoot a child, and by that time, I’m quick enough to be gone.

That’s what they banked on. Another child told me

he witnessed his best friend [01:28:00] get shot and blown up. They picked up a ball, it had gunpowder in it. He touched his friend and the sniper shot and it blew the kid up and that kid wanted to be a freedom fighter. Coming up after the break, I take position on the left side of the doorway. My partner fills in the position of the right side of the doorway, and we fill this space Naturally.

Our guns are drawn because we’re searching this residence. And I yell, sir, on the sixth day, I, I got a phone call and there was three kids on the other line and they were calling from the Wolf Point Pizza Joint. I was like, hello? They were like, all they said was, we found your dog. That’s next on the Tell Us Something podcast.

Remember that. The next tell us something event is October 7th. You can learn about how to pitch your story and get tickets@tellussomething.org. [01:29:00] Thanks to our media sponsors, Missoula events.net and Missoula Broadcasting Company. Learn more about Missoula Broadcasting Company and listen online@missoulabroadcastingcompany.com.

Thanks to our in-kind sponsors Float Missoula. Learn more@floatmsla.com and Joyce of tile. Hi, it’s Joyce from Joyce of Tile. If you need tile work done, give me a shout. I specialize in custom tile installations. Learn more and see some examples of my work@joyceoftile.com. Remember that the next tell us something event is October 7th.

You can learn about how to pitch your story and get tickets@tellussomething.org. Alright, let’s get back to the stories. You are listening to the Tell Us Something podcast. I’m Marc Moss opening up the second half of this episode of the Tell Us Something podcast. Steve Schmidt is a rookie police officer in Kansas City in 1997.

Steve responds to a seemingly [01:30:00] routine recovered property call that quickly escalates into a tense and dangerous encounter of a burglary in progress. What unfolds is a story of split second decisions, unexpected revelations, and a profound moment that would forever shape his understanding of duty perception, and the weight of a single choice.

Steve calls his story, get down on the ground. Do it now. Thanks for listening.

It was 1997 and I was driving my car in South Kansas City when my radio began to speak to me. 5 44. 5 44 From Banister and Hillcrest. Go ahead. 5 44, respond to the area of a hundred and sixth and wall end on a reported recovered property call. Now I was a very, very young police officer. In fact, two years prior to this call, I graduated from the Kansas City, Missouri [01:31:00] Police Academy.

Nine days after turning 21 years old. I looked like I was about 15 and a half years old, and that I was just wearing a really authentic looking police Halloween costume. So I respond to the area of 106 and wall end where I’m greeted by a family, and we go through the typical, you don’t look old enough to be a cop thing.

They hand me over a duffel bag that they had found at the edge of their property that they thought might’ve been involved with a purse snatching in the area. I looked through the contents of this duffle bag and one thing stands out, and that’s an envelope with a name and address on it. So I check with dispatch and I see if there’s been any burglaries at that particular residence in the last 30 days or so.

They said there hasn’t been. So I said, hold me out at that address. Let me check with the homeowner. So I drive about three or four blocks away to this split level home where the main living residence is all on one level and the bedrooms are above [01:32:00] the garages. And I walk up to this house and I notice that the deadbolt is still in the locked position and the dwarf frame is splintered in towards the inside of the residence, meaning the door has been kicked in and it’s been recently burglar burglarized.

So I call for a second car because we’re gonna have to go inside and search this residence for any burglars that might be left inside. So I call for my second officer and he shows up and we do a procedure called holding the air, which means we have priority for any radio traffic on that particular frequency in case there’s an extreme emergency on the inside.

All the other officers know that we’re searching this house and it’s really important and pretty dangerous. So my officer partner shows up. We walk up to the front door and we open the door and we yell, police, is there anybody here? And I don’t hear any answer. We do a search of the main living area of the house, [01:33:00] and I don’t see any signs of burglary whatsoever, and I’m quite confused the fact that the VCR is still there because back in 1997, VCRs were the probably one of the most common things stolen from burglaries.

We still have the upstairs to search. So I begin to make my way up the flight of stairs and I see a bedroom on my right hand side. I see a bedroom straight ahead, and I see another doorway on the left. I peek into the first room and I see a suspect laying face down on the bed sleeping. The first signs of burglary I see are directly behind this individual where a dresser drawer is pulled out and sort of cockeyed a bit, and there’s some clothes thrown.

I take position on the left side of the doorway. My partner fills in the position of the right side of the doorway, and we fill this space naturally. Our guns are drawn because we’re searching this residence, and I yell, sir, he wakes up, gets up on his [01:34:00] hands and knees, deer in the headlight look, looking at me.

Do you live here? Yes. I don’t really like the way he answered that question, so I ask it again. Do you live here? No. Okay. We need you to get down off the bed now. Get down off the bed. He hops off the backside of the bed and he’s holding a T-shirt in his hand and he starts to say, I need to go outside. I need to go outside.

I need to go outside. He walks to the end of the bed and pretty much the, the width of a queen size bed is all that separates us. And if you imagine. A running back on the one yard line with one second left in the fourth quarter, and they’re given the ball trying to score that touchdown. This guy charges us.

We both have our handguns out. I know that in order for him to reach out and grab my handgun, he has to drop this t-shirt first as he hits us. Both my partner and I [01:35:00] holster up simultaneously and we hit the back wall. We drop to the ground and he starts pushing and kicking. I need to go outside. I need to go outside.

I’m on the radio assist, assist, assist, and I have visions of top gun in my head going, eject, eject, eject. Because all I want to do is get outta there. We fall down the flight of stairs. I’m on top of the suspect, the suspect’s on top of my partner. We land at the base of the stairs, glass breaking from a nearby coffee table.

I am trying to get this individual’s hands behind his back, and I am just not strong enough. My little 15 and a half year old sized body just isn’t gonna do it. I let go of his left arm, I get a handcuff on his right arm, and I just yell, relax, and he just magically goes limp. And I get the handcuffs on. I get on the radio 5 44.

We got one party in custody. The house is still hot. Keep the officers coming because when I yell, assist, assist, assist on the radio, all the officers in the area drop everything they’re [01:36:00] doing and they come rushing to our aid. I run back upstairs to search the other rooms that are upstairs and this is where I see most of the evidence from the burglary.

Nobody else is in the house. I clear the air, I go downstairs. I said, we have one party in custody. Start me in an ambulance because this individual sustained a small cut on his arm from the fall. I begin to try to investigate who this guy is, and I’m asking him all these different questions, and he’s not telling me his name in any way, shape or form.

And in fact, all he keeps saying to me is, put your socks on. Put your socks on. And I’m like, thanks man. I appreciate it. As he’s sitting on the floor, I’m like, thanks, I appreciate it. I got my socks on and I go, are, are you on drugs? And he’s like, yes. And I’m like, okay. That was probably one of the dumbest questions I’ve ever asked anybody.

Like I knew he was on drugs, and I wish I remembered the exact line of questioning I had for this individual [01:37:00] because one thing led to another as I was trying to figure out who he was, and I asked him, what’s your mom’s name? And he goes, Theresa Williams. And I freeze. My partner looks at me and is like, what’s wrong?

I’m like, dude, Theresa Williams, that’s the name that was on the envelope in the duffel bag. Four blocks away that brought me here. This guy lives here and he’s not on drugs. I don’t know about you, but this is the closest I’ve ever come to shooting somebody and my partner goes, if you would’ve shot, I would’ve shot.

I go into the kitchen, I look through some paperwork, and I find some information about who his parents are. I get ahold of his dad, who’s a principal of a local high school in Kansas City, and I call him and I say, there’s been an incident here at the house. [01:38:00] You need to come here. Your son’s okay. We already had an ambulance for the, the, the son, and he was in the back of the ambulance being taken care of.

Dad gets there. And I’m explaining everything that happened that got, that led to me being in his house. And I’m to the point to where we were walking up the steps, I peeked inside and I saw him sleeping in the bed and I asked him, I was like, sir, do you live here? And he said, yes. And I said, I didn’t like the way he said that.

So I asked him again, sir, do you live here? And he said, no. And he goes, hold on a second. Let me tell you a little bit about my son. My son is 33 years old and he has autism. He gets dropped off by a cab every single day. He has a garage door opener in his backpack, and he’s enter, enter the house through the garage door.

He goes into the kitchen, he makes himself a sandwich, and then he goes upstairs and lays down in one of the three bedrooms and goes asleep until we get home. If you ask my son a yes, no question, he will always respond [01:39:00] with yes. If you ask him that question again, he assumes the only reason why you’re asking him that question is the second time is he must have got the the first one wrong.

So he is gonna answer no. So, do you live here? Yes. Do you live here? No. And I’m thinking, how are we supposed to figure this out when I have a burglary suspect in front of me

not pulling the trigger? That day was the best decision I’ve ever made in my entire life. If I would’ve harmed that guy,

I would not be here today.

The headline in the newspaper across the country the next day would’ve been two white officers shoot an unarmed, autistic black man in his own home, and I would not have been able to live with that.

It’s been 28 years, and I think [01:40:00] about this guy often. I have so much love for him and his family, and I hope life has been kind to him. And if he was here today,

I would just wanna say, I’m sorry, I scared you.

Steve Schmidt, also known as Schmidty, starting from his small town origins in Malta, Montana. Schmidty is dedicated to positive change. With eight years experience as a police officer in Kansas City, Schmidty has developed strong skills in law enforcement and community engagement, all while connecting with thousands of fans as a professional mascot.

Now based here in [01:41:00] Missoula, Schmidt Schmidty leads Drive Safe Missoula, a traffic safety initiative within Missoula Public Health. That’s focused on saving lives through education. His expertise extends nationally where he speaks on influencing behavior and leveraging AI for road safety and public health.

Schmitty stopped by the tell us something studios in the days following the event to share more about his story. Hey, I’m Marc Moss. Thanks for listening to the Tele Something podcast. We just heard from Schmitty, his story he told on June 30th, 2025 at Ogre Park, at Allegiance Field, and I caught up with Schmitty later after the fact.

I, I’m here with him now in the tele something studios. Hey, Schmitty. Hey Mark. How are you? It’s great to be here. Thanks for coming and thanks for initiating this. You, you’ve said you wanted to fill in some gaps. Yeah. You know, it was interesting going through the entire process of learning how to tell this story, which I [01:42:00] think was so important during that process.

Of course, when you get out there and you’re in front of everybody and you’re trying to stay at a time, you forget a few things, and there were some key elements of my story that I would love to share with people because I think people walked away with a few big question marks in their head about what the story really was all about.

Yeah, and if you just listened to the story, one thing that I failed to mention in front of the group of people was that we believe this individual. Uh, interrupted a burglary in progress and speaking with his dad about his autism and all of that stuff. He didn’t even have the ability to understand that he interrupted a burglary in progress.

So when he arrived home using a garage door opener, he comes into the house and he goes into the kitchen. He makes himself a sandwich and then goes and lays down in one of the bedrooms upstairs and waits for his parents to get home. That when the garage opened is when we believe the actual burglars that were inside the house.

Bolted out the front door, which is why so [01:43:00] much of the house was left undisturbed is they didn’t have that much time to really go through everything. So it was a really interesting situation, of course, being there live and trying to put all this into place and, and then reflecting on it basically over the last 28 years of what that scene was really like and how scary it must have been for that guy, you know, with us being there yelling at him in his bedroom and the fact that if those burglars that were in there, uh, thankfully most burglars aren’t out to really hurt people.

They, they try to go into places when people aren’t there and thankfully they left, but thankfully they didn’t do anything to harm this individual either, you know? Yeah. And I’m, I was always so curious, you could have responded to that situation in so many different ways. Yeah, absolutely. And that’s a scary thing.

You know, I think I may have mentioned like when we were falling down the stairs and I was putting the assist out on the radio and I was yelling, assist, assist, assist. You know, it was images of [01:44:00] the top gun movie, eject, eject, eject that were going through my head because I was so scared at that moment. I mean, I wanted to get out of there and it was weird how I’m like looking back on it that evening why my brain responded that way and how I had those images in my head as we are falling down the stairs and I’m on the radio yelling, assist, assist, thinking that there’s still other people in the house.

Who are going to come out of the house and be shooting at us as we are falling down the stairs and trying to put all of that information together. It was just a really crazy moment. Right, and you still didn’t know, had no idea that he wasn’t actually right. Perpetrator? Yeah. Yeah. We thought he was the burglary suspect that for one reason or another, here he is in the house and he was acting very strange.

So it made sense that if he was on drugs, maybe he stayed behind for one reason or another, stranger things have happened. Then of course, I’m not thinking at that moment when I see this individual laying on the bed that, [01:45:00] okay, so if this is the burglar, then how did the duffel bag with the contents end up four blocks away?

Like, you don’t think about those questions in that moment. Right. Um, but you know, as things settled down and we were asking him questions and trying to figure out who he was, those things are the things that started to pop into my head, which ultimately led me to ask him. What’s your mom’s name? And then when he said his mom’s name, you know, I just froze.

I mean, I was just, you know, sick to my stomach automatically. I mean, this is the closest I’ve ever come to pulling the trigger on somebody. And thankfully our, you know, our training, the constant ongoing training that we have to deal with these situations allowed me the ability at such a young age to make the right decision at that time, to not pull the trigger, which I think was vitally important, you know?

Yeah. Clearly we never hear this story. Yeah. We always hear the story of, of the cop that made the wrong decision. Right. That’s what makes the news. And [01:46:00] how do we get more of this story? How do these cops who have made the wrong decision, or how the cops that haven’t yet made the wrong decision because they haven’t been placed in this circumstance.

Yeah. How do we get them that kind of training or you know, like I, it just blows my mind, you know? And some people, some of the listeners don’t know that my dad was a cop, so I’m very familiar with police training and what’s required and decision making. And in tough circumstances, he was on the police force in cities about the size of Missoula in Ohio near Akron for 40 years as a detective, and also out on the streets and.

It’s not easy work. Right, right. It’s not easy work in any way, shape or form. And most of the issues that I have seen over the last several decades when it comes to police officers making the bad call or you know, really negative press related to police officers, I always chalk it up to, well, [01:47:00] there was a failure in training that occurred that allowed this to occur the way it did.

And so I wonder how departments really focus on, analyze these situations internally to utilize the worst case scenarios or the worst case situations that are being broadcast maybe nationally. How do they utilize that as an opportunity to learn to make their departments better? And I was really impressed with the Kansas City, Missouri Police Department.

Not that I had anything to ever compare it to, but I was impressed with how well they analyzed situations from any use of force report to any sort of major interaction from citizen complaints. How do we utilize this to make our department better? And obviously, this was a long time ago when I was wearing the uniform and behind the badge, and it was before police officers had body cameras and.

We were just starting to get video cameras in our cars and it was still [01:48:00] being recorded on VHS tapes. And it was interesting how many officers were upset with the fact that they’re gonna be on tape because they would think that, oh, well this is just gonna be utilized to punish me when I do things wrong.

And I always had that concept of. You know what? I’m super excited that this is being recorded because one, I want my supervisors to be able to see all the good that I’m doing because just like the news doesn’t see it, my supervisors didn’t get to see it because they weren’t on every single call with me, right?

They might be on one call a week with me, and I have 28 calls a day that I was going on. So this’ll be an opportunity that they would be able to see the good work that I’m doing and utilize that maybe as a training opportunity for other young officers coming up. But I was really excited about the fact that if I ever made a mistake that it could be recorded, and not only myself, but every other officer had an opportunity to learn from it because we learned most from our [01:49:00] mistakes.

And I would’ve a new recruit student next to me in the car and I’d be like, Hey, what did we learn most from, we learned most from our mistakes? Well, then let’s go mess some stuff up. As long as it doesn’t result in a, you know, a hundred thousand dollars lawsuit and nobody gets injured or killed tonight, then let’s go say the wrong thing.

You know, not intentionally, of course, but let’s appreciate the fact that we said the wrong thing to the wrong person at the wrong time. And now we learn from that. And now we’re gonna have a 30 year career where we’ll never make that same mistake again. Yeah. So let’s mess it up now, learn the most we possibly can and, and make ourselves better, and then let’s share those lessons with everybody else so you don’t have to drive down this same exact road that I drove down to learn these hard lessons.

You know? And so that was the, the culture that was built into our environment in Kansas City that I was so impressed with is that everybody said, Hey, look, let’s, we’re all learning and we’re all gonna make mistakes. Let’s go. And it was. Closing out this episode of the [01:50:00] Tell Us Something podcast. What begins as an unlikely friendship for Lauren Tobias with a free spirited dog on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation in northwestern Montana takes a heartbreaking turn when the dog mysteriously disappears.

Days of agonizing searching lead to a devastating discovery, a poignant makeshift funeral, and an outpouring of community support. Just as grief settles in a shocking revelation, sends everything spiraling into an unbelievable twist. Lauren calls her story off leash. Thanks for listening.

I never thought I’d have a dog. I, it’s not that I don’t love dogs, obviously, it’s that I just like the guilt of anyone who’s a dog on her nose. The guilt of just like watching them stare at you in your house, uh, it was just like too much for me. Um, so [01:51:00] when I moved to the Fort Peck reservation in 2018, late 2018, um, my perspective on dog relationship kind of got blown out of the water.

Um, anyone who, um, maybe in the, who’s listening in the audience might know, um, the relationship that people have with dogs there is just very symbiotic and, um, people consider the members of the community. It, from the outside, I might look like, um. It might look like they are just like, don’t have homes, but actually like people take, take care of them and it’s their meaningful parts, parts of the community.

And so when I, I met many, many dogs while I was living there. Um, I spent about four years and, uh, this one particular dog stood out to me. She was a big [01:52:00] poofy, white, fluffy dog, and she had a slap happy personality. I would see her on the streets with like this pack, this like mi um, miscellaneous pack with dogs.

And every time she saw me, she would like jump on me and like greet me. And we had this like, developing relationship over the course of months. And she would do this thing where I swear she like, knew that she could make people laugh. Um, direct eye contact and like a foot long tongue, just like. Hanging out of her mouth.

And, um, she would like dip her shoulder butt would just flop down to the floor like a seal’s tail. And then she would just like get on her belly to ask for belly rubs and she would just like still be making eye contact with you. And so that’s how I like met her. And, um, eventually she kind of started following me, like in town and we sort of developed a courtship and after a couple months [01:53:00] decided to make it official, which meant that I got her vaccinated and slapped a collar on her.

Um, and a week later she told me that she was pregnant and I was not the father. And so, um, that was our first experience together. So my whole thing about the guilt and the dogs, um, we had this very fluid relationship. And we never went there just for the record. Um, um, so she, we, we had this like, come and go.

She would just sort of like sit on my porch all day and she would kinda like knock on the door. She wanted to come in in the house, she’d knock on the door if she wanted to leave, she’d wander around all day. So, um, it was kind of perfect, like we just had developed trust and then through like the raising of her babies, like we developed [01:54:00] even more of like this really natural, beautiful trust.

And, um, she was like my best friend. It sounds like cliche, but it was true. Everyone in town that knew me knew that she was my dog. And um, so yeah, we spent probably about a year that she was kind of like with me. Um, and so because of our, the nature of our relationship, when she didn’t show up home one night, I didn’t really think very much of it.

Um, and then two nights went by and I was like, you know, she’s done this before, you know, it’s probably no big deal. Um, three nights, four nights go by and I’m like, okay. Like I let her out of the house with a collar, without a collar on because I like didn’t always put a collar on her when she was, um, leaving the house.

’cause we had just kind of come in and out. And so I was like, she probably got lost. And, um, I hung up posters all over Wolf Point. Those of you who know Wolf Point, probably like, didn’t take that long to cover the town. It’s pretty small, small town. But [01:55:00] um, on the sixth day I got a phone call and, uh, it was from, there were three kids on the other line and they were calling from the Wolf Point Pizza joint, uh, like the, the, the dial phone there.

And they were like, I was like, hello? Uh, they were like, all they said was, we found your dog. And I was like, oh my God. Like, where can I come get her? Like, yes, thank you so much. Like, I’ll be right there. And I was just met with silence on the other line, and this was like literally the first time throughout the entire six days where I was like, like maybe something’s wrong.

Like maybe she’s, something happened to her. I never considered it. She grew up around cars and she was always really good around, you know, cars and stuff. So I never thought that that was like a possibility. So I run across town, I drive across town, I pick them up and they, I’d ask them [01:56:00] to show me where she was.

And when we start walking up to the train tracks, I was like, like, oh my God. Like, no way. Um, so I walk up and I see, I walk up and I see her body deflated and, and lifeless and just like formed to the, uh, reels of the track. And yeah, sorry, that was really graphic. Um, so the kids are still with me and they’re like, this is the most interesting thing that’s happened to us all day.

We just located your dead dog off of a missing poster sign. So we’re like, here for this. And I was like, can you please leave me for a second? And so they did. And they left me for like, you know, 10 minutes. And then I saw them circling back and I was like, okay, I think we’re in this. And I’m like, okay, if I was, I, you know, if I’m remembering myself as a child and I had done that, like sleuthing, like I’d probably be pretty invested too.

So I was like, all right, you can come with me. [01:57:00] And they were like, what are you gonna do? I’m like, I don’t know. Do you have any ideas? Never been in the situation before. So, um, they came with me. I went back to my house, I grabbed a bathrobe, went back to the train tracks. I wrapped her up 65 pounds, picked her up, put her in my trunk.

Uh, did the only thing I could think to, you know, thank the kids. Went to the McDonald’s drive through, dog still in the back of my trunk. Um, and, and then I took them home and I go home. And now I’m like alone for the first time making phone calls. Uh, and I’m getting text messages from people I didn’t even tell, sending their condolences.

Um, and I made a, an appointment the next morning with the Wolf Point Crematorium. They said they’d make an exception and Cree made a dog, um, the next day. So my friends who live downstairs, three friends came upstairs. They were devastated because they like, loved her too. They knew her spirit. [01:58:00] Um, and we had like probably the most beautiful funeral and ceremony that I’ve ever been to.

We took her body out of the trunk, we put it on her bed, uh, outside in like this kind of mud room. And we, um, put her toys around her, her treats, sweet grass, sage. They, they kind of burned sage and we were drinking whiskey, laughing, uh, crying. And there was like also this moment I wanted to stamp her paw print.

I was like, which arm am I gonna get tattooed? Um, I wanted to stamp her paw print on something like sentimental. The closest thing I could find was my ukulele. I can’t get into that side quest right now. But basically it was like some ped tremors, um, a uh, nail polish, navy blue nail polish. And my friend’s CSI knowledge about like rolling it, which like was not intuitive at all.

It was like a mess. But it gave us like the first belly laugh of, of like the 24 hours. [01:59:00] And, um, so I went to bed, got a really terrible night’s sleep. And I wake up the next morning, I’m flipping pancakes. I’m still, I’m still crying. And, um, I, it’s the first thing I’ve eaten since the McDonald’s the day before at like 3:00 PM and I get a text message on my phone and I see a picture.

Someone forwards me a Facebook post and I see a picture of my dog. Um, I know I’ve lost credibility of saying this, but it was her, the, the picture. I’m like, why, why is someone sending me this? I look at the caption and it says, and anyone know who sweet dog this is? Like, she showed up on my porch today. I look at the timestamp.

It was yesterday, so I’m like, maybe it’s an old picture. I don’t know. And so I message her, find her address. Then my friend mush from the night before the funeral comes banging on my door [02:00:00] and it’s like, have you seen this? Her text message, like she just got it forwarded to you. And, and so I’m like, shut the fuck up.

Like, I don’t know, like, please don’t get my hopes out. We’re like, drive. So I’d like make her get in the car with me. We drive six miles to get to this person’s house and we open the door out. Comes running my actual dog.

This is Fluffer.

Um, she’s seven years old now, and we’re a pet therapy team. Um, uh, yeah. And so she, nothing happened. She was just pumped. She was like, wow, haven’t seen you in a week. Like, what’s up? Like, I’ve been through a lot. Like, whew. She didn’t like look like she lost weight [02:01:00] because she just, you know. She’s chilling.

She probably made some friends. And so anyway, the the de ma of this story is, um, I still have the dog in my closet, you know?

Um, yeah. So the appointment to get her cremated was like in an hour. And so I did the best thing I could do. I took real fluffer in the rod daylight. It was April. So the ground was really hard. I tried, I promise I did my best. I know this is not environmentally friendly, but I like took a, the bathrobe, the dog dug a shallow grave in the hills of Wolf Point.

Um, and yeah, I, that was it. And then, um, I invited the kids to come on an adventure with Fluffy and I, and they got to meet her and hear the things I was telling [02:02:00] about. And, um. Yeah, now we’re just living life and that’s, that’s my story of Lost and Found. So thank you.

Closing out her evening. Tonight is Lauren Tobias. When Lauren moved to Montana from the suburbs of New York City nine years ago, in search of some peace and quiet she never could have expected she’d be making home here. She loved visiting the many nooks and crannies of Montana via highways, gravel, tire, track, roads, hiking trails, bike paths, and her favorite and eight cedar plane.

During her time here, she’s been called to infinitely learn from how to recognize what’s under the hood of her car to self-expression through photography, to embracing a queer identity, to picking up beer league, ice hockey in her thirties. [02:03:00] Those last two things are related only by pure coincidence she assures me.

Lauren has found more life here than she could have ever imagined. She spent COV living on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation, learning a more holistic history of our country and about the incredible culture and decolonization efforts of indigenous nations. You are listening to the Tell Us Something podcast.

I’m Marc Moss. Remember that the next tell us something event is October 7th. You can learn about how to pitch your story and get tickets@tellussomething.org. You can find us on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and Blue Sky and visit Tell us something.org to explore 14 years of our story archives and let me know what you thought of the new format.

You can email me at info@tellussomething.org to share your [02:04:00] thoughts.

Marc Moss: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Tell Something podcast. I’m your host, Mark Moss, founder and executive director of Tell Something. The next tell us something event is October 7th, 2025. The theme is, welcome the Wild Side. You can learn about how to pitch your story and get tickets at Tell us something. Dot org this week on the podcast.

Hammy: That was the first thought I have gonorrhea. The second immediate thought was the place I need to go to treat this gonorrhea is my first day at the health department. I thought, oh my God, this is gonna suck. I get dressed. For some reason, I decided to put on white underwear. To this day, I don’t understand why I chose white.

Katie Van Dorn: And I probably should have figured it out, but I didn’t. And I came outta surgery with my right leg, an inch and a half shorter than my left, and I was pod to say [00:01:00] the least, and a doctor said, well, that’s the way it has to be. So it just was

Marc Moss: four storytellers share their true personal story on the theme.

Lost and found.

Karna Sundby: When I found his body, I just started screaming and screaming and ran into the house, grabbed the phone, and started dialing my parents in Illinois. When I realized I can’t just keep screaming when they answered the phone and I can’t stop, I hung up. I look over and there’s a copy of the kinmen.

Kara Adolphson: The campus newspaper sat right there and on. It is a photo of the art exhibit from the day before Kismet. I’m gonna read that, so I drag it over. And I unfold it so that the page drops down and that’s what I see underneath the photo.

Marc Moss: Their stories were recorded. Live in person on June 30th, 2025 at Ogren Park at Allegiance Field in Missoula, Montana.

Closing out Pride Month. On this episode of the podcast, we’re trying out something a little [00:02:00] different. Tell us something. Board member Beth Ann Osteen generously offered to bring in a professional sound engineer to better capture the feeling of a live event. We’re going to try to keep the essence of the live evening by using the storyteller introductions as I introduce the storytellers the night of the event.

As usual, I’ll give a little teaser of the story before the storyteller shares their story. We’d love to hear from you what you think. Shoot me an email and let me know how you like the new format. You can email me at info at tell us something. Dot org. Love it. Hate it. Let me know what you think. Thanks.

Huge thanks. Goes out to the Greater Montana Foundation who encourages communication on issues, trends, and values of importance to Montanans. We are so grateful to the Greater Montana Foundation for their support to make the June event possible. Tell us something acknowledges that this land where Ogre Park, [00:03:00] uh, ogre Park now stands, is the ancestral territory of the Salish and Kalispell peoples who have stewarded it for generations.

Summertime is traditionally the primetime for indigenous peoples to gather various berries and roots that are in season while the bitterroot are already harvested. Now is the time for processing and storing any remaining bitterroot that have been gathered. Another staple canvas bulbs are being dug and prepared for storage huckleberry’s service.

Berries and choke cherries are ripening and being harvested for immediate consumption and for drying to preserve in winter. We take this moment to honor its land and the native people in the stories that they share with us to honor them, you can support the ongoing efforts of the Confederated Salish and Kni tribes by learning about their cultural initiatives.

And advocating for indigenous rights, more information can be found@kskt.org.[00:04:00]

In our first story, hammy shares his tale about family faith, and finding yourself what starts as a journey of self-discovery after a life altering decision. Takes an unexpected turn leading to a hilarious and surprising public health crisis on the very first day of a new job. Sometimes life’s most challenging moments can also be the most liberating.

Hammy calls his story, Ham’s First Day at the Health Department. Thanks for listening.

Hammy: Hello everyone. My name’s Hammy, and before I begin, I need to tell everyone that I just grew up loving my family. I, me, my mom, my brother, my sister, my dad. We were all so very close. Um, also, I never really heard my parents fighting at all, which was pretty cool. They would always fight about religion, though.

You see, my [00:05:00] dad was Roman Catholic and my mom’s a Jehovah’s Witness. And, uh, their son had a secret. Um, so I always knew that I had to, I always knew that one day I was gonna make this decision. And I, I tried, I prayed, I, I did the baptism, I did the conversion therapy. And when I was 27 years old, I finally realized I couldn’t do it anymore.

So I, uh, kind of, kind of came out. I, I started downloading the dating apps. I started dating. And I met this boy. There’s this beautiful man in Indiana and I decided to, to get married. Someone go, woo Indiana. Yeah. Um, don’t hear that often. So, uh, he, he just completely swept me up. And I, I came out and, uh, sure enough, my church gave me that phone call and they excommunicated me and my mom, my brother, my sister, my cousins, my friends, everyone.

Dead. That’s it. They just, I believe the church said they handed me over to [00:06:00] Satan. And I’m like, that is a little dramatic. I’m the gay one. Easy there, Satan. Um, but anyways, we were married for five years. We had a good relationship and till one day he decided that he didn’t wanna be married anymore. And so I thought, well, I, I left my family to marry you and, and you change your mind and, and that’s okay.

But what am I gonna do? I knew I wasn’t staying in, in, in Indiana, so, um, I, I wanted to go home. Everything in my body told me I gotta go home. I have to go home. And I knew that if I went home, I would get sucked into the church again. And I knew I would just end up killing myself. ’cause I would just, I would be conflicted.

So I decided to do one of those, you know, eat, pray, love things and just go find myself. But I really don’t like Europe, so I just came to Montana instead. So I got, I got a job at Yellowstone and in Big Sky and I did all those kind of things of working seasonal [00:07:00] jobs. And I finally decided what I wanted to do more than anything was.

Work in public health. I was in a first responder and then in occupational health and now I was in public health, so I got accepted back into a public health program online and I got a job at the Gallatin County Health Department. And so my very first day, right, well, let me actually back up just a minute.

After I, um, came off the mountain, uh, the girl was in heat. Let me tell you. I was divorced. I was in a new city. It was, I was feeling good about myself. You know, the grinder notifications were rolling in. So, uh, I had a lot of fun that first weekend. Now that morning, on my first day at the health department, I woke up and I went to go take a piss and I thought, shit, it started burning.

I said, this can’t be good. Maybe I’m just dehydrated. So I hop in the shower and I look down and this discharge is coming out. Well, you know what? We don’t need to get too [00:08:00] graphic, but I think I knew exactly what it was. That was the first thought. Shit, I have gonorrhea. The second immediate thought was the place I need to go to treat this gonorrhea is my first day at the health department.

I thought, oh my God, this is gonna suck. So I go to the I I, I get dressed. For some reason, I decide to put on white underwear. To this day, I don’t understand why I chose white, but I loaded up on underwear and I headed into work. And I thought, I don’t know what I’m gonna tell them. I don’t know if I’m gonna just keep it kind of quiet.

Um, but then they’re all gonna know they’re gonna do the contact tracing. So I met the health officer and she says, hello James. Welcome my, my real name’s James. She says, hello James, welcome. And I said, hello, and I have gonorrhea and I’m gonna have to talk to someone. And she says, okay, um, let’s get your boss, who’s the communicable disease manager.

Uh, and I’m like, of course, that makes total sense. So I tell her. I’m like, Hey. And then I kind of do it like at, by [00:09:00] that point I kind of go on like this one man show where I’m just telling everybody they got the first two out. So like epidemiologist, you knew front desk reception. I was letting her know, I just had to own that story.

So they, they arranged the, they, they do the, the follow up and contact tracing at the health department, but they do actually the testing, uh, at a different party. So I go down. Hey, I go get tested, um, and the doctor comes in, I’m like, I have gonorrhea. And she’s like, okay. So I pulled down my pants and then I look down and she looks down and we both notice a bump.

Now this was August, 2022. If anyone in public health knows what was happening around August 20, yes, there it is. Monkey px, m MPOs. She looks, I look, she says, I’ll be right back. Come leaves the room. She comes back in looking like monsters ink. It was head to toe, PPE, the mask, the shield, the gloves. The runway category was PPE, and she crushed it.

So she’s coming in and [00:10:00] so she like takes, you know, and, and. She, she, she starts slicing it. And I’ve only been in, yes, exactly. Oh, because I’ve only been in one public health class my first semester and three days at the health department. And inside I knew, I’m pretty sure it’s a swab, but I’m not gonna tell you like, Hey, by the way, doctor, I’m new to public health.

This is what to do. So she cuts it and as she cuts it, there’s like gonorrhea dripping out of my penis. It is a whole Hello. Yes. Um, there is a whole, it’s, it’s a whole production. So now I gotta call my boss on my way home and be like, Hey, um, they think it might be Empo and I have to quarantine. So Do you guys have like a remote or a computer?

Yeah, like a pickup. They were very great. The, the health department, I’ll tell you when, when they say you have, these, were all strangers and you have to rely on, on the, the compassion and kindness of strangers. They were all absolutely amazing. And, uh, they just re reaffirmed my life. And, uh, the people [00:11:00] in Butte, that queer people were being taken care of because there was no stigma.

There was no judgment. They were just right to the facts. Um, so. I get a phone call a couple days later. It’s, it’s negative. Um, for em, PX, gonorrhea, we all knew. Yes, that was, we, we had that one coming. So we get there and she’s, um. So I go back, I go back in and they say, okay, you gotta do your follow-up test.

Or I do my follow-up test and uh, they call me back. They say everything’s negative. We just wanted you to come back in one last time for a shot of penicillin. I thought, okay, that’s fine. Gimme a shot of pen penicillin. I wait a couple weeks. I go on another date. Now I have to go to Butte for this date. I go to Butte.

I first time, I think it’s really fun. Here I go. Have a nice beautiful morning with Clayton. His name was a wonderful man. We’re just having some coffee and he says, you know, we like to get lunch. He. I said, yeah, I just want to let you know I’m allergic to seafood. And he says, okay, well we’re in Butte, so relax.

Um, and [00:12:00] then, uh, I said, are you allergic to anything? He said, it’s just penicillin. And I said, okay, well, we can’t have sex after lunch because I might give you penicillin. Uh, I had gonorrhea. And they had, it wasn’t, but then thought it was monkeypox, but it wasn’t that, but it was gonorrhea actually. So if I can transmit it, I’m not, I’m only in my, like, third week of public health right now, so I don’t really know how all of this works.

Um, he said, I just want, I just wanna buy you lunch. So, uh, good guy. So that, that’s, that’s thinking about that now, you know, getting lost. Getting found was I, was I lost when I came out here? I think a little bit, and I think we’re always a little bit lost, right? Because that’s so, it makes life kind of exciting.

And, um, have I been found? Well, I found a really good therapist. Um, thank God for her. Uh, uh, I, uh, found a community. A [00:13:00] family. My partner Clayton, he stayed with me by the way. Uh, great guy by the way. Doug is here. Oh. Um, by the way, every interaction since then is always that of me being like, I have a wild story.

And him being like, sure. So it’s like the perfect relationship. Uh, and, uh, I, I found a great community in, in Butte. Uh, it’s such a wonderful town. Thank you to Missoula. Butte. It’s able to hang a pride flag. We got that passed. So thank you guys. Thank you Missoula for that. Um, but. In, in conclusion of this story, I, I try to talk openly about this.

I don’t want us to feel like we ever have to hold in that shame, that darkness. ’cause I know what that darkness does when we bring that darkness to the light in front of strangers. Um, just sharing our stories, we’re able to own that, right? So thank you guys so much for having me here. I appreciate it and I hope you guys enjoy the rest of this time.

Thanks, Marc.[00:14:00]

Marc Moss: Hammy is thrilled to be sharing his story tonight. He works in occupational safety, health and risk management. He is the founder and creative director of Queer Butte Arts and Culture, a new group celebrating local, queer art, queer culture, and local queer history. Last year he was named one of Southwest Montana’s 20 under 40, and this year he was honored as the young professional of the year by the Butte Local Development Corporation.

He is a homosexual and he lives in Butte with his partner Clayton. Also, a homosexual

ham is passionate about harm reduction, ending stigma, and walking on his hands. Above all, hammy believes that storytelling can save lives. In our next story, Katie Van Dorn recounts a childhood marked by an unexpected physical challenge to a life defined by adventure and a [00:15:00] relentless pursuit of wellness.

Katie’s journey is filled with extraordinary feats, unexpected setbacks, and profound self-discovery. Katie calls her story, the cracks are how the light gets in. Thanks for listening.

Katie Van Dorn: Wow. The only time I hold a mic like this is when I am in a room all by myself. So now I’ve gotta see all these faces. Anyway, um, well, good evening everybody. Have you ever heard the joke about the lost dog with three legs blind in his left eye, missing an ear and no tail? Well that dog answers to the name of Lucky and my, my brother used to call him.

Say that I was that dog named Lucky. And, and the reason for that is, is it began at birth. I was born with a dislocated hip and I was a [00:16:00] cesarean baby. So either the doctor pulled too hard or they, um, or somehow they didn’t check my hip at birth. So around. Age two, my parents finally discovered that I had a dislocated hip when I fell and couldn’t get up.

And, um, so I was braced, just, uh, just tucked in and kept in a brace. And I would be standing in the yard in the patio just spreading, go like this with my brother and sister running all around me. And a little tiny dog named Clyde would just knock me over flat on my back. And, uh. And so anyway, I, um, that actually did wondrous for me.

It, it sent me on my way. And I, because I grew up in Lala as Mark said, I, um, I was able to swim and, and surf body surf, and. Hike and run and all that. My childhood wasn’t affected, but at high school I started to have a lot of hip pain again, and so [00:17:00] I went to the orthopedic surgeon and he said, well, you need a pelvic osteotomy.

In other words, a total restructuring of my right hip, and basically it just rotates your. Acetabulum your socket straight down instead of down and out. And that actually six weeks, um, in a body cast, then seven months on crutches. And the body cast was like, my parents had to have a baby all over again.

They had to come give me the bed pan and water and food and everything. And I, um, I was not a happy baby. Um, and so anyway, I, uh. I got through that and it was like, I felt like the lucky dog. It was pretty miraculous. I was able to run, I was, I started school at the University of California Davis and I was able to run a half marathon and I just really got into running and I also got into swimming.

Um, I used to swim in the ocean, but I started swimming in a pool with a master’s program and the coach [00:18:00] there asked me if I wanted to do a race from. Lanai to Maui in Hawaii, swimming across the channel. And so I did that and it was a pretty neat experience with huge swells. And some of the, some of the swimmers were seasick ’cause the boat had to go as slow as the swimmer.

But I did it and it just fueled my love of adventure and my desire for more. And soon thereafter, I was invited to cook at a guest ranch in the cell way, bitter wilderness. And that was my introduction to Montana. And so I went back and cooked for five summers. I loved it. I would run along the river’s edge and jump into big pools.

And so for five years, I alternated summers in the cell way and winters cooking at a guest or at a restaurant at the top of Aspen or snow mass. Mountain and then I decided, okay, I gotta, I need a real job. So I went back to school in exercise physiology and learned about how, how exercise and nutrition [00:19:00] and all sorts of things factor into.

Staying healthy. And uh, but then soon after I graduated for my, got my master’s, once again, my hip was bothering me. So now I was facing surgery number three, and this was from the femoral side instead of the pelvic side. And I probably should have figured it out, but I didn’t. And I walk, came outta surgery with my right leg, an inch and a half shorter than my left, and I was.

POed to say the least. And, um, the, the, you know, doctor said, well, that’s the way it has to be. So it just was so, I just learned to use poles for hiking and I put lifts in on, in and outside of my shoe and I got a lot of body work. And my name used to be Katie Bodywork, van Dorn. And to this day I live by that principal, but I met my husband around that time and he also loved hug.

Hiking Ray, he’s up there [00:20:00] and, um, so we did a lot of adventures that involved hiking, trapper Peak, Lolo Peak, et cetera. And he, if I got sore, he would give me a piggyback and just bounce my, my hips around until I was. Good to go again. And, uh, so anyway, that, uh, went on. And then around 2001, when I was 45 years old, I decided to have a hip replacement.

And to tell you the truth, that was a very lucky experience because to this day, I still have that hip and it works wonderfully. I might have a. Funky gate, but it still works. And, um, and so because of that good surgery, we decided to do this ski trip from Finland, in Finland, from Russia to Sweden. And we skied about 40, uh, about 40 to 50 miles a day for seven days.

And that, again, was, was quite an adventure. And what I realized with both swimming and [00:21:00] skiing is that they’re very rhythmical. And so if you just put a piece of music like Taco Bell’s cannon in your head, you can just. Get into the flow. And so, um, so we, I did a lot of skiing and then I, um, because of this funky gait, I found myself needing knees, two of them in 2014.

And so I went back and I had, um, knee surgery. And again, that was so fortunate. It just flowed. So well, and, um, I had, I still to this day have the knees and the hip, and they both do really well. But what happened a few years later was that I started to have foot pain, left foot pain, and I, um, and I consulted doctors after trying ibuprofen and tons of steroid shots.

I kept pushing myself, pushing myself, and finally the doctor [00:22:00] said, you know what? You’ve, you’ve your foot. Uh, talus bone, which is your landing pad, has collapsed and your only option is amputation. Cut that off. And I said, I’m gonna cut my head off before I cut any foot off. And I, um, I meant it. And, um, so I.

Um, and this was the first time that there wasn’t a solution. There was always solutions to all these things. This is the first time when I thought, okay, you’ve got to figure this one out for yourself. And um, Henry David Throw once said that, not until we are lost. Can we begin to find ourselves? So I sought out, um, a lot of alternative medicine.

I got stem cells and prolotherapy and platelet rich plate plasma, and I, I sought it all out to try to help the foot. At least structurally. And then my mom passed, happened to pass away in the middle of all this. So I had time to [00:23:00] just go inward and think about, okay, what, what have I done wrong here? Maybe I’ve been, um.

Not a nice person because I lost my SOLE, but I felt like I needed my SOUL saved, and so I tried to do a lot of meditation and studying neuroscience and y. Um, how meditation can help that. And I studied energy medicine and I studied restorative yoga. And I, I just went, just went deep for three years. I just kind of hid out and all my friends up there were with me when, you know, I, Ray would put on his, his ski closer, his running shoes, and go to, to go out and exercise and I would start crying and I just would always be in tears.

And finally after a lot of work and it internally and a lot of outside work, little by little my foot started to be a little less blue [00:24:00] and so did I, and less swollen. And gradually I was able to do more and more. First I could walk without the brace. I had a A FO brace on my foot, and then I could. Walk a little bit longer and then I could double pull cross country skiing.

And finally, in 2022, I hiked to jump top a jumbo for the first time and I just wept. And um. With joy and gratitude. And ever since then I’ve really thought, okay, you’ve gotta be grateful for this body. ’cause you know, it’s, it’s pieced together. Lots of, lots of replaced parts, and so you’ve gotta take good care of it and honor it.

And when it doesn’t wanna do something, let go. Just let it go. And so. I wanna summarize my story, my lost and found story with a, a little verse from one of my favorite Museum, museum [00:25:00] musicians, Leonard Cohen. And the song is called Anthem. He says, ring the bells that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering.

There is a crack in everything, and that’s how the light gets in. Thank you.

Marc Moss: Katie Van Dorn

is originally from Lala, California. Katie studied exercise physiology at the University of Montana. She is passionate about the outdoors and is a compassionate real estate agent who has been caring for home buyers and sellers alike in Missoula for over 20 years. Katie loves hiking, cross country skiing, swimming, gardening, and cooking.

You may have heard her freeform show on Montana Public Radio, where she is a rotating host and producer of Thursday freeform coming up after the break.

Karna Sundby: When I found [00:26:00] his body, I just started screaming and screaming and ran into the house, grabbed the phone, and started dialing my parents in Illinois. When I realized I can’t just keep screaming when they answered the phone and I can’t stop, I hung up.

Kara Adolphson: I look over and there’s a copy of the caman. The campus newspaper sat right there and on. It is a photo of the art exhibit from the day before Kismet. I’m gonna read that, so I drag it over and I unfold it so that the page drops down and that’s when I see underneath the photo.

Marc Moss: That’s next on the Tell Us Something podcast.

Remember that. The next tell us something event is October 7th. You can learn about how to pitch your story and get tickets@tellussomething.org. Thanks to our media sponsors, Missoula events.net and Missoula Broadcasting Company. Learn more about Missoula Broadcasting Company and listen [00:27:00] online@missoulabroadcastingcompany.com.

Thanks to our in-kind sponsors, float Missoula. Learn more@floatmsla.com and Joyce of tile.

Joyce Gibbs: Hi, it’s Joyce from Joyce of Tile. If you need tile work done, give me a shout. I specialize in custom tile installations. Learn more and see some examples of my work@joyceoftile.com.

Marc Moss: Alright, let’s get back to the stories.

You are listening to the Tell Us Something podcast. I’m Marc Moss, opening up the second half of this episode of the Tell Us Something Podcast. Karna Sundby goes on a blind date in Seattle, which leads to a whirlwind, romance and a life that feels like a dream when an unimaginable tragedy strikes. One woman’s world shatters, forcing her to confront the deepest of despair, follow her incredible journey through loss, unexpected healing, and the profound discovery of purpose amidst the pain.

Know that Karna’s story speaks frankly [00:28:00] about suicide. Karna calls her story, finding the gift. Thanks for listening.

Karna Sundby: Hello everybody. Can you hear me?

Come with me to Seattle. It’s after work and I’m on an escalator, headed up to a restaurant, and I’m feeling anxious and wondering why am I doing this? I get to the top and sitting on a couch is a very handsome man. Eyeing the escalator, he stands up, flashes me. A big smile, has perfect teeth, and maybe this blind date isn’t such a bad idea.

After all, we sit in the bar for hours telling stories about our families, our sales careers, his love of sailing, my passion for skydiving and all of our bizarre blind dates. Later, we would [00:29:00] agree that it seemed like a reunion. Like we already knew each other, maybe from some other time. His name was Ed, and his gentle spirit won my heart.

We spent almost every weekend on his sailboat, which was so relaxing and so exhilarating when you’re keeled over and the spinnaker’s out, slicing through the the swales, and then there’s nothing so tranquil as being lulled to sleep. By waves slapping against the hull of a gently rocking boat. Eventually we moved into a guest house, I mean a, a house on the Puget Sound, and it was summer in Seattle.

We were so happy. Life was so good. As I got to know him over the next couple years, I felt we had the happiest relationship of anybody that I knew. He was more quiet with other people than he was with me, and so I started [00:30:00] thinking of him as the strong, silent type. We were both in sales and I realized that he never should have been.

There was just too much pressure, too many quotas, too many, too much selling, and so I wish that he had had some different kind of career. We never had an argument. I never saw him upset or. Depressed until one November night. And then when I asked him what was wrong, he said it was his job. And I said, well, ed, you can find a different job, but I’d never seen him despondent like this.

And I didn’t know how to support him. So I just thought, well, I’ll just let it be. Let him watch Monday Night football and we’ll talk about this more tomorrow. But for us, there would be no, tomorrow I was 42 years old. Living a charmed life with the man of my dreams. Those dreams died the next day when I came home from work and found him dead.

[00:31:00] He had chosen to end his life. When I found his dead body, I just started screaming and screaming and ran into the house, grabbed the phone, and started dialing my parents in Illinois. When I realized I can’t just keep screaming when they answer the phone and I can’t stop, I hung up. Yeah, just then my neighbor shouted.

I called 9 1 1 and whoosh. All of my freaking out parts just came rushing back together and I thought, help us on the way. Maybe he’s not dead, maybe they can save him. The firetruck came very quickly and got him out of the, the car. We’re trying to resuscitate him on the driveway. It was so unbelievable. I ran into the house to get a pillow for his head.

I remember standing against this post just praying out loud. I swear I could hear the sound of my life shattering on the concrete. When I realized he was gone. I now know [00:32:00] that he’d been fired from that job for not making his sales skull. And later I would find a box of mail that he didn’t want me to see.

Debts a recent bill from the IRS with six years of unpaid taxes. The strong, silent type with secrets that I would never find answers for the next year was hell, full of dark emotions, sorrow to pray, despair, hopelessness, and I needed community to heal. So I went to visit some dear girlfriends in the LA area and happened to be there when the Northridge earthquake happened.

We were talking until late into the night when suddenly the earth just started quaking. The walls were shuttering, shirking violently back and forth, and it was dark as a tomb, and there was this dead silence except for my friends shouting, are you okay? Are you okay? They were [00:33:00] diving for door jambs and hiding under fufu furniture.

I was laying on the ground spread eagle in front of a plate glass window that went from the floor to the ceiling, hoping that it would shatter and kill me. And I’d made an instant decision that if it broke and didn’t kill me, I’d take a shard of glass and slip my juggler vein and no one would know that I had done it.

That’s how much I didn’t wanna be here. I wished that I could die, but I knew the pain of suicide. There was just this constant ache. This. Empty, endless hole that nothing could fill. And there were the nightmares that first year. It was a supportive family, friends, grief counseling and a spiritual connection that got me through the tough times.

I wanted to be free of the bad dreams. So I went to a professional. That first session was pretty scary because she wanted to take me back into the garage. The source [00:34:00] of the, the sight of the. Bad dreams where I would wake up in a cold, sweaty panic, sometimes screaming. But what she said made sense that I had, I was reliving it because that’s the way my brain had recorded it and that we needed to rewire my brain.

So she taught me how to disassociate in a healthy way from the event so that I could observe it instead of live it. After two sessions, I never had a nightmare again. After a few more sessions, I was blown away at how much better I was feeling no longer merely surviving. I was thriving. The modality was called NLP, which stands for Neural Linguistic Programming, and I decided I wanna help people heal from their trauma.

So I went to school, became a master practitioner of neural linguistic programming. [00:35:00] And when I first started working with clients, it was the most fulfilling thing I ever experienced in my life. It was such a gift, and there were other gifts that came from this tragedy, the gift of compassion. When I felt such deep pain, it led me to such deep compassion for human suffering.

I don’t know if I could have become someone who cares so much what people go through if I hadn’t gone through so much myself. That was such a gift, and another gift that I received was learning how to forgive. If I hadn’t been able to forgive the people that I wanted to blame, I think I’d still be haunted by this tragedy stuck forever in the past.

Maybe even using it as an excuse for why I couldn’t be happy or successful in life. But I like what Nelson Mandela says about forgiveness. To stay [00:36:00] in a state of non forgiveness is like me drinking poison, expecting the other guy to die. I didn’t wanna drink the poison, so I became someone who can forgive easily, and that is a great gift.

Another gift that I received was I learned how to feel all my feelings, no matter how dark they were, without being afraid of feeling them. I learned the truth of grieving, which is this, to heal you must feel. When I, when Ed first died, I never thought I’d be happy again, and I sure never thought I’d fall in love, but maybe it’s because I was willing to so deeply feel that I was able to truly heal my broken heart and create new dreams.

I’ve been with my amazing husband, Kirk, now for 24 years. Actually, it’ll be [00:37:00] 24 years on July 7th, and I would need that my whole 10 minutes up here to tell you what a wonderful man he is. I’m gonna start crying. So communicative. So reliable. So passionate about life and handsome. With perfect teeth.

When I first met Kirk, I realized that for me, some of the grief work was only gonna be completed when I was in a relationship again, and he was willing to walk that path with me bringing us so close able to talk about everything. I created new dreams with him, like moving back to Missoula where I went to college.

Our life is so good and I’m so grateful that I didn’t die in that earthquake. That I live to find this joy and I love my work. I love to help people transform. And when I help somebody heal their trauma, their depression, their PTSD, you know, the [00:38:00] really deep stuff, it means the world to me. I feel like I’m doing the work that I’m meant to do.

Do I think about Ed very much? Not so much when there’s a, some, you know, anniversary. Yes. When I hear of another suicide, yes, but when I heard that the theme tonight was lost and found, I thought maybe I would like to tell my story. I lost so much. I lost the man I loved. I lost my hopes. I lost my dreams, and I found so much.

I found my passion. I found meaningful work. I found my life’s calling, and maybe I was destined to work with people to help them heal their trauma. And maybe I wouldn’t have found my destiny without this tragedy. So the whole experience has brought me to develop kind of a new core belief in life, which is that when the really tough times happen, maybe there’s a gift in there [00:39:00] somewhere.

And if we can just keep our eyes and our ears and our hearts open, maybe somehow will be guided to find a gift amidst the pain. Thank you.

Marc Moss: Karna Sundby’s journey of self-discovery has led her to explore various paths in life. From teaching meditation to a successful career in corporate sales, what has always driven her most is the desire to make a difference. Often the toughest times in life are the ones which break us open and forge within us a deep well of compassion.

Her story tonight is about one of those times when a terrible tragedy led to a precious gift. Closing out this episode of the Tell Us Something podcast. Kara [00:40:00] Adolphsen is a college freshman, grappling with a secret grief. Kara vows to herself that she will navigate her new life and grief silently. But on the anniversary of a profound loss, an unexpected invitation leads to an art exhibit, a surprising discovery and a breakthrough moment of joy and healing.

Kara calls her story finding humor after loss. Thanks for listening.

Kara Adolphson: Hello out there.

The first day of my freshman year in college was on the six month anniversary of my best friend’s death, and I had just come from this small Montana town where all of my day-to-day interactions had shifted from, Hey Kara, how’s it going? To, Hey Kara, how are you? [00:41:00] And I became so desperate to get away from that, that I moved as quickly and as early as I possibly could here to the University of Montana campus.

And as I arrived in the town that my friend and I had planned to move to together without her. I made a solemn vow to myself that I would tell no one that I was grieving, not only because I was so tired of these other sum interactions that I had been having, but also because at 18 I really didn’t have the words to explain what I was going through.

So it became my closest kept secret, and I told no one. I didn’t tell my professors. I didn’t tell my new bosses. I didn’t tell any new peers that I met. I didn’t even tell my [00:42:00] roommate that I lived in a proverbial shoebox with. It was truly a secret, but the thing about grief is that it tends to show up even when it’s uninvited, especially when it’s uninvited.

And my grief really showed up in my poor academic performance my freshman year. I had a hard time attending my classes, let alone doing anything to pass them. I practically flunked out my very first semester. I lost all of my academic scholarships, and while that was really difficult to hold. For anyone out there who has experienced grief, you can corroborate that.

One of the more difficult emotions to hold when you’re grieving is surprisingly joy. These two seemingly opposite emotions are hard to balance at [00:43:00] the same time, and it’s something that took me years of practice to master. But one thing during this year that really cracked open this joy for me was I, of course, met a boy and he really brought that glimmer back into my life.

I could tell that he could see through the facade that I was offering, and he was treating me like a normal person. And even so still, I couldn’t tell him about my grief. And as the year continued on and the seasons changed, and winter was preparing to give way into spring, there was this horrible date that was approaching, which was the one year anniversary of my friend’s death.

And I could tell pretty quickly that I wasn’t gonna be able to handle it very well. So I was [00:44:00] making plans of how I could kind of cancel the day and pretend that it. Didn’t even happen. And on the night before the one year anniversary, I was sitting in my dorm room predating calling out of work, canceling my classes, shocker, and just hiding away in my room.

And that’s when I heard a familiar ping on my laptop. A Facebook message because the year was 2013 and we still, Facebook messaged each other to communicate. And so I went over and it was a message from this boy and it said, Hey, what are you doing tomorrow? I thought, well, nothing. And he said, how would you feel about coming to one of my classes with me?

I thought, well, that’s really bizarre. Um, but what class? And he said, just show up. You’ll find out when you get there. So I agreed, [00:45:00] having no idea what I was agreeing to. The University of Montana offers over 300 different courses, including things like acrobatic trampoline class, so it really could have been anything.

But the next morning, instead of hiding away from the world as I had planned, I went out into it. And I went over to the social sciences building on campus, which is a kind of catchall building for a lot of classes to meet this boy. I went up to the third floor to a room that I knew was a lecture hall, hoping that I could walk in and blend in with the crowd.

But when I opened the door to that room, there was maybe 15 people in that room. There was no blending in, but I went in anyway and I sat down next to this boy and I said. Where am I? And he said, well, this is my art history class. I said, okay. [00:46:00] And right then the professor says, well, class, as you know, today is our big field trip day, so gather your belongings.

We’re leaving right now. Okay, so I get up with the rest of the class and we leave and we go all the way downstairs in the same building. There are student art exhibits on the first floor, and the class was to go around and just meander around the exhibits and make of them what you will. And this boy, he was beaming, so excited.

Because at some point over the last several months, I had told him that I love art, but what he doesn’t know that’s more salient to me on this day is that my friend, she really loved art. And so somehow on the one year anniversary. [00:47:00] I’m there at an art exhibit and as we go in, I’m pretty novice to the whole art exhibit scene.

So I’m breezing past the artist statements and I’m really taking like a vibes based approach to what’s in the room. And I walk into the very first exhibit. In The first display is this giant block of ice being melted by sound.

And I thought, oh no, I have no idea what this means, but I’m staring at this block of ice and this boy is staring at me staring at the block of ice. And I think you gotta say something brilliant. So I say something to the effect of, well, we’re all blocks of ice and. We’re all slowly melting. I’m having a rather existential day.

Mind you. [00:48:00] And he loves it and it encourages me to go authentically through the rest of the exhibit. So we go through serpentine all of the different art that’s on display until we enter the final room. Which is this magnificent display of all of these different hourglass shaped ceramic sculptures in all different shapes and sizes.

There’s one that’s four feet tall. There’s some on pedestals, like flower vases. There’s a hundred of them pinned up in a grid system, repeating over and over again, and I tell him how very. Warhol that is or something, and we spend a lot of time in this exhibit. We’re really enjoying it. And at the end, there’s this huge container of tiny versions of this sculpture that the viewers get to take home.

Perfect. We dig [00:49:00] through this container. We’re reaching to the bottom. We’re pulling them up to see how the glaze shines in the light. We’re rolling them in our palms to see the texture and the weight, and he finds one that he thinks speaks to him. I find one that speaks to me. We slip them in our pockets and we leave.

And as I made my way back to my dorm room, I was overcome with gratitude, how on a day that I had planned to disappear, I had been seen and really seen. And that night as I laid down in bed, I took my sculpture and I gave it a big kiss and I tucked it under my pillow, just warmed by the events from that day.

The next morning I even took it with me to the food Zoo for breakfast, and I went to the Food Zoo, the campus cafeteria, and I sat down with my cereal and my orange juice [00:50:00] and I look over and there’s a copy of the Caman. The campus newspaper sat right there and on. It is a photo of the art exhibit from the day before Kismet.

I’m gonna read that. So I drag it over and I unfold it so that the page drops down and that’s when I see underneath the photo in rather large writing. University butt plug exhibit is a huge success, and that’s when I realized that my sweet sculpture is in fact, yes. And I let out the biggest belly laugh that I had in a very long time, and it was during that time of tremendous loss for me that I found my sense of humor about life again.

Thank you,[00:51:00]

Marc Moss: Kara Adolphson. Kara is a Montanan community member, therapist and storyteller who finds joy in the arts, the outdoors, and Bluebird days in Missoula. She believes in the power of vulnerability, humor, and shared experience to bring people together, a lover of language and listening. Kara is committed to fostering connection, whether it is in the counseling room on a trail or around the dinner table.

Coming up in the next episode of the Tell Us Something podcast.

Aunvada Being: I asked him if he wanted to open up and he jumped at it. He was thrilled and that was shocking to me and also terrifying. And I’m, I wish that maybe I had been a bit more terrified.

Jilnar Mansour: Here I am in a refugee camp in Palestine with four other Americans, and what we’re doing is we’re witnessing the let up of a curfew.[00:52:00]

Curfew is. Something that was happening then and is still happening now where people are not able to leave their home for hours or days at a time.

Steve Schmidt: I take position on the left side of the doorway. My partner fills in the position of the right side of the doorway, and we fill this space naturally. Our guns are drawn because we’re searching this residence.

And I yell, sir, on the sixth day, I, I got a phone call and there

Lauren Tobias: was three kids on the other line and they were calling from the Wolf Point Pizza Joint. I was like, hello? They were like, all they said was, we found your dog.

Marc Moss: Listen to the concluding stories from the June, 2025 live event that closed out Pride Month.

The theme was lost and found. Subscribe to the podcast so you’ll be sure to catch those incredible stories. You can find us on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and Blue Sky and visit Tell us something.org. To explore 14 years of our story archives [00:53:00] and let me know what you thought of the new format. You can email me at info@tellussomething.org to share your thoughts.

Live recording by the recording Studio in Missoula, Montana, podcast production by me, Marc Moss Remember that the next tell us something event is October 7th. You can learn about how to pitch your story and get tickets@tellussomething.org.

TUS01501-The-Trail-Lunchbox
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[00:00:00] Welcome to the Tell Us Something podcast. I’m Marc Moss, your host. We have a special edition of the Tell Us Something podcast. Today I was lucky enough to be invited into the Trail Studios with Mike Smith for the Trail Lunchbox and when it Wednesday and unbeknownst to me, they recorded the show so.

Thank you so much to Tommy Evans for producing what you’re about to hear. Remember that we have an event coming up on Monday, June 30th. You can get your tickets@tellussomething.org.

The Trail 1 0 3 3 is KDTR fm Florence Missoula, locally owned and operated by the Missoula Broadcasting Company. Five, six.

Time for lunch. This is a very nutritious lunch. All the food groups are represented. You enjoy every sandwich. Give me two. Call me. Have lunch. Time is an illusion. Lunchtime, double. Now. Listen, lunchbox, don’t try [00:01:00] anything. Funny.

Well, Marc, this is kind of your theme song.

I feel real grateful to Cash for Junkers for letting me use it. What a,

that just sounds like Missoula, you know what I mean?

They’re, I mean, the first version of it, I sat down with Nate Beal, who, who’s plays in that band. Mm-hmm. He’s a friend of mine and, uh, I said, you know, I’m gonna be [00:02:00] doing a podcast.

This is back in 2011. For live storytelling. And we, we record the stories and, um, we’re gonna publish ’em as a podcast and I need music. Do you have anything? Yeah. And he said, well, I’ve got this rough cut of something that we’re working on and you can just use the rough cut. Hmm. And it was this, and, but it was, it was not as produced as this.

And then when the. Album came out, it was called, um, poop and Shinola, and um, obviously edited for radio play. Yeah. Thanks for pulling that. Mm-hmm. Thanks for pulling that. Yeah. Yeah. Mm-hmm. And he said, um, you know, use that, use the record cut. Yeah. Now, but that was years before we got that. Yeah. And it’s interesting to go back and, you know, you can listen to all of the podcasts episodes, all of the stories ever been told.

At tell us something on the website or wherever you get your podcasts. And so if you go back into the early days, you can hear that early version. The song is called Buzzing. Buzzing, [00:03:00] buzzing. All right, Marc Moss, tell us something. You got an event coming up. First of all though, I wanna talk about your t-shirt.

Oh, yeah. Quote on Marc’s t-shirt. I think the world is going to be saved by millions of small things. It’s Pete Seeger quote. Yeah. Thanks for wearing that. I mean, it’s the truth. I, yeah. The millions of small things are also gonna eat the shirt. Like Yeah. Got mos, right? No, it’s, it’s well loved. Yeah. But, uh, that’s kind of, uh, putting te us something together is by no means a small thing.

No. But all of the stories, all the stories that build it up seem like small things and the people that are telling them sometimes. Have never been on a stage before. Yeah. And maybe you’ve never heard of them. Mm-hmm. And I don’t announce who the storytellers are ahead of time. Right. For the reason that I believe.

That we all have a story to share. Everybody’s story is important, and I would love to see the community come out and support each other by [00:04:00] listening to each other. Mm-hmm. And it’s like, oh, Mike Smith is gonna be telling a story. Yeah. Awesome. I’m going to that show. Yeah. Or I’ve seen this person around.

Yeah.

Or, wow, I’ve never seen that person in my life. Right. Cool. Yeah. Let’s hear their story. Oh, I’ve seen this person. And they’re, they, they’ve got that as a story. What this time, uh. Each time you have a theme. Yeah. And this is lost and found. Right? Boy, you could go in a lot of different directions and we, and I bet they do.

And we do. Yeah. We have, uh, eight storytellers. They each have 10 minutes to share their true story on that, that theme. Lost and found. Mm-hmm. No notes. No calls to action, no props. There’s no PowerPoints or anything. Let’s talk about stage fright. How do you get folks to, you know, somebody who’s just like, oh Marc, I really want to tell my story, but this is not gonna be easy.

So terrified. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. One person actually, um, is fairly known in town, said I was gonna try to go onto the radar, but somebody told me that they know I’m doing it. Yeah. And I said, I don’t know how they know that. Um, I didn’t say anything to anybody. Yeah. She’s terrified. Right? [00:05:00] Right. And I said, you know, you can back out and, and that’s up to you.

Yeah. And she’s like, it’s an important story. I’m gonna tell it. Yes. You know? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And because when, once people know that they have a story worth hearing mm-hmm. And I give them that faith and that. Confidence, they’re ready to go. And that’s your belief in people, that everybody has a story to tell.

We hear you going back to that on a regular basis. That is absolutely true. You know, and, and to have your story be seen and witnessed and heard by your community mm-hmm. Is so powerful. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Definitely. Yeah. Uh, the next storytelling event, tell us about it. It is at Ogren Park Allegiance Field.

And it will be closing out Pride month. So we have some queer voices, we have some allies, and we’ve got people coming from the East coast [00:06:00] to witness one of their friends sharing this story story. Oh, that’s fun. Yeah. We’ve got, and, and that’s the point, obviously you have this great catalog of people, uh, telling stories over the years.

Yeah. On the tell us something website, fantastic resource. But the point is getting together to hear these stories. Yeah. The live event can’t be, can’t be transformed. Yeah. I mean, you do radio for a living. Mm-hmm. And you understand the power of spoken word. Yeah. It’s different when you’re in person and you’re witnessing in community.

It really is. Yeah. And you’re about to cry and you’re looking around and there’s people already crying. Mm-hmm. Or you’re like laughing out loud. Mm-hmm. Maybe what seems like an inappropriate moment and everybody else is laughing. Yeah. And it’s like, and the personal nature of it, you just get so personal with that, you know?

And oftentimes on the radio, I’m just telling you, I love this new song. Yeah. Or isn’t it gonna be cool when we go to this concert? Sometimes we’re passing along sad news, the passing of a, of a musician or, or, or something going on in the world. Yeah. But when you get real personal, that’s where it gets not only, uh, it gets [00:07:00] deep and meaningful for everybody involved.

Yeah. And then even things going on in the world, if you can personalize even that. Mm-hmm. You know, we have a story about a woman who is trained to. Deal with, um, conflict. Mm. And she goes into a situation where there is war and she’s trying to be humanitarian aid. Mm-hmm. And that’s just amazing. Yeah. Yeah.

You know, and we have a story of a. Police officer responding to a robbery in progress and what does that like? Mm-hmm. What about the decisions that get made and how are those going? Those decisions gonna change not just his life, but everybody else’s life in there, per usual. Marc, you have a beautiful, uh, poster for this event.

I. You wanna shout out the artist on that one? Yeah. This poster is Ryan Hawk and this poster originally, so lost and found was going to be the theme for the March. Mm-hmm. 2020, yeah. Program. I dunno if you remember what happened in [00:08:00] March of 2020. Yeah. Yeah, kind of. Uh, we, we, we try to forget. Then we remember and yeah.

And we remember a lot of positive that came outta that. Yeah. So, uh, it was way before, right? It was mm-hmm. I think I was, she used the 10 bar, Ryan Hawk used the 10 bar at the North Side Cattle House, and that’s in my neighborhood, and I spent some time there and she was, you know what’s, it was a. Slow afternoon and well, you know, what’s going on?

What have you been doing? I was mm-hmm. Sort of complaining that I have a show coming up in two months and I don’t have a poster artist. Yeah. And she said, well, I’ll do it. And I said, well, you know, you’re an artist. Okay. You know, you never, everybody’s an artist. Yeah. And so I wanted to see. Her work and she pulled out her phone and started showing me she does the, all of the artwork for the, uh, international Wildlife Film Festival.

Yeah. Nice. And I said, what’s your rate? And she told me, and I said, I can pay you that. And, and she whipped this out and a. Couple of weeks and it’s beautiful. Yeah. [00:09:00] And obviously I couldn’t use it right. March, 2020. Mm-hmm. Didn’t that show didn’t happen, so I adapted it a little bit and added the trans pride flag, um, to the flames.

And if you haven’t seen the poster, yeah, check it out for the listeners. Uh, it features a person and, uh, what looks like a monkey with a. Space helmet on and a Sasquatch much, and then like a cero or cat, a cowgirl looking person, cowgirl sitting around a campfire. And the flames are going up into the sky and featuring, could be a moon, could be a sun.

I kind of think it might be a moon, full moon looking thing. It’s open to interpretation. Yeah, it’s cool. And it’s all, all monochrome. Except for the flames now. Yeah, but, but her initial design was all monochro, the pride flames. Cool. Yeah. Tell us something. Dot org. We dig your style. Marc Moss. Thanks. Not only putting on this event all these years, but also reaching for [00:10:00] an artist here and a musician there.

I mean, everyone gets paid. Lot of fun. Casper Junkers initially gave us the song pro bono, and I thought, you know, I don’t have any money right now, but when I finally did have some money mm-hmm. Uh, they didn’t ask me to pay them, but I, I did. And I was, it was, I think I’ve told you this before, knocked on their door.

Yeah. And they practiced in the, in Tyler Roddy’s shop. Mm-hmm. Down the, down the alley from where I live. Right. Yeah. And I knocked. And it was dark and you hear all the shuffling going on, it’s like hide the weed. Pretty much. Yeah. And he goes, I go, it’s Marc Moss. He goes. We thought you were the cops. That’s how the cops like a noise complaint.

Right? That’s how the cops knock. Right. You know? That’s You knock like a cop. Yeah. Well, my dad was a, my dad was a cop. Yeah. Well, Marc Moss of tell us something lost and found stories coming up. June 30th, seven o’clock. Ogrin Park at Allegiance Field. I say [00:11:00] June 30th, but that’s Monday next. Yeah. Would you like to go?

I’m talking to you. Fair listener. Uh, would you like to go text in? Tell us something. Lost and found. Lost and found. Thank you. Yeah. Lost and found. 4 0 6. 6 0 4 1 0 3. 3 4 0 6. 6 0 4. 1 0 3. Three. Lost and found. Uh, June 30th next week you can find out all the details that tell us something. Dot org. Uh, final thought.

Marc, you’re away. Tickets, right? Yeah. Lost you text. Yeah. We’re giving away tickets. You text, text laws and found to that number. What was the number? 4 0 6. 6 0 4 1 0 3 3. Text Lawson found to that number and you’ll get a pair of tickets. To the Monday June 30th event, and for those of you who don’t get those free tickets, you can purchase tickets@tellussomething.org.

Tickets are on sale right now, and they do go up. The price of tickets go up on Monday, the day of the show, but right now they’re $20. Thank you very much. Marc Moss. We’re gonna go out of the, uh, trail lunchbox today with a new one from Role Model. This is called [00:12:00] Sally. When the Wine runs Out, trail Lunchbox.

Remember that we have an event coming up on Monday, June 30th. You can get your tickets@tellussomething.org.