$15.00 Ticket
60-minute Powerstories-Produced - 2 pm
- The First Step by Kathleen Maule Holen (Kansas)
The First Step tells the story of how four women were changed for good by a secretive young man who became their personal fitness coach. For the past fourteen years Dotty Paulson and her three friends, Cassie French, Brenda Underhill, and Susan Marcus, have been driving to the top of Veterans Hill on New Year’s Day. They salute the dawn of the new year, cook breakfast on a grill, and affirm their resolutions. They affirm the same ones every year—lose weight, quit smoking, cut back on drinking, get more exercise—and promptly break all of them. Finally, they admit that they are middle-aged and out of shape. But 2014 is going to be different if Dotty has anything to say about it. She’s met the new personal trainer in town, Glen Duncan, and signed herself and her friends up for fitness training. Now all she has to do is convince them to forget their worn-out resolutions and make just one: by next year they will be strong enough to climb the steps to the top of Veterans Hill. Glen may not be the perfect trainer. After all, his motto is “Do as I say, not as I do”, and it’s obvious he has some serious emotional baggage. Why else would he be taking large doses of painkillers with alcohol? Despite his dangerous personal habits, over the next nine months he sets all four women on the path to strength, both physical and emotional, and then tragically leaves them but not without an enduring sense of purpose.