My mother owned a small duplex in East Palo Alto, along the freeway - for awhile I lived there. Next door were various tenants at different times - two of them were a retired couple - he was an ex-boxer who had gotten work in the electronics industry, places that dealt with radiation, and she was his fiery wife. They used to drink, argue, and physically fight - we could hear them through the wall. Being the man of the house, I felt it my duty to go next door and quiet them down. They really just wanted someone to pay atention to them, and treated me as sort of a son - the husband wanted to teach me about electronics, and had some old electronic machine on the floor. I had begun writing plays the year before and never took him up on his offer, and after six months they moved out. I decided to write a one-act play about them when they were gone, called "The Secret War". The young man in the play, "George", was based on me, and I wrote it and put it away, did nothing with it. I did other things in my life, moved out of my mother's duplex, got various jobs, kept writing plays - and every once in a while, I would pull "The Secret War" out of a drawer, work on it, and then put it back. Years went by, and I became a teacher - one year I was teaching summer school, a tough assignment, and I decided I needed to work on a play every morning before I would go off to teach - I pulled out "The Secret War" and worked on that, and by the end of summer school I had finished it, and called it "The Glimmer. Now I needed to get it produced. More to come...

Contact me at edballou@icloud.com if you are interested in producing The Glimmer.​