To Sue and Oscar, for everything;

to Dr. Richard Barakat and Dr. Carol Aghajanian, for time;

to Betty Brock, for being a paragon of children’s room librarians and for being ours;

to Stuart Pizer, for his step-grandfather;

to Caroline Heller, Lynn Focht, and Martha Nichols for their most felicitous balance of kindness and intelligence;

to Mary Page, for being an exquisite reader and a teacher to the bone;

to Gillian Richards and Florence Marc-Charles, for help with Baptiste and his Grann;

to Ted Simpson, for help with stagecraft;

to Cathy Jaque, Matt Spindler, Erin Edmison and especially Inge De Taeye, for their icebergian talents and labors, of which I know I glimpsed no more than the proverbial tip;

to Sarah McGrath, Geoff Kloske, Sarah Stein, and everyone at Riverhead, for their thoughtful and rare care in making this into a book;

to Barney Karpfinger, for helping me come to understand not only the work but also myself better, and for his increasingly vital friendship these past twenty years;

to Joan and Arnie and Tam, for coming into the picture; and to George, Rosy, Joe, Barley and Mike, for everything else:

thank you.