Growing up in an industrial English town, writer/performer David Cale escaped his parents’ fraught marriage by singing in his bedroom and tending to birds in the animal hospital he built in a garden shed—until a tragedy changed everything. Lushly arranged songs and an intimate portrait of his mother—a charismatic woman trapped by her circumstances—unite in Cale’s vivid testament of connecting to life when adversity is suddenly everywhere. With his “singular fusion of theater and performance art” (Chicago Tribune), Cale makes “reality and fantasy dissolve into stories as memorable as one's most vivid dreams” (The New York Times).