Rap Reigning Queens

***The day Dean Martin buried his heart with Dino Jr. — The funeral that killed the King***

They say Dean Martin died on Christmas Day 1995. The history books will tell you that his heart finally gave out in his Beverly Hills home, surrounded by the silence he had come to crave. The obituaries listed his movies, his songs, his jokes, and his legendary coolness. They spoke of emphysema and old age.

But his friends knew the truth. They knew that the man who died in 1995 was just a shell, a ghost haunting a body that had forgotten how to live. The real Dean Martin, the man who laughed, the man who loved, the man who lit up every room he entered, actually died 8 years earlier on a snowy mountainside in California.

He died on March 21, 1987, the day a telephone call brought him to his knees and ripped the soul right out of his chest. Because on that day, the king of cool didn't lose his fame. He didn't lose his money. And he didn't lose his voice. He lost his son. And when he lost his son, he lost the only reason he had to keep playing the game.

This is the heartbreaking untold story of the night the music stopped forever. This is the story of a father's silent scream that echoed for eight long years until he finally found the peace of the grave.

To understand the magnitude of the tragedy that destroyed Dean Martin, you first have to understand the bond he shared with his son, Dean Paul Martin, known to the world and his family simply as Dino Jr.

In the constellation of the Martin family, Dino was the brightest star. He was everything Dean was and everything Dean wanted to be. Handsome, talented, athletic, and possessed of that same effortless charm that made his father a legend. Dino was the golden boy. He was a tennis pro who played at Wimbledon. He was an actor who starred in movies like Players and TV shows like Misfits of Science.

He was a musician in the rock band Dino, Desi & Billy. But more than all of that, he was a pilot. And not just any pilot. He was a captain in the California Air National Guard, flying F-4 Phantom jets. To Dean, who would spend his life pretending to be a drunk on stage while secretly being a dedicated family man, Dino was his validation.

He was the proof that Dean had done something right in this crazy world. They were more than father and son. They were best friends. They played golf together. They cracked jokes together. They understood each other in a way that didn't require words. Dean, a man who famously kept everyone at arm's length, who built a wall of cool around himself that no one could pe*****te, lowered the drawbridge for Dino.

Dino was the only one who truly saw the man behind the tuxedo. Dean would look at his son and see his own immortality. He saw a better version of himself. He saw a future where the Martin name would continue to shine, not because of showbiz tricks, but because of genuine merit. Dino was the anchor that kept Dean's feet on the ground.

When the pressures of fame, the demands of Frank Sinatra, or the hollowness of Hollywood got too much, Dean would look at his son—this strapping, brave, beautiful young man, serving his country—and he would feel a swelling of pride that no applause could ever match. He called him "Captain." He bragged about him to anyone who would listen.

"That's my boy," he would say, pointing to a picture of Dino in his flight suit. "He flies jets. I just sing songs." It was a humble brag, but it was the truest thing Dean ever said. He revered his son. And that reverence, that deep unspoken connection was what made the events of March 1987 not just a tragedy, but a spiritual ex*****on.

March 21, 1987 started like any other Saturday in Los Angeles. But in the San Bernardino Mountains, a beast was waking up. A freak snowstorm was swirling around the peaks of Mount San Gorgonio, the highest point in Southern California. The weather was treacherous. Thick clouds, blinding snow, and winds that howled like banshees.

Captain Dean Paul Martin and his weapon system officer, Captain Ramon Ortiz, were scheduled for a routine training mission. They were flying an F-4C Phantom, a beast of a machine capable of breaking the sound barrier. But on this day, nature was the superior force. They took off from March Air Force Base in the afternoon. The mission was simple, a departure procedure that would take them up through the cloud layers and out towards the desert.

Dean Martin was at home in Beverly Hills. He was likely watching television, perhaps a golf tournament or an old western, nursing a soft drink, completely unaware that 60 miles away, his world was about to end. At 1:52 p.m., Dino's jet requested a left turn from air traffic control to avoid the towering ominous clouds that were blocking their path.

The controller approved the turn. But in the confusion of the storm, amidst the swirling whiteout conditions that erased the horizon and turned the world into a featureless void, something went terribly wrong. The jet, traveling at over 400 mph, didn't turn away from the mountain. It turned directly into it.

The terrain of San Gorgonio is unforgiving. It is a wall of granite and ice that rises over 11,000 feet into the air. In the blinding snow, Dino wouldn't have seen the mountain until it was far too late. There would have been no time to scream, no time to be afraid. One moment, they were flying. The next, there was only darkness.

The jet impacted the sheer granite face of the mountain at high velocity. The impact was cataclysmic. The explosion would have been muffled by the heavy snow. A silent fireball quickly extinguished by the blizzard. Back in Beverly Hills, the phone hadn't rung yet. The sun might have even been peeking through the clouds over Dean's pool. He was safe. He was calm.

He didn't feel the disturbance in the air. He didn't know that his mini-me, his golden boy, had just been erased from the sky. But the silence was coming. The radar blip had vanished from the screens at March Air Force Base. The controllers called out, "Phantom 6, come in. Phantom 6, do you read?" Static. Just static.

And in that static lay a nightmare that would consume Dean Martin for the rest of his life. The news didn't come immediately. It started as a worry, a delayed return, a missing blip. But when the phone finally rang at Dean's house, the voice on the other end wasn't Dino. It was an official from the Air National Guard.

"Mr. Martin, your son's plane is missing." Those words are the most terrifying sentence a parent can hear. Missing. It implies hope, but it carries the weight of doom. For the next 3 days, Dean Martin entered a personal hell that no Dante could describe. The storm on the mountain was so severe that search and rescue teams couldn't get near the crash site. Helicopters were grounded.

Foot patrols were turned back by avalanches and zero visibility. Dean sat in his living room. He didn't sleep. He didn't eat. He chain-smoked pack after pack of ci******es. The smoke creating a blue haze around him that matched his mood. He stared at the telephone as if by sheer force of will he could make it ring with good news.

He imagined scenarios. Maybe Dino had ejected. Maybe he was sitting on the mountainside wrapped in his parachute waiting for rescue. Maybe he was cold but alive. Dean clung to these fantasies with the desperation of a drowning man. Friends came by. Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., Jerry Lewis called, but Dean barely spoke to them.

He was in a trance of agony. He wasn't the king of cool anymore. He was just a frightened father trembling in his pajamas. He paced the floor, walking miles on his expensive carpets, muttering prayers he hadn't said since he was a boy in Ohio. "Please, God, take everything. Take the money. Take the fame. Just give me the boy. Just give me the boy."

But God wasn't bargaining that week. The storm raged on, covering the mountain in a shroud of white, hiding the wreckage and the truth. Every hour that passed without news was a torture session. The not knowing was a razor blade slicing through Dean's sanity. He would pour a drink, look at it, and put it down, feeling guilty for even thinking of comfort while his son might be freezing on a mountain.

Finally, on the third day, the weather broke. The search helicopters lifted off. They spotted the scar on the granite face. They spotted the wreckage. There was no parachute. There was no survivor. When the confirmation came that Dino was gone, that he had died instantly upon impact, Dean didn't scream. He didn't throw things. He simply collapsed inward.

It was as if the strings that held his puppet body together had been cut. The light in his eyes—that mischievous twinkle that had charmed the world for 40 years—flickered out and died. He hung up the phone and sat in his favorite chair, staring at a blank television screen. The silence in the room was deafening.

It was the sound of a heart breaking beyond repair. The funeral was a blur of black limousines, weeping celebrities, and military honors—a folded American flag, the sound of taps played on a lonely bugle. Dean Martin was there physically, but spiritually he was miles away. He moved like a robot. He wore his dark glasses not to look cool, but to hide eyes that were swollen and dead.

People tried to comfort him. They said Dino died a hero. They said he didn't suffer. Dean nodded politely, but he didn't hear them. All he could hear was the silence where his son's laugh used to be. At the graveside, Dean looked older than his years. The vitality that had defined him was gone, replaced by a gray, hollow fragility.

He touched the casket, a gentle, lingering touch, as if he were tucking Dino in for the night one last time. Witnesses say he whispered something, but no one knows for sure what it was. Maybe it was, "I love you." Maybe it was, "Wait for me."

After the funeral, Dean retreated into his fortress on Mountain Drive. He shut the gates. He stopped returning calls. He stopped going out to dinner. The world wanted Dean Martin back. But Dean Martin didn't want the world. He felt betrayed by life. He had played by the rules. He had worked hard, provided for his family, entertained millions, and this was his reward—to bury his child.

It made no sense. It was a cruel joke. And for the first time in his life, Dean didn't find the joke funny. He began to shed the trappings of his stardom. He didn't care about the records. He didn't care about the ratings. He sat in his room watching old westerns on a loop. Why westerns? Because in westerns, the good guys won.

In westerns, death had a reason. In westerns, the world was simple. The complex, painful reality of 1987 was too much to bear. He became a ghost in his own life, drifting from room to room, carrying the heavy, invisible burden of grief that pressed down on his shoulders like the granite of San Gorgonio.

A year later in 1988, Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr. tried to save him. They saw their friend fading away, dying of a broken heart, and they came up with a plan—a massive reunion tour. Together again, the Rat Pack back on stage, filling stadiums, reliving the glory days. Frank thought the applause would heal Dean. He thought the music would bring him back to life.

Frank was wrong. Frank didn't understand that Dean didn't want to be healed. He just wanted to be left alone. But Dean, ever the loyal friend, agreed. He didn't want to let Frank and Sammy down. The tour started and it was a disaster for Dean. He stood on stage in Oakland, in Vancouver, in Chicago, and he looked lost. He would forget lyrics.

He would flick his cigarette ashes onto the stage floor with a look of utter disdain. The old magic, the timing, the spark—it was gone. He looked at the audience and saw thousands of strangers who wanted him to be funny, who wanted him to be Dino, while his heart was bleeding. He felt like a clown performing at a funeral.

In Chicago, it reached a breaking point. Dean turned to Frank on stage and mumbled, "I want to go home." Frank tried to push him, tried to rally him. "Come on, De, let's knock 'em dead." But Dean had nothing left to give. He threw his cigarette down, walked off the stage, and went straight to the airport. He flew home to Los Angeles, leaving the tour, leaving the money, leaving the legend behind.

He checked into a hospital for kidney problems, but everyone knew the truth. It was a soul problem. He was done. He had tried to be Dean Martin one last time for his friends, but the mask wouldn't stick anymore. It slid off his face, revealing the grieving father underneath. That night in Chicago was the last time the real Rat Pack ever existed.

Dean had walked away not out of arrogance, but out of exhaustion. He had realized that no amount of applause could fill the hole in his life. The final seven years of Dean Martin's life were a study in solitude. He didn't become a recluse in the crazy sense. He just became a man who was finished with the noise. He established a quiet routine.

Every evening he would put on his tuxedo or a sports coat, always dressing for dinner out of habit and self-respect, and go to his favorite Italian restaurant, La Famiglia or Da Vinci. He would sit at the same table. The staff knew not to disturb him. They would bring him his pasta e fagioli, his bread, his glass of wine, and often Dean would have them set a place setting for the empty chair opposite him.

Some said he was waiting for Frank. Others whispered he was waiting for a woman. But those who knew him understood. That empty chair was for Dino. He was having dinner with his son. He would sit there for hours, eating slowly, sipping his wine, staring into the middle distance, lost in a conversation that only he could hear.

Fans would sometimes approach him, asking for an autograph. Dean would always be polite. He would sign the napkin, smile that sleepy smile, and say, "You're welcome, pal." But the eyes, the eyes were vacant. They were the eyes of a man who was just waiting for the check so he could go home.

He spent his days watching TV, playing golf until he became too weak, and sleeping. He wasn't sad in a dramatic weeping way anymore. He was just absent. He was serving out his time. He was a prisoner of existence, waiting for parole. He missed his friends. Sammy died in 1990, and that was another blow. But mostly, he missed the boy on the mountain.

He told a friend once, "I'm not afraid of dying. Why should I be? Everyone I love is already there." It was a profound statement of faith and fatigue. The king of cool had become a monk of grief, finding a strange comfort in his loneliness.

And then the end finally came. It was Christmas Day, 1995, a poetic date for a man who had made "Marshmallow World" and "Baby, It's Cold Outside" holiday anthems. Dean Martin lay in his bed. His breathing was shallow. The emphysema caused by a lifetime of ci******es had claimed his lungs. But it was the grief that had claimed his will to breathe.

He was 78 years old. As the world outside celebrated, opening presents and singing carols, Dean Martin closed his eyes. There was no struggle, no panic, just a gentle exhaling, a final release of the burden he had carried for 8 years. The silence he had sought for so long finally embraced him completely.

When the news broke, the lights on the Las Vegas Strip were dimmed in his honor. The world mourned the loss of an icon. Frank Sinatra, devastated and frail, wept for his brother. But for those who really loved Dean, there was a sense of relief. They knew that he wasn't suffering anymore.

They knew that somewhere in the great beyond, the pilot had landed and the father was waiting at the gate. The tragic irony of Dean Martin's life is that he spent 40 years trying to make us laugh. But his story ended in tears. Yet in that tragedy, there is a beautiful lesson. It teaches us that fame is nothing.

Money is dust and awards are just metal. The only thing that truly matters, the only thing that can break a man like Dean Martin is love. He loved his son so much that he couldn't survive without him. And that in its own heartbreaking way is the most noble legacy of all.

So the next time you hear "That's Amore," don't just hear the jokes and the Italian charm. Listen to the voice. Listen to the warmth and remember the man who died of a broken heart on a snowy mountain and the father who spent his last years staring at an empty chair waiting for his boy to come home.

Rest in peace, Dino. You finally got your wings.

***John Wayne Threw Away a Perfect Take When Mitchum's Horse Started Running — Here's Why***

Mitchum's horse bolted straight toward the cliff edge with the cameras still rolling and nobody on that western set was close enough to stop what was about to happen. Wait, because what John Wayne did in the next 3 seconds would cost the studio a fortune and make every stunt man on every lot tell the story for the next 30 years.

And most people still don't understand why he made that choice.

The Arizona high desert at 7 in the morning looks like God decided to paint with nothing but gold and shadow. And on this particular morning in October 1959, 200 crew members were scattered across 3 acres of scrubland waiting for the light to hit just right.

They'd been setting up this cavalry chase sequence for 8 months. 12 cameras, quarter million dollar budget riding on one massive shot. John Wayne sat on his horse about 40 yards from the starting mark, checking his saddle straps for the sixth time that morning. The horse under him was a 14-year-old quarter horse named Smokey, who'd been in more films than half the crew.

And when Smokey's ears flicked back twice in the same direction, John paid attention. Robert Mitchum was over by the equipment trucks smoking and talking to the wranglers about the stallion they brought in for him. It was a big gray animal with a white blaze down its face, the kind that looked perfect on camera, but made the experienced guys nervous.

The director, Vernon Cross, called everyone to positions around 6:45. The shot was simple in concept. Eight riders coming over a ridge at full gallop, cameras tracking them across 300 yards of open ground. They'd done five takes already. This was take six, the one that had to work.

John walked Smokey over to his mark and caught Mitchum's eye across the staging area. Mitchum grinned and gave him a two-finger salute off his hat brim. John nodded back, but his hands stayed on his reins just a little tighter than usual.

"Rolling," Cross said, and dropped his arm. The riders came over the ridge like a wave of muscle and leather and controlled violence. And for the first 100 yards, everything was exactly what it was supposed to be.

The cameras tracked perfectly. The light held. The dust came up in long cinematic plumes. John kept Smokey at the front. Mitchum on his right. Then Mitchum's horse saw something. Nobody ever figured out what it was. Could have been a rattlesnake. Could have been reflection off a camera lens. Whatever it was, the horse's head je**ed left.

Its eyes showed white and the animal broke from formation heading straight for the cliff edge that bordered the north side of the shooting location. Notice something about the way panic moves through a crowd. There's always a 2-second lag between when something goes wrong and when people understand what they're seeing.

The camera operators kept tracking because that's what their hands knew how to do. The wranglers started moving, but they were 300 yards back. John Wayne saw it instantly. Not just that the horse was running wrong, but that Mitchum was pulling back on the reins with both hands and nothing was happening and that the cliff edge was maybe 200 yards ahead and closing fast and that at this speed there were 3 seconds before the drop and that nobody else was in position to do anything except watch it happen.

Stop for a second and picture the set from above because what you're about to see only makes sense when you know where his eyes were looking. John wasn't watching Mitchum. He was watching the space between Mitchum's horse and the cliff edge, calculating angles and speeds the way you do when you've spent 25 years learning that math with your body instead of your head.

And the cameras were still rolling because film cost money. And you didn't stop unless someone was dying. That's the part most people don't understand. Everyone on that set knew the money was riding on this take. Everyone knew that stopping now meant another day of setup. Another $20,000. Another round of explanations to nervous studio executives.

And everyone saw John Wayne kick Smokey hard and break formation straight toward Mitchum. He didn't yell, didn't wave his arms, just turned his horse and rode. And Smokey responded like they were one organism. The angle was wrong. Too sharp, too fast. But John leaned into it anyway, and the wranglers watching would say later they'd never seen a man push a horse that hard without breaking something.

Mitchum was still fighting the reins. His horse was in full panic now, running blind, and the cliff edge was close enough that you could see where the ground dropped away into nothing but air and rock. The cameras kept tracking. Vernon Cross finally screamed, "Cut!" But nobody heard him over the sound of hooves and wind and 200 people watching something that couldn't be stopped.

John closed the angle. He had maybe 10 yards of ground to work with before the physics stopped being negotiable. He came in from Mitchum's left side, not from behind where the collision would have thrown them both forward. And when Smokey pulled alongside the panicked stallion, John did something no insurance company would have signed off on.

He reached across the gap between the horses and grabbed Mitchum's reins. Not Mitchum's arm, not his saddle, the reins right below where they connected to the bit. And he pulled hard to the left while simultaneously pushing Smokey right, creating a channel that forced both horses to turn away from the cliff.

The stallion fought it for maybe two seconds, but John had leverage and weight, and Smokey's momentum, and the three animals together carved a turn that left a 6-foot trench in the desert floor, and brought them to a shuddering stop, maybe 15 yards from the edge.

The camera stopped, the generator cut out. Vernon Cross dropped his megaphone and for about 5 seconds the entire Arizona high desert was silent except for the sound of two horses breathing hard and dust settling slowly back to earth.

Mitchum was still in his saddle, hands frozen on the reins, face locked somewhere between shock and something that hadn't processed yet into words. John let go of the stallion's reins and backed Smokey up a few steps. His hat had come off during the turn. His right shoulder looked wrong, angled in a way that suggested something had torn or popped, but his face was blank and calm.

"You good?" John said. Mitchum looked at him, looked at the cliff edge, looked back at John. "Yeah," he said, and it came out like gravel. "Yeah, I'm good."

Then the crew arrived. Wranglers and medics and assistant directors and everyone who'd been too far away to help but close enough to see what almost happened. Vernon Cross was there too. His face red, megaphone still hanging from his hand.

"The take's ruined," he said to nobody in particular. "8 months of setup and the take's ruined." John was off his horse now. Three people trying to look at his shoulder while he shrugged them off. "The horse panicked," he said. "Bit probably pinched. Could have been anything."

"The cameras were rolling," Cross said, his voice edged with watching money evaporate in real time. Listen carefully to what John Wayne said next, because this is the moment that defined everything that came after.

He looked at Vernon Cross, then at the crew gathering around, then back at Mitchum, who was finally getting down off the stallion with a wrangler's help. "Yeah," John said, "but we've still got Mitchum."

The silence that followed lasted about three heartbeats, and then someone laughed, nervous and relieved, and within 10 seconds, the whole crew was laughing or shaking their heads the way people do when they've just watched something terrible almost happen and didn't.

Vernon Cross didn't laugh. "That was a quarter million dollar shot, Duke." "So, we'll do it again," John said. "Different horse, different angle if you want." He picked up his hat and put it back on despite the fact that his shoulder was visibly bothering him. "I'm not making a picture where somebody dies for a shot. Not on my set."

That phrase, "My set," did something interesting to the atmosphere. Everyone standing there knew that when John Wayne said it was his set, that's exactly what it was. And you either accepted that or you had a problem that wasn't going to resolve itself with contracts.

Cross turned and walked back toward the camera trucks without another word. The medics got John to stand still long enough to examine his shoulder, partially dislocated, torn rotator cuff that would need surgery. The first assistant director suggested they shut down for the day.

John told him they'd shoot the scene again after lunch with a different horse and better safety checks, and nobody argued. Mitchum walked over while the medics were taping John's shoulder. He had a cigarette going, hands steady now, but his eyes had that look people get when they've just had a close conversation with their own mortality.

"That was a stupid thing to do," Mitchum said. "Yeah," John agreed. "Could have killed both of us." "Could have definitely killed the shot." "Yep."

Mitchum took a drag and looked out at the cliff edge, then back at John. "Thanks," he said, and it was the quietest John had ever heard him speak.

They broke for lunch. The wranglers brought in a different horse for Mitchum, a calm bay gelding that had never spooked once. They adjusted camera angles to account for the torn up ground. They checked every piece of equipment twice. Then Vernon Cross checked it again.

The second time they ran the shot. It was perfect. No panic, no near misses, no drama except the kind that belonged on film. And when Vernon Cross called cut, everyone on that set knew they had exactly what they needed.

But here's what happened. After they wrapped, the front office reviewed the footage from all six aborted takes, including the one where John broke formation and ruined the shot. They calculated the cost, a full day's delay, the ruined take, overtime for 200 crew, equipment rental extensions, and the fact that they'd have to paint out the trench marks in post-production.

The number came to just under $47,000. The studio sent John Wayne a bill, not officially. The insurance covered accidents. But there was a meeting, a closed-door conversation between John and three studio executives who explained very carefully that his decision to break the shot had cost them significant money and that perhaps in the future he might consider whether saving a fellow actor from an unlikely accident was worth destroying an entire day's work.

Remember what John Wayne said in response because this is the line that got repeated in every bar and commissary for the next decade. He looked at the three executives, stood up despite the fact that his shoulder was in a sling and said, "Gentlemen, if you'd like to put in the contract that I should let a man die for a camera shot, I'll be happy to review that language with my lawyer. Otherwise, we're done here."

He walked out. The executives didn't send another bill, but the consequences didn't stop there. Word got around that John Wayne had cost a production significant money by breaking protocol. Some people saw it as heroic. Others saw it as unprofessional. A few saw it as evidence that Wayne thought he was bigger than the production process itself.

And there were studios that quietly decided not to work with him on certain projects because they couldn't afford someone who might make expensive moral choices. John knew about it, never talked about it publicly, but the projects that disappeared and the meetings that got cancelled told their own story.

He kept working. You don't stop being John Wayne just because a few executives think you're expensive. But there was a subtle shift in how certain deals got structured.

Mitchum never forgot it. Years later, when asked in an interview about working with Wayne, he told the story of the runaway horse. The interviewer asked if it was true that Wayne had been penalized by the studio.

Mitchum smiled and said, "Yeah, but he never told me that until years later. Just kept showing up doing the work. That's the thing about Duke. He didn't need you to know he paid a price for doing the right thing. He just needed to know it himself."

The film came out in summer 1960. The cavalry chase scene was in the trailer and it looks spectacular. All thunder and dust and momentum. Critics called it one of the best action sequences of the year. Nobody watching in theaters knew that the shot they were seeing was Take Seven or that Take six had nearly ended with a man dying on camera or that the reason they got to watch Robert Mitchum ride across that screen was because someone made a choice in 3 seconds that cost him $47,000 and a piece of his career.

The stuntmen knew though. Word travels fast in that community and the story became part of the code that governed western sets for the next 30 years. You didn't let a man die for a shot. You didn't prioritize the camera over the human being.

John's shoulder never fully healed. The torn rotator cuff required surgery. And even after that, he couldn't lift his right arm above a certain angle without pain. Watch his films from 1960 onward and you can see it. The way he compensates, keeps his draw slightly lower, shifts his weight differently in fight scenes.

He never complained about it. When someone asked him once, years after, if he regretted the choice he made that day, he just shook his head. "I've broken bones, torn muscles, dislocated joints," he said. "But I never had to watch a man die because I was too worried about money to do something. That's the injury I couldn't live with."

The truth is there were dozens of people on that set who could have done something. The wranglers were professionals. The other riders were experienced. Vernon Cross could have called cut earlier, but it was John Wayne who moved first. And that matters because in the 3 seconds between seeing a problem and deciding what to do about it, most people freeze. He didn't freeze. He kicked his horse and changed the angle and grabbed the reins and everything that came after.

The ruined shot, the studio bill, the career complications, the permanent shoulder injury was just the price of not freezing. Some men pay that price and spend the rest of their lives talking about it. John paid it and went back to work the next day with his arm in a sling.

If you enjoyed spending this time here, I'd be grateful if you'd consider subscribing. A simple like also helps more than you'd think. If you've got a story about when someone made a choice that cost them something real, tell me in the comments. And if you want to hear what happened the night the sheriff showed up at John's trailer after the rap party incident, let me know because that's a whole other story about what happens when doing the right thing gets complicated.