Katie Kintner

It's a brilliant film that shows how relationships can develop over long distances, even by people who have never met face to face. I've had a similar experience when I did research for a writer based in Brooklyn, New York. I was living in Los Angeles when a mutual friend told me that her Brooklyn friend was looking for someone to do this work for her. I told her to give her friend my phone number if she wanted me to do it, and soon I got the call. The voice on the other end was a woman's dry, very Brooklyn-accented voice asking for me. Over several years, we communicated by phone often as she gave me assignments, but also told me about her life in Brooklyn, having lived in the same apartment that she had been born in. She wrote biographies for elementary school age children so I spent a lot of time in libraries and online researching these people for her, printing out what I found, putting it in a shipping envelope and overnighting it to her. She was quite distressed when we moved to a rural Wisconsin farmhouse, but I assured her that i still had access to many library databases and college libraries. Then one morning after 9/11, she called me and asked if I knew what was wrong with her television reception (she knew my husband was a tv/radio engineer). I had the sad news that the World Trade Center, where her TV had gotten the signal, had been destroyed by terrorists. She had no idea. My husband suggested that she try to receive broadcasts from New Jersey. I never knew if she did. One morning, our mutual friend called us. My long distance friend, confidant and employer had died during the night. The funeral and burial would be very quick as her Jewish faith apparently required, so we would never make it on time. Even now, I still think of her, her dry crackly voice, her issues with her neighborhood kids being too noisey, calls about her new computer which mystified her, and just the good comeraderie between two people who ever even saw each others faces. I will never forget Rose Blue.