BURN SCAR
written & performed by Christine Dunford
In the wake of the 2024 election results, it felt like the world was burning.
But I was determined to push that shit aside as we entered 2025 and rally!
But metaphor turned to matter a few weeks later when, at 10:35am on Jan 7 2025, I smelled smoke.
I grabbed the go-bag, my dogs and all the meds in the house (some of the most expensive stuff we've got cuz - America!) and after 3 hours of fighting traffic with 30,000 other evacuees, escaped the largest fire in Los Angeles history.
What followed was a string of Airbnb's with couches that all seemed to be
stained in the same place, a deep dive into the wine selection at Trader Joe's and exposure to insurance fuckery of such epic proportions that it seemed a mirror to the ascendance of cruelty we're seeing in the greater American landscape.
“Surviving having survived” was its own kind of devastation, all the more cruel because it was manmade, corporate, systemic.
In its face, I became hypervigilant and more cynical than I've ever been.
I hardened.
So when I heard the term “burn scar” and learned that it means “earth that’s been scorched by fire and become hard, brittle and impenetrable” – all Icould think was - “Yep, that’s me.”
Until a single encounter on another January morning changed everything.
And I won't give it away here, but let me just say that it prompted me to have a t-shirt printed that says:
"I went to a disaster and all I got was renewed faith in humanity."
Premiering at the 2026 Hollywood Fringe Fest
Theatre of NOTE
1517 N Cahuenga Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90028
Thursday June 4 @ 7:15pm Saturday, June 20 @ 7:30pm Saturday, June 13 @ 4:00 pm
This is a (dark) comedy...partly in the "HA HA!" sense (hopefully even in the "HA HA HA! sense) but also in the sense that it ends well (thank you W Shakespeare.) I dug into the worlds of disaster, mutual aid and the history of the insurance industry in America - both for research and, to be honest, for hope. Strike that last bit - the insurance industry gave me no hope. At all.
Zip. Zilch. Nada.
Here's some of what I found...
Rebecca Solnit A Paradise Built in Hell
"If paradise now arises in hell (in a disaster) it’s because, in the suspension of the usual order and the failure of most systems, we are free to live and act another way.”
Emily Johnson - Tekahionwake
And only where the foresst fires have sped,
Socrching relentlessly the cool north lands,
A sweet wild flower lifts up its purple head,
And, like some gentle spirit sorrow-fed,
It hides the scars with almost human hands.
And only to the heart that knows of grief,
Of desolating fire, of human pain,
There comes some fellow-feeling beautiful, if brief.
And life revives, and blossoms once again.
Octavia Butler Parable of the Sower
Just a week before the ’25 Palisades fire, I listened to Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (narrated by the incredible Lynne Thigpen) written in 1993.
If you know the book, you'll know that’s a pretty mind-bending coincidence.
Butler begins the story in 2024, in a Los Angeles plagued by drought and catastrophic wildfires, and an America where social safety nets have been shredded by the corporatization of every institution once intended to serve people and greed has poisoned and all but destroyed the natural world.
A couple of weeks later (after the Pali fire) I looked back and was astounded by the coincidences and parallels.
But even before the fire, I was shaken by another element in the book: a presidential candidate running with the slogan “Make America Great Again.”
When I encountered the book, I was still stunned – and stung – by the presidential election results in November, and here was Octavia Butler, way back in 1993, writing about a fictional presidential candidate who manipulated the American public and somehow wrested control of the most powerful leadership position in the world – using that slogan.
Butler actually based that character on Ronald Reagan, whose campaign for president in 1980 featured the slogan “Make America Great Again.”
Butler was incredibly open about her view of Reagan, saying he was “young, vigorous, and utterly unencumbered by conscience.” She said she had a
“special contempt” for him.
So she did what writers do: she created a character who showed what happens when a bullish personality, bottomless ambition, an excess of greed and no moral center manipulates the American public (I won’t give any more of the plot away, except to say that his success leads to the ruin of the country.)
Between that character, the slogan and the catastrophic fires, you might think Butler was prescient. But Butler wasn’t gifted with the ability to see the future in some mythic way – she saw it as a result of deep and endless research. She studied patterns in human behavior, ecological decline, the pendulum swing of power between increasingly polarized factions; she studied climate science, political science, sociology, the impact of corporate greed and deregulation - and from all of that research, extrapolated the “future.”
The fact that this novel grappled with two issues so central to my life in the past 2 years – a catastrophic political situation and a catastrophic fire – still stuns me.
When I heard that, after the fires in the Palisades and Alta Dena, Octavia's Bookshelf in Pasadena (named after her) turned the store into a mutual aid hub providing food, water, baby supplies, clothes & more for fire survivors, I just thought it was the most beautiful and impactful way to honor her.