I knew from the moment our website A Mission Of Love became a charity that we would be doing some form of live event fundraisers. I decided those events would be stand up comedy shows. Besides helping families with these events they would also honor the memory of our daughter Stephaine. The last conversation I had with our daughter was her telling me the best day of her life was meeting Gabriel Iglesias. I will never forget that evening and of course could never thank Gabriel enough for what he did for our family. This wasn't a "Make A Wish" trip. This was Gabriel taking time on his own to make a little girls dream come true. Stephaine loved stand up comedy and so do I. Over the years I have been told a thousand times I should have been a comedian. I enjoy making people laugh. I have not had a storybook life. So I have lived by the rule sometimes you have laugh to keep from crying. I know a lot of childhood cancer families do that exact same thing. With all that said I wanted our fundraisers to be filled with laughter and to give people a break from life for a little while. Just like meeting and watching Gabriel perform did for all of us last March.

When you try and launch something like these shows it's almost impossible to do it alone. It takes a lot of time and a lot of teamwork. I wanted to make sure I took the time to thank everybody that got us to this point. First is the Mayor of our city Jim Fouts. Mayor Fouts took time out of his schedule to call me on numerous occasions to discuss plans for our childhood cancer awareness rallies for next September.  When talking with our Mayor he lead me to Henry Bowman the parks and recreation director for our city. While doing the paperwork for the park we're hosting a childhood cancer rally at. Henry and I discussed the auditorium we're using to host our Comedy 4 Cancer shows. After explaining the concept of these shows to Henry he let me know all the things he could do to help us. Because of that conversation it motivated me to get our debut show up and running. I set numerous goals for our charity after we lost our daughter. One of those was to run our first live event fundraiser by April 2016. Thank you to Henry Bowman for helping us secure the building to host the event and also thanks for all the help he still continues to give us going forward.

If your going to run a stand up comedy show you need comedians. That's where Norm Stulz comes in. I reached out to Norm to be the headliner for our debut show and he ended up being more than that. When I told Norm I wanted to do a two hour show with 4 comedians he quickly replied with no problem. Thank you Norm for getting all the performers together for our debut show. Also thanks to Kate Brindle, Steve Lind and Tonya Murray for agreeing to perform at our debut show. 

Besides our childhood cancer websites I also have one for sports. The support from members of that site has been overwhelming. They have sent cards to kids fighting cancer, donated to multiple families and helped us get these events up and running. I appreciate all of their support and couldn't thank them enough.

I would also like to thank everybody that supports us by attending our debut show. Plus thank you to all of our family and friends who will help with these shows.

I have one more person I wanted to thank and that is my daughter Stephaine. It was because of her we have our childhood cancer charity A Mission Of love. It's because of her there is a Comedy 4 Cancer concept that hopefully allows us to help many people. I thank her for all that. But I also thank her for all the love and laughter she gave me over her 13 short years with us. 

I'm excited and a little nervous about taking this next step with our live event fundraisers. Hopefully this can become the first of many shows to help childhood cancer families out. Again thank you to all that helped get this started.