SADEC 1965: A LOVE STORY Will Be Presented at the Atlanta Fringe Festival

'Sadec 1965: A Love Story,' a one-woman show written and performed by Flora Le, is part of the primary line up of the 2022 Atlanta Fringe Festival. This 60-minute powerful solo storytelling piece is best described as "Motorcycle Diaries" meets "Eat, Pray, Love" set in Vietnam. The show will be presented at The Neighborhood Church from May 19 to May 22, with tickets available at the door or online at www.atlantafringe.org.

In late 2013, Flora rode a motorcycle across Vietnam for six weeks, solo, in an attempt to make sense of her difficult relationship with her estranged Vietnamese father. Flora was on a quest to understand why her father, who left Vietnam with a scholarship to study in Canada in the mid-1960s, never spoke about Vietnam. By the time she was an adult, Flora knew nothing about her father's life in Vietnam. Since the answers she was looking for would never come from him, Flora decided to go on a road trip across the country, riding a total of 2100 miles in six weeks, from the Chinese border in the North to the Mekong Delta in the South, to reclaim the story of her origins and make sense of the difficult man that her father was.

Flora has been wanting to tell this story on a stage ever since she completed her motorcycle journey in 2014. But one piece was missing: her father's old love letters. After her father passed away, Flora found the love correspondence he exchanged with his high school sweetheart, a woman named Hien, whom he left behind in Vietnam during the war. This woman turned out to be an important piece of the puzzle, and reading their correspondence promised to provide many answers.

There was one problem: Flora couldn't read Vietnamese, since her father never spoke his language with her growing up. It took her five years and a team of thirteen Vietnamese to translate the voluminous correspondence the couple exchanged between 1965 and 1971. Flora was able to complete this translation project during the COVID-19 pandemic. Here is an poignant excerpts from those love letters she shares in the show:

Letter dated May 15, 1968

My love, today is our anniversary. If it were not for the Viet Cong making chaos in Saigon, I would have received your letter by now. I don't believe you didn't write to me. The road to Saigon is difficult to travel so mail delivery is interrupted. The situation hasn't died down here since the Tet offensive. We hear gunshots and bomb shells day and night, and it's the same everywhere so there's nowhere to escape. One can only live for today and accept what will come tomorrow.

Flora Le is a storyteller based in Washington DC. She is a lawyer by day, though she has always had the soul of an artist. Flora discovered storytelling in 2017 while attending a Snap Judgment show in Washington, DC and she felt at home instantly. The combination of writing and public speaking was exactly the medium she wanted for self-expression. In March 2019, Flora was selected to perform at Story District's Tuesday Show in Washington DC, a popular storytelling show attended by 400 people. The performance of her #metoo story, an emotional and vulnerable experience, received a standing ovation, a rare occurrence at such shows.

a??Sadec 1965 is Flora's first full-length solo storytelling show. One theme is common to Flora's work: the transformation of pain into beauty. Flora uses her own painful life experiences to create beautiful stories of resilience, forgiveness, personal transcendence, and love.

"I'm thrilled to be performing Sadec 1965 in person for the first time in Atlanta! This raw and vulnerable story is not for the faint of heart, but the audience is guaranteed to be captivated."

Sadec 1965: A Love Story, a part of the 2022 Annual Atlanta Fringe Festival

Written and performed by Flora Le

Venue: The Neighborhood Church

Times:

• May 19 @ 9:30 pm

• May 20 @ 11:00 pm

• May 21 @ 6:30 pm

• May 22 @ 2:00 pm

For more information about this show, please visit www.sadec1965.com.

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