I found a second route through a kitchen corridor that was sixty-one and got permission to use it, which took two phone calls and a conversation with a banquet manager named Cyril who thought I was insane and did it anyway.

I had the hotel replace the green room chairs, all four of them, with a model from a different ballroom that had an eighteen-and-a-half-inch seat height and a solid arm.

I got the four steps up to the stage removed and replaced with a ramp, and the way I did that is the part I am proudest of and the part that, in a conference room in Wilmington two years later, a lawyer spent forty minutes on.

I told the production company that one of the speakers used a wheelchair.