My sister might win an Oscar tonight.

Today’s note is on my sister being nominated for a freaking Oscar.

Elli Legerski, my sister, is the producer on the Oscar nominated film Jane Austen’s Period Drama for best live action short film. You can watch it right now on YouTube. Check it out. Now. 

This moment means a million things to me. It’s incredible. Elli, like me, comes from a small town in Wyoming at the base of the Big Horn Mountains. The house with the strongest memory from that time (there were a few) had cows, sheep, and an old sheep wagon in a pasture right outside our chain link fence. It was a house we rented. A dilapidated building sat in the back, overgrown with weeds. Barns, tractors, old engine parts, horses swishing their tails, and stacked hay bales and corrals filled out the rest of the property. The Nowood river crawled next door and the small rodeo grounds could seen just beyond a set of squat cottonwood trees. This was our house in a town of 300 or so. We were so damn far from Hollywood.

We moved throughout our lives, away from our father out to Utah and Colorado. We lived on the low-income side of things with a sick and single-parent mother who later died in our young just-started twenties. We orchestrated our lives out of nothing into everything. 

Picture this: two young teens in Pueblo, Colorado holding dreams to escape and build new lives. One, me, an awkward teen with braces, over-gelled hair, crooked spine wanting to be a pro athlete. Or a Sports Center anchor. I always wanted someone to give me permission to be something — to be allowed. I wanted some green goo from a lab to drop on me and transform me into someone different.

The other, Elli, wearing a tiara and circling her nominees every year the Oscars came on. Watching it with Mom on cube-like TVs. I still remember a toy Oscar Elli kept, or maybe it was a prop from participating in a play. Unsure. But that's what she always wanted. To be at the Oscars.

She never waited for permission. She always wanted to be there. To be part of a movie — part of an experience — that gave people escape; a story that invited empathy, and opened worlds. Mom took Elli to movies. Encouraged her from the start. 

Then, picture this: some years later after Mom is gone, but a bunch of cousins are sitting around a grandparents' dining table sharing their big ideas about life. It turns to Elli: “I believe if you work hard enough and believe, anything is possible. You can do anything.” Elli had already been working and living in Los Angeles for a few years at this point. I don’t know if I believed her then. I didn’t want to be duped into false hope. I didn’t want to be tricked.

When really, we need that trick. We need to hope. To believe we can get somewhere. Hope is all we have ever had. It’s how anything has changed. It’s how this evening my sister will be at the Oscars and might win — an impossible made possible. She did it. I’m so proud and happy for her beyond measure. Dreams come true.   

Love you Elli. Good luck tonight. We will be watching.