This Is Chance!: The Shaking of an All-American City, a Voice That Held It Together

by Jon Mooallem

Act I ended. Act II began. Before long, it was George and Emily’s wedding day, and the scene between Emily and her father that had blown up in rehearsals a few weeks earlier when the play’s prim and insecure lead, the beauty queen Susan Koslosky, fell apart in Brink’s office, worried she had no authentic self. Brink would continue to look out for Koslosky after the quake, finessing a grant application to qualify her for student housing, getting her out of her volatile mother’s house and into the university dorms. Eventually, Brink would encourage Koslosky to transfer to a small college in Michigan and escape Anchorage altogether; if she didn’t leave now, he told her, she would never create a life of her own. By the time Mooallem would track down Koslosky, she had changed her name to Michale Gabriel and, at age seventy-two, was living in Costa Rica, returning frequently to the United States to run storytelling workshops for corporate executives—helping them, she explained, “express themselves authentically.” After a pause, she added, “I haven’t actually connected it back to Frank and Our Town until now.”