Happy Birthday, Matt

Today is Matt Mullenweg’s Birthday It’s also the anniversary of my Dad’s death in 2007. So for this birthday tribute, I’m going to tell you all about my Dad.

Mike Carruthers is the main reason I identify as a “theatre person” even now that I work in Tech. My parents met doing college theatre and continued to do community theatre most of my childhood. He was also the speech and theatre teacher in the small towns we lived in, so all of my early memories of seeing and participating in plays are linked with my memories of him. Camelot and Company are two of my favorite musicals and when I listen to them now, I go right back to running lines with him and sitting in the audience (in two different pink dresses that I hated very much). 

I sat in his classroom after school in elementary and jr. high school listening to the “big kids” practicing their speeches, and even tagged along to started going to high school speech competitions far earlier than I was able to compete myself. I was introduced to Ray Bradbury, Elie Wiesel and Tennessee Williams thanks to Serious Prose practice, and I’ll never think about Neil Simon without thinking about Dad. I was also introduced to politics and news coverage thanks to Extemporaneous speaking, and went on to compete in that event myself. 

While I spent lots of years watching Dad coach speech, I got to have him as my coach a much shorter time. Dad had a big fall during my Freshman year and over the next 24 months went from a noticeable hearing loss in one ear to being profoundly deaf. A man who up to this point was a singer, actor and public speaker lost all of those ways to communicate–and did so just before WordPress and social media made text based communication a viable alternative.

So while my dad never knew Matt or got to use WordPress to reconnect with the world he lost when he lost his hearing, I find it poetic that the two of them share this day because thanks in part to Matt, people like my dad whose communication options were limited in 2007 now have many ways to thrive. 

Happy Birthday, Matt. Thanks for helping to democratizing publishing.