Cancer Shark Shoutout
(Or, hurray for Edgar & my ego)
Last year, friends, family, and I hosted the first Cancer Sharks Storytelling Night in Boston. When it came time to choose a host, there was no real debate.
It had to be Edgar B. Herwick III.
Edgar and I became friends sometime around 2007, I think. It feels impossible to pin down the exact date, without contacting GBH HR, because we have both lived about a thousand lives since then.
We are not the kind of friends who talk every week or even regularly check in. But somehow, whenever one of us is truly stuck, creatively or personally, we resurface in each other’s orbit.
The strange and beautiful thing is that it never feels like starting over. It always feels like we just stepped out of a brainstorming meeting five minutes ago. Like we are still quietly conspiring to make something bland or unwanted feel electric. Public radio pledge drives. Someone else’s work. Entire late-night television programs with zero budget.
From the very beginning, I knew Edgar was a host. Not someone who reads copy. Someone who is the draw. The spark. The steady hand that makes people lean in instead of tune out. I was honored to help shape some of his words and tone, but the truth is that when I work with Edgar, whether at GBH or at the Cancer Sharks event, it is best to just let him do his thing.
In all the lives I’ve lived and all the professional rooms I’ve been lucky enough to sit in, I have never had as much fun as I did collaborating with Edgar. Not before. Not since. That kind of creative pairing is rare, and when you find it, it ruins you a little for everything else. At least, it ruined a bit of me for everything else.
Leaving broadcasting in 2013 meant leaving that behind. And while I do not regret the paths I’ve taken since, not working with Edgar regularly remains the sharpest ache from that chapter. I can evolve, grow, learn, heal, and still miss a version of me that only existed in one particular collaboration.
And I smiled. A real one.
Then I felt it. The unmistakable flicker of ego.
Not jealousy. Not bitterness. Something subtler. The feeling of having known. Of having seen it immediately. Of being right without being necessary anymore. Proof that my instincts were sound, even if my seat at that table has long since changed.
My ego is alive and well. That was the proof.
And honestly, I am okay with that.
Because the ego I am talking about is not the brittle one that demands credit or proximity. It is the quiet, stubborn one that remembers who I was when I was doing my best work. The one that recognizes excellence without needing to claim it. The one that can hold pride and distance at the same time.
So, thank you to the listeners, donors, engineers, producers, executives, and colleagues at GBH, both current and long-ago, who helped make what so many of us could see and hear for so many years finally official.
And thank you, Edgar, for continuing to do exactly what you were always meant to do.
You never needed luck. You just needed space.
And yes, for the record, if anyone is curious who first put Edgar on the air in Boston, the answer is still the same.
She might be a Cancer Shark.
Edgar, me, and the incredible Rose Saia, at the first annual Cancer Sharks Storytelling Night in Boston, 2025. You can listen to Edgar and the night’s tellers here: https://cancersharks.com/storytelling