Zona was ninety-two and fading fast.
It was spring break. The boys had been counting the days. A week with cousins. A week of unscheduled time.
The kind of week that felt rare even then and feels almost impossible now.
My wife was already there with her grandmother, Zona. The message from the family was clear enough: if we were going to see Zona alive again, this was probably a good time. We had lived away for decades. It was about time.
But spring break meant more than a visit to Zona for the boys. It meant a block of family time, unscheduled hang time with cousins, and just plain goofing off.
When spring break, day one arrived, I loaded our four boys into the car, ages eleven, eight, six, and one, and started for the airport. We had left five hours early for a two-hour drive. I had built in time for traffic, check-in, children, and the ordinary inevitability of chaos when traveling.
Within minutes, the day began to come apart.
As we rolled down the driveway, I glanced at the gas gauge in our minivan. It was below empty. Way below empty.
I thought she filled it. Was that my job? So many variables were up in the air when going out of town.
It was the sort of small, preventable oversight that felt harmless right up until it became the first domino. Still, there was a gas station nearby, and we lived at the top of a hill. I thought we could coast there.
We sputtered to the top of the hill, barely. Coasting downhill in neutral, we prayed for enough fumes to make it to the station.
No such luck. We made it through the traffic light, but our speed died as the minivan breathed its last breath of gas. The van finally came to rest on flat ground.
It was the first time in my life I had run out of gas.
One father. Four boys. No gas. No gas can. Hot day. I could not leave four children in a hot car. I could not send one child off alone. So we all piled out and walked to the station.
And because you cannot walk half a mile with four boys without it becoming a thing, we turned it into a small game. We could see the station ahead. Everyone guessed how long it would take to reach it. Nine minutes? Twelve? Six? Winner gets a treat. Only rule was to stay together. Dad argued for a run-walk cadence.
Nine minutes flat. Our oldest won. Dad bought consolation treats anyway, a kind of peace treaty before the real negotiations began. Then I stepped up to the lone employee and said, “These items, and one gas can, please.”
“We’re out.”
No gas cans for sale. None in back either. I asked if we could borrow one. No. I checked my watch. We were still four and a half hours early for the flight.
So we made another plan, quickly. A few phone calls and we found a big box store down the street that had cans. Off we went. Half a mile to the store, another half mile to the back of the store in the automotive aisle, then back to the station, fill the can, back to the car.
An hour was gone before the trip had properly begun.
Full tank. At last we were moving again, air conditioning cooling off five bodies glowing from a two-mile walk-run. It felt, in that moment, like we had recovered. We had taken the first setback, absorbed it, and turned it into a shared problem the family could solve together.
On the expressway, an hour into our renewed momentum, traffic came to a dead stop.
Not a slowdown. Not a delay. A full stop.
It was 1:30 in the afternoon. GPS now showed a red line on the interstate where none had existed when we left. We sat there for an hour without moving an inch. The day kept getting stranger, as if it had decided to test how many reversals could fit in a single storyline.
The radio reported an accident and a grass fire in the median. Both sides of the interstate jammed. Frontage roads full. Our estimated arrival time still showed two hours ahead of our flight.
Plenty of time, I told myself. Still safe.
Soon we would be flying toward spring break, cousins, and Zona, at the far end of the country. Or so I thought.
That day, though we did not know it at the time, ended up changing the trajectory of our lives for the next fifteen to twenty years.
To explain why, I had to go back a year.
I had been lecturing to master’s students at NYU’s communications department, invited to talk about my field work teaching kids visual storytelling in early education. For years I had worked in educational media and software, obsessed with a practical question: could we teach visual storytelling with the same kind of structure we used to teach reading and writing?
That night I demonstrated stop motion with paper cutouts under a camera connected to an app. I used a simple dog cutout drawn by a fourth grader and moved it frame by frame.
Click. Move. Click. Move. Click.
The students watched the monitor and leaned in. They saw the pauses created by extra frames. They saw pose swaps that suggested squash and stretch. They sensed anticipation and follow-through, even though I was only moving paper on a tabletop.
Then I played it back. The dog scooted across the screen, stopped, wiggled, reared back, and shot off stage left. Someone called, “Again!” So we watched it again. I added barks and a tire-screech sound effect with my mouth. The room laughed.
A student said, “This is like cooking. You’re giving us recipes.”
And that was the moment. Not the laugh. The sentence.
Then someone else said, “It even looks like a cooking show. You’re down there at the table. We’re watching from above.”
They called it Iron Chef, half as a joke. But the joke kept echoing.
On the drive home, the idea crystallized. A by-kids, for-kids cooking show format, except the recipes were motion, timing, sound, and story. Mystery materials. Challenges. Demonstrations. Kids teaching kids. The whole thing clicked into place with the speed that only happens when your brain has been carrying the parts for years and finally finds the right way to snap them together.
And here was the truly heady part.
YouTube existed.
In the old media world, you could have a brilliant format and still spend months, sometimes years, chasing a green light. Meetings. Notes. More meetings. Polite nods. Then a polite no. But YouTube did not ask permission. It simply accepted your work.
The possibility was intoxicating. The idea that you could put on a show in a barn and reach people around the world felt like a loophole in the universe.
My boys were the natural stars. They had already been guinea pigs for my classroom experiments. They were thrilled to do anything on YouTube, which at the time felt like walking onto television.
We needed a place to shoot. Our house had no spare inch. Across the street was an old restored farmhouse, empty at the time, with one of those Revolutionary-era barns on the historic register. We made a few calls and reserved one of the old cow-milking rooms for three days.
Then we went full production.
We rented lights and tripods. We rigged a PVC backdrop frame and draped black fabric. We borrowed a table from a local church. We even rented a pie warming cart so finished projects could be stored safely, as if we were running a tiny studio instead of a father trying to keep a schedule while boys tried to be funny.
We ordered chef hats and coats with “Animation Chefs” embroidered on the chest. In the spirit of Groucho Marx, we drew mustaches on the boys with grease paint. The hats and mustaches offered a little anonymity, a simple privacy hedge.
We rented the best camera we could at the time, a MiniDV, and a good microphone. Over one long weekend we shot five episodes, working from a loose outline of classic stop motion demonstrations mixed with improvised silliness.
It was thrilling. Not just because we were making a show, but because we were skipping the years-long permission process and heading straight for the world. A barn. A camera. A ridiculous format. A worldwide audience, potentially, on the other side of an upload button.
Then I sat down to edit.
And discovered that somewhere within the first hour, the camera had stopped recording sound.
I had checked it during the shoot. I set the levels. I watched the meters. I listened through headphones.
But the tape was silent.
Five episodes. No usable dialogue.
The depression that followed was real. The boys had improvised constantly. Their best lines were spontaneous. The whole charm of it was that it felt alive. Without recorded sound, we did not have episodes. We had silent footage of boys moving their mouths and doing jokes nobody could hear.
Could we loop their voices afterward? Not really. Lip syncing children from memory is a miserable business. Could we reshoot? No. We did not own the equipment. The rental window was gone. The barn reservation was over. The budget was spent. And I was running a company.
We had taken our shot, and the one invisible piece we assumed would simply work did not.
So the project was shelved. At least we had silent home movies we could someday show grandkids. Perhaps someday, we told ourselves, we would try again.
Very discouraging.
But the skills behind it stayed alive, and we were given another opening to share our homegrown stop motion storytelling with the world.
A client of mine had two daughters publish a book through Scholastic, Owen and Mzee, a true story about a baby hippo and a 120-year-old tortoise becoming best friends.
Our boys loved it. After the disappointment of the failed chef show, one of them suggested we make an animated book trailer. “A by-kids, for-kids trailer for a by-kids, for-kids book,” our eight-year-old declared.
Note: Remember we were still sitting in traffic on the way to see Zona, yet here we were in the weeds. I promised this was going somewhere.
At the time, video book trailers were still uncommon and often stiff. So we storyboarded a short sequence, cut out our versions of Owen and Mzee, and animated it on the kitchen table.
It worked.
The boys wrote lines, animated, voiced the characters, and edited. I made a few tweaks and we sent it off. Then the dad reached out. His daughters loved it and asked for more. “We want a dozen of these shorts. We’ll pay.”
After spending hours and hours on Animation Chefs with nothing to show for it and not a dime earned, that was nectar from the gods.
We got to work. As we developed more trailers, Scholastic invited us to their Manhattan flagship office for an in-house workshop for employees’ children.
It was a thrill to enter the halls of Harry Potter’s US publisher to do our workshop. Harry was everywhere. On the walls, on the shelves, in the bathrooms, on the mugs. We did our workshop in the heart of Harry’s lair.
The boys were awestruck.
Then Scholastic called Tribeca.
Tribeca invited us to host a tent at their Family Day street festival. We brought down the props we had animated on our kitchen table, and the boys demonstrated animation with cutouts they drew.
Lines formed. The boys were paid. College funds began, improbably enough, with a cut-paper hippo and tortoise.
A few months later, Tribeca and Scholastic called again. A new children’s book was coming out the next year, about a polar bear losing its home to melting ice. Would the boys make a trailer?
We storyboarded, animated, and delivered what became the tenth short book trailer.
They loved it. Months went by. Then, a week before the Tribeca Film Festival, one of the founders called and invited us to opening night.
I told the boys. “They want to premiere your polar bear animation on opening night at Tribeca.”
A stunned silence.
Then jumping, whooping, high-fiving.
Opening night took forever to arrive. Anticipation slowed time to a crawl.
When the night came, we walked up to the front of the red carpet. A woman with a clipboard was funneling some people left, some people right.
“We are here to see our movie screened tonight. Where do you want us?” our oldest said as she scanned her list for our names.
She smiled and gestured.
And somehow, instead of being routed quietly behind the scenes, we were waved onto the red carpet.
We did not see it coming. We thought we would be given tickets, or green room access, or something sensible. The next twenty minutes were insane.
Paparazzi cameras. Posing instructions. Microphones shoved in our faces. Famous faces ahead of us and behind us: De Niro, Fallon, Walken, Scorsese, Bon Jovi, Giselle, Stiller. Stars as far as we could see.
And in the middle of it all, our boys being asked questions by people who assumed, for reasons known only to the universe, that we belonged there.
A real, live Hollywood red carpet experience.
The boys handled it beautifully. They spoke naturally about animation, storytelling, and process. It was easy because they lived it. More questions followed. What it was like to make movies at home. What it was like to be there, in the middle of it.
At the end of the carpet, we were ushered into the main theater and seated next to the girls who wrote Owen and Mzee and the polar bear book, and a few publisher families.
Our movie was introduced by Rob Reiner, then came up on the big screen, and we entered a surreal multiverse where we had been whisked from our kitchen table to glitz and glamour of ridiculous proportions.
Our film received an ovation. The room felt lit with the new possibility of kids making media with tools once reserved for Hollywood.
Then the after-party.
We were whisked into a large hall by another clipboard-toting intern. Film people kept asking where children could learn to do this kind of work.
We did not reveal that we had shot Animation Chefs to show kids how to do it, but we had lost the sound and shelved the project. The biggest promotional moment arrived, and we had no show to point to. If only we could have said, “Why yes, in fact we can show your kids how to do this. Here it is.” But we could not.
Bittersweet, but unforgettable.
In the not too distant future, those same kids were in a traffic jam with their dad trying to get to Zona.
The DOT had not rolled out the red carpet.
By the time the road cleared, rush hour had closed in around us. I phoned the airline. There was another flight later, but the change fee for five people was punishing, about twice what we had paid for the original tickets.
Hope became our only strategy as time ticked by. Maybe we could still run through the terminal and catch the flight as the gate closed.
By the time we reached long-term parking, we had forty minutes left. By the time I got everyone lined up for the shuttle to departures, it was obvious.
We were not making that flight. The later flight booked up. We were not the only ones who missed it.
After miserable arithmetic, we turned back.
Deflated, the drive home was full of second-guessing. If we had not run out of gas. If the station had sold a can. If there had been no accident. No fire. No rush-hour squeeze. Five separate setbacks lined up, each one unlikely on its own, together almost bizarre.
No spring break. No Zona. No cousins. No nothing.
We called with the bad news. My wife remained with her grandmother. I absorbed the public shame of missing a flight.
Yet suddenly I had an unexpected week at home with the boys. A spring break week, no less.
Staring down what we were going to do with ourselves, we decided it was now or never to pull out the silent Animation Chefs footage. And just as the gas situation had turned into a game to offset the slog of a forced march, the repair work became one too. Turn the problem into tasks. Turn tasks into momentum. Let the boys take ownership. Make it feel possible. Treats for milestones.
We rebuilt it. We rescued it. We animated a narrator to bridge missing dialogue. We shot new material without the sets by doing close-ups with black fabric on the kitchen wall. We patched and spliced. We filmed extra action segments outside and created connective tissue for the raw silent episodes.
In one week, we turned a failed production into a working format and launched the first episode of Animation Chefs on YouTube.
But we still had four more episodes of raw footage, uncut.
We realized we had bitten off too much. But we could not turn back.
So we built a system. A production flow. A way to keep going when school started, when homework and activities took over, when life returned. We could rev it up on snow days, holidays, weekends, and late nights.
Within months, we posted more episodes. People were watching in twenty countries. Followers gathered. Requests for lessons came in.
The boys expected to start making money as the YouTube audience grew. AdSense promised more than reality delivered.
We quickly discovered that free YouTube content created applause, but YouTube income was not the same thing.
So we began teaching after-school classes. My wife and I arranged for a local gymnastics center to lend us a room so we could test our lessons on local kids for money. In exchange, her young kids could take our pilot for free. After all, the actual Animation Chefs were in the room.
She suggested three hundred dollars for ten weeks per student. Then a red carpet premiere as the recital, like a piano teacher would do, except we screened finished movies for friends and family.
YouTube for free, in person for money. Twelve kids at a time, ten weeks at a time.
Slowly, steadily, it grew into a real teaching system.
I took more notes. Retail after-school had a different dynamic than standards-aligned classroom work or one-off events. It had its own physics. There was still so much to learn.
What had begun as an interrupted trip and a stranded week became a second chance for a shelved idea. It expanded to thousands in over twenty countries, then morphed into after-school teaching, and eventually became Animating Kids.
The postscript to all this?
Zona died a year after we missed that flight. We did not see her alive again, though we did attend her funeral to pay our respects.
The boys learned about the “Z gene” from family stories and her obituary. The legend of the Z gene was shorthand for the life and character of Zona.
Zona had been just great-grandma to them. Then they found out she had been quite a piece of work back in the day. A flapper in the roaring twenties. She met her husband, a big-band leader, and toured around the US during the Depression, performing, dancing, entertaining. She was known to sneak away from her home in Arizona, Zona, to Hollywood with friends, autograph-chasing celebrities at red carpet events in the golden years of film.
The Z gene on full display. When any of her posterity showed signs of reckless impulsivity and a need to entertain with novelty, they were said to have inherited the Z gene.
We would never want to pretend that missing the living Zona that week was somehow made right by what followed. It was not. That sorrow remained sorrow.
But it was also true that the week created by that failed trip became the week we finally rescued the Animation Chefs. From there came Animating Kids. The work spread farther than we could have imagined, into schools, festivals, after-school programs, organizations as far away as Rwanda, Qatar, and England, events at SXSW, demos in Apple Stores, and into thousands of kids’ lives, wherever a media mentor wanted to mentor content creators at the earliest possible age.
The boys found out they had the Z gene all along. Now we continue to export it to the world.
This chapter is dedicated to Zona.
