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Justice Sotomayor's side hustle during a hectic term? A children's musical

By Justin Jouvenal, the Washington Post

August 29, 2024, 12:45 pm CDT

KANSAS CITY, Mo.—Sonia Sotomayor has earned a prominent spot in the nation’s legal pantheon, becoming the nation’s first Latina Supreme Court justice, voting to legalize same-sex marriage and speaking for the nation’s aggrieved liberals in a sharp dissent to the decision overturning Roe v. Wade.

But her trailblazing legal career is not her most meaningful achievement, Sotomayor recently told a small audience far from the glare of Washington. What is? Her writing for children.

“Of all my legacies, this is the one I’m most proud of,” Sotomayor told about 200 parents, children, actors and musicians gathered in a church hall to rehearse a musical adaptation of a children’s story she wrote. “You have brought to life a book that was in my head for over 35 years.”

Soon, the lights dimmed, actors took the stage, and music swelled to open the first dress rehearsal for Just Ask!: Be Brave, Be Different, Be You. The piece features adult actors portraying children with various disabilities working together to save a community garden from development.

Sotomayor came to this Midwestern city after an unusually tempestuous term at the high court. The 70-year-old justice has faced calls to retire and told an audience at Harvard University that she sometimes closes the door to her office and cries after rulings by the court’s conservative supermajority.

On the last day of this past term, she issued a dire dissent warning that the majority’s decision to grant Donald Trump and other former presidents broad immunity from prosecution for official acts was placing American democracy at risk.

Through it all, Sotomayor has carved out time for an unusual side hustle, helping craft the development of the musical for a small community theater that usually draws hundreds to each performance. That the court’s senior liberal justice would hash out scenes, rework characters and scribble notes on lyrics while grappling with the nation’s weightiest legal issues—crafting a treatment the way she might an opinion—surprised the production’s director, Fran Sillau, and lyricist, Mark Kurtz.

“Every scene that the audience will see she has touched,” Sillau said. “If she wasn’t a justice, she would be a drama research assistant.”

Sotomayor, who declined to be interviewed for this story, told The Daily Show after the 2019 publication of her book that she believes her children’s writing offers the opportunity to have an impact her legal writing does not.

She talked about growing up in a Bronx public housing development, saying there were no attorneys or judges in her building. She had never heard of the Supreme Court until high school, she said, let alone dreamed about becoming a justice.

“If I can affect the lives of children—if I can inspire them to be bigger, better, braver than they believe they can be—then I’ve left a real legacy,” Sotomayor said. “For me, when I write for children or speak to them, it’s to create for them that lasting gift that I hope will inspire them to do something they haven’t even dreamed about.”

The six books Sotomayor has written draw on her singular story as the daughter of Puerto Rican parents who rose from poverty to the nation’s highest court, offering a sense of possibility but also a sense of how her struggles have led to growth.

Just Ask! pulls from Sotomayor’s battle with diabetes, which she was diagnosed with at age 7. She taught herself to sterilize a needle and inject herself with insulin, which forms the opening scene of her memoir, My Beloved World.

Sillau, who has cerebral palsy, said he was drawn to Just Ask! because of its themes. At the urging of a colleague, he placed a cold call to Sotomayor’s literary agent to pitch the idea of adapting it as a musical.

Sillau and Kurtz put together a treatment and sent it to the justice. They expected a response in six months, but Sotomayor expressed interest in working together just three weeks later, Sillau said.

The actors in the musical version of Just Ask! have disabilities and health issues such as autism and asthma, corresponding to those of their characters—a side of themselves the actors said they had not had the opportunity to show before onstage.

Andrea Hobley, who plays Sotomayor in the production and has diabetes, said she likes the approach.

“Each of us knows what it is like to grow up with a particular issue,” Hobley said. “It feels more authentic in the representation of it.”

The producers created 14 characters, but only seven will be featured in any one performance. The idea is that characters can be swapped in and out of the show, depending on what actors are available in an area where a production is staged. Sillau said the characters were drawn from people Sotomayor knows or has met.

The musical opens in January at the Coterie, an all-ages theater in Kansas City. The producers say they hope to publish the musical so theaters across the country can license it and eventually perform it.

Sotomayor told NPR in 2013 that books helped expand her world and served as an escape. Her father was an alcoholic who died when she was 9. Her mother worked outside the home to support the family and often retreated to her room when she was not working.

“Reading became my rocket ship out of the second-floor apartment in the projects,” Sotomayor said then. “I traveled the world through books. And even to this day, if I’m feeling down about anything, I pick up a book, and I just read.”

Three of Sotomayor’s books have made the New York Times’s bestseller list. Supreme Court financial disclosures show she has earned nearly $4.1 million over the past 12 years from writing.

The success has included some controversy. Last year, the Associated Press reported that the justice’s court staff prodded schools and libraries to purchase copies of her books and performed tasks for her appearances promoting the works.

The AP also reported that Sotomayor’s publisher, Penguin Random House, was involved in matters before the high court, and Sotomayor did not recuse herself from those cases. The court said in a statement at the time that Sotomayor was unaware of Penguin’s role in the cases and would recuse herself in future cases in which the publisher was a party.

Book proceeds are exempt from the $30,000 cap on outside pay for justices, so publishing has become a go-to source of income for many of them.

Amy Coney Barrett reportedly received a $2 million advance for a forthcoming book, and financial disclosures from 2023 showed three justices—Ketanji Brown Jackson, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Neil M. Gorsuch—received six-figure book advances. Gorsuch just released a book, and Jackson’s memoir will be published in September.

The theme of Just Ask! is learning to accept the differences of others, something that came from Sotomayor’s searing experiences dealing with her illness. On the day she watched the dress rehearsal, she relayed one of those experiences to a group of about three dozen children who had come to the Kansas City Public Library for an author reading.

Sotomayor told the children seated at her feet about injecting herself with insulin in a restaurant bathroom decades ago when a woman walked into the room. Later, as Sotomayor was leaving the restaurant, she said, she heard the woman whisper to a companion that Sotomayor was a drug addict.

Sotomayor was mortified, then angry. She confronted the woman.

“‘Madam, I’m not a drug addict, I’m a diabetic,’” Sotomayor recalled saying. “‘You saw me taking medicine that helps save my life. I really wish that when you see somebody doing something different that you would just ask what they are doing.’”

A little while after telling the story, Sotomayor asked the U.S. marshal hovering behind her for her blood sugar meter. The man reached into the breast pocket of his dark suit jacket and pulled it out. Sotomayor explained to the children how the electronic meter worked, before taking a reading. She said it showed her blood sugar in the normal range.

Sotomayor’s diabetes has been a major topic of debate recently. Some liberals have called on her to retire before President Joe Biden’s term ends. They worry Trump might be able to fill her seat if he wins the presidency in November and health issues force her to quit during his term, echoing what happened after the death of liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Sotomayor has not indicated she has any plans to step down, and disability rights activists have bristled at the calls, saying they are ableist.

The recent dress rehearsal of Just Ask! finished with actors joining in a rousing chorus that repeated: “Be different! Be brave!” The crowd rose in an extended standing ovation. Sotomayor hugged some of the actors afterward and beamed while greeting guests.

But before long, she requested a meeting with Sillau and Kurtz. They disappeared into a side room. The justice had a few more ideas on how to tweak the treatment.