A Conversation with Robert Cray (continued)

PM: Maybe share a little with our readers about your wife, Sue Turner-Cray's film, Through Riley's Eyes.

RC: Well, my wife, Sue, she's an actress. And she met this friend of ours, Richard Burdell from Portland, Oregon. And Richard had been living with ALS for--well, when he died, it was fourteen years. [ALS is Amyothrophic Lateral Sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig's Disease.] Sue got involved. She joined the ALS Society down here in Los Angeles. And she was going to do the newsletter, and then they got into a spat, and then she wound up quitting. But then she went ahead, and she met up with Richard, and Richard's sister. And she decided she wanted to document his story.

I had met Richard years ago. Richard was a trumpet player, a jazz trumpet player in Portland. And he was kind of like the guy in Portland as far as popularity went. And then he came down with the disease. I remember running into him once in Chicago, and his speech was starting to slur, which was the beginning sign. I don't think that he knew, at that particular point.

PM: Oh, he didn't even know yet.

RC: No, I don't think he really knew. But actually, his mom died from it as well, I believe.

PM: Oh, my.

RC: And then Sue decided she wanted to document the story, so she made the film Through Riley's Eyes. It's a short film. She got with Jim and Kevin and myself, and Dennis Walker, who played bass and co-produced. We did the soundtrack for it. And Sue hired a film crew and she shot it at our house.

PM: Shot it at the house!

RC: Yeah. And in Marin, at the Headlands up there.

PM: Yeah.

RC: And we pretty much forked out the money ourselves do it.

PM: Wow.

RC: She was able to take it around to different film festivals and the like. And she won a few awards for it, too.

PM: Oh, so it got recognized.

RC: Yeah, it got recognized--at Nashville, actually, at the film festival there, and also at Houston.

PM: Wow.

RC: But the deal was that it was trying to draw more awareness to ALS.

PM: When I was reading about it in the press kit, I knew that I'd heard about this before, this film about the guy with ALS. And it must have been when it was coming through the Nashville Film Festival.

RC: Sue has a website about it, throughrileyseyes.com. One can find out more about the film or even purchase a video of it there.

PM: How's her acting career going? Is she getting a break?

RC: Ah, she's working on it.

PM: That's as tough as being a ballerina or a guitar player.

RC: She's working on a one-woman show that she did here last summer called Manchester Girl. That's on another website, manchestergirl.com. She's working on taking that to New York.  continue

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