Sam Price, in 2015-16, her junior year at Oberlin College. (Photo courtesy of the family of Sam Price)

'Exact Change' at FringeNYC

CLEVELAND, Ohio – In August 2015, Beth Price made plans to go to a little theater in Greenwich Village to see “Exact Change,” the one-woman show by transgender Cleveland artist Christine Howey.

The New York Times had listed Howey’s autobiographical play, about her pioneering transition from a man named Richard to the woman Christine, as one of “the 10 shows to watch for” at the New York International Fringe Festival, the sprawling showcase for theater and dance that takes over houses in lower Manhattan for two weeks every summer.

Beth hoped that Sam, her 20-year-old, home in Maplewood, New Jersey, from Oberlin College, would go with her to the city to catch Howey onstage. The subject matter could not have been more relevant.

Just four months earlier, Samuel, Sam for short – her 5-foot-11, broad-shouldered son – had come out as trans to the family. They responded with love – “without exception,” says Sam’s father, Adam.

Not that it wasn't hard for them. Everyone still called her "Sam," as it could apply to either gender, but getting used to the new pronoun took some doing, and her parents sometimes slipped. Her older brother, Jonah, the most supportive of all, was there to correct them. When they would refer to Sam as "he," Jonah would say, "Uh-uh – she."

Story by Andrea Simakis, The Plain Dealer

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Sam (right), with big brother Jonah, before coming out as trans to her family. (Photo courtesy of the family of Sam Price.)

Sam grew her short-cropped hair long enough to tuck behind her ears and dyed her dark curls blond. When Sam showed up at her grandmother’s 85th birthday party dressed as a woman, she received warm hugs.

Not that her family didn’t worry. Adam and Beth, both psychologists, knew what their kid was up against.

“Whatever happens bad to people in the world, it happens worse to the trans community,” says Adam Price. Among the list of hurdles: discrimination in housing and employment, fueling higher rates of homelessness and poverty in the trans community.

Even when you know the risks, the numbers are still the numbers. Howey included some of the starkest in her play, displayed without fanfare on a portable screen:

Every three days a transgender person somewhere in the world is murdered because of their transgender status.





Rate for attempted suicide in the general U.S. population: 4.6 percent.





Rate for attempted suicide in the transgender community: 40 percent.

In the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey, the most wide-ranging examination of the experiences of transgender people in America to date, 46 percent of nearly 28,000 respondents reported being verbally harassed and 9 percent physically attacked in the year prior to completing the survey because of being transgender.

During that same period, 10 percent of respondents were sexually assaulted, and nearly half (47 percent) had been sexually assaulted at some point in their lives.

That Sam would be targeted by a bigoted stranger was a real concern. It never occurred to the Prices that she would try to harm herself.

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Poet and playwright Christine Howey. (Kyle Lanzer/Special to The Plain Dealer)

A story of transformation

“Exact Change” had its world premiere at Cleveland Public Theatre in 2014. Audiences connected to Howey’s story of her gutsy, public transformation at age 45, made long before Bruce became Caitlyn Jenner.

In the play, on the same screen that displayed those jaw-dropping statistics, we see a grainy clip of a younger Christine, sitting on Oprah’s couch in 2002 and schooling the Queen of All Media about why her choice to transition from man to woman is about gender, not sexuality.

(“You were as butch as anyone,” an awed Oprah says upon seeing pictures of Chris as Dick Howey, a bearded bear of a man who frequently appeared on the Dobama Theatre stage playing heavies, from Lucifer to Goebbels to Nixon.)

Propelled by her poetic language and caustic, irrepressible sense of humor, "Exact Change" was soon snapped up by bigger venues: In June 2015, Howey performed at Playhouse Squarefor attendees of the largest theater conference in the nation; in August, she got that shout-out from the Times as she headed to the Fringe Fest.

Prestigious as it was, the experience exhausted her. Every day for nearly two weeks, Howey had to schlep her own gear from New Jersey, where she was staying with her daughter, Noelle, to a 50-seat theater in Greenwich Village. Then, after every performance, she had 15 minutes to strike her own set.

She wasn’t getting any younger, and the rigors of DIY touring were getting even older, one of the reasons she wanted to create a film adaptation of “Exact Change.”

She found another reason in Sam Price.

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Sam with Mom, Beth. 'Courage,' Beth Price wrote, 'is being a 5'11' broad built man, putting on a bright blue sleeveless turquoise dress, jewelry, and carefully applied make-up, then walking down the block where you grew up to take the train into NYC to meet a friend.' (Photo courtesy of the family of Sam Price.)

The girl with a natural passion

Sam had originally come out as gay in high school, as many trans kids do. “That’s part of why we wanted to make sure she was at a gay-friendly college,” says Adam Price.

Oberlin was Sam’s first choice. Better still, she would have family nearby: Adam and his brother, Eric, had grown up in Shaker Heights, and their mother still lived in Beachwood.

Sam entered as a freshman in 2013. A Jewish Studies major from the beginning, Sam wanted to be a rabbi, but a passion for the natural world had her eyeing a second major in environmental studies.

She brought an uncompromising intensity to everything she did – a “barefoot integrity,” the Rev. David Dorsey, Oberlin’s multifaith chaplain, called it.

Sam so loved the feel of the Earth beneath her feet, she liked to walk around barefoot, “not just inside but everywhere,” her mother recalls, even in restaurants, prompting some managers to ask her to leave.

When Sam returned home after her first year at school, she asked Beth if she could turn their front yard into a sustainable garden. Her mom agreed to give up a small piece of real estate, and Sam grew tomatoes, jalapenos, lettuce and herbs, then treated the family to homemade salsas and hot sauces.

After a trip to Guatemala over a winter break, Sam insisted the family buy only fair-trade-certified products. When Beth forgot and bought organic instead, Sam printed “SLAVE BANANAS” in black Sharpie on the fruit sitting in a bowl in the kitchen.

On Hanukkah and birthdays, Sam told people, "No gifts!" and provided a list of charities and causes they could fund instead, including an organization to aid Syrian refugees, Black Lives Matter and the Trevor Project, a national 24-hour suicide prevention hotline for gay and questioning youth.

A resident assistant at a house for Jewish students at Oberlin, Sam was called back to campus for a training session before the start of her junior year. That’s why she never went to New York with her mom to catch Howey in “Exact Change” at the Fringe Fest.

Who can say whether the show would have made a difference?

Would seeing the tall, chic grandmother Howey is today — those awkward, painful months of trying to “pass” as a woman long behind her — have offered Sam a long view she didn’t have?

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Precious archives: Because she was just beginning to transition when she died, 'we didn't have a lot of photos of Sam as a woman,' says Adam Price. (Photo courtesy of the family of Sam Price)

She was the color of happiness

At Oberlin, Sam was a powerful role model, even from afar.

“I thought she was the coolest person ever,” says Oscar d’Oliveira Soens. To Oscar, Sam first appeared as a burst of brilliant yellow.

Oscar has synesthesia, a rare brain phenomenon that triggers an unusual blending of the senses. The condition manifests itself in myriad ways – one person might bite into a rare steak and see a wave of indigo blue, while for another the sound of a lover’s voice triggers the smell of ripe oranges.

For Oscar, the world is color-coded. Everything – including people and numbers – corresponds to a different hue. And when Oscar caught a glimpse of Sam that first week on campus, she was the color of happiness.

“Does she go here?” Oscar wondered.

Born a girl, Oscar started taking male hormones almost three years ago. “How I think of my transness is, it’s just a hormone deficiency,” Oscar says. “That means that my body doesn’t produce enough testosterone.”

The next time Oscar saw Sam, she was driving by in a car.

“She definitely goes here,” Oscar thought. Sam wasn’t just cute – to Oscar she represented so much more. “I was like, ‘OK, there could be a place for me at this school.’ ”

Sam seemed to be friends with everyone, no matter what group or clique they hung with. Maybe it was her openness that drew so many to her, an expansiveness that included everyone and felt bottomless.

She didn’t want anything to come between her and someone else’s humanity, says her father. Sometimes, just getting down the street with Sam was an accomplishment: On one trip to New York City, she stopped to give money to each homeless person she passed.

“Every time I saw her, she would come up and say, ‘Hey, love,’ and give me the biggest hug,” says Wolf Pulsiano, who got to know Sam while the two worked to start Lilac, a group for trans students at Oberlin.

“It was such a wonderful feeling to feel so cared about,” he says. “And I never knew how to reciprocate that. I felt that I could never get to the point where I felt comfortable enough to show so much love and affection to everyone around me.”

Wolf “sort of identified as a girl” until about 13. He began taking male hormones at 16 or 17 and had top surgery three years ago.

When Wolf first started transitioning, he didn’t know a lot. “I researched everything that men do – how men walk, how they sit – and I tried to conform so much.”

Today, when you look at Wolf, you see a lovely, slender young man who wears expertly applied eye shadow and nail polish. Nothing wrong with men looking pretty, he says.

In a word, Wolf can “pass.” Not Oscar. Though injections of testosterone, or T-shots, changed Oscar’s emotional life almost at once (“the sun seemed brighter,” Oscar says), they have yet to erase the soft contours of puberty.

“When I go into the coffee shop, they’re like, ‘All right, miss, what would you like?’ ” says Oscar. “It’s a very small thing. I don’t mind. I’m feminine, I’m beautiful. It’s OK. But that every day? Every time I go out somewhere is like a constant little reminder – it’s like a constant itch you can’t scratch.”

Oscar and Sam dated for about a month, though people just meeting the couple assumed they’d known each other for years. That’s how in sync they were. They talked a little about gender and body issues, just enough for Oscar to know they were on the same page.

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Sam Price. (Photos courtesy of the family of Sam Price)

Because neither of them was what Oscar calls “passing trans people,” they shared a reality filled with endless micro-decisions and exhausting interior monologues.

Something as simple as finding a place to pee presents a conundrum. Which bathroom do you use?

“It’s like, ‘Men’ or ‘Women’?” says Oscar. “I could use the men’s, but I wouldn’t feel comfortable in there. I could use the women’s, but potentially make other people feel uncomfortable. What the f- - - do I do?”

And then there are the silent judgments and recriminations that come from just looking in the mirror.

"Even if you have the hormones, even if you have the explicit support of your loved ones, it's hard to wake up every day with a visual reminder, this physical reminder that something is . . . not wrong," says Oscar, "but not as it should be."

It was hard to find somewhere just to be.

“For people like us, the structures of society are not built to serve us or to even leave room for us, and we don’t have a place,” says Oscar. “You are born with this burden of having to create your own home. And Sam was working on that, and she got tired.”

Oscar doesn’t blame her for that.

On March 15, 2016, while away at school, Sam attempted suicide. It was her 21st birthday. She was hospitalized in Cleveland in a coma. Ten days later, her family removed her from life support.

That summer, Adam and Beth, cleaved by grief, went to visit Adam’s brother Eric in Provincetown, Massachusetts. He told them he had someone he wanted them to meet. Her name was Christine Howey.

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Christine Howey films a sequence from 'Exact Change' in October 2016. In the play and the movie, she plays all of the characters, including her ex-wife, her mother, a child psychologist and a drag queen named Dolly. (Photo by Stephen Hacker.)

There's something about Provincetown

P-town, a famous haven for gay tourists known for its profusion of street performers – opera singers belting “Aida” on one corner, drag queens crooning ABBA covers on another – is also one of America’s oldest artists’ colonies.

Eugene O’Neill penned scripts for the Provincetown Players. Tennessee Williams spent summers in the dunes working on “The Glass Menagerie” and “A Streetcar Named Desire.”

Michael Cunningham, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his novel “The Hours,” wrote “Land’s End,” a short, passionate tribute to the seaside enclave at the tip of Cape Cod, in 2002.

“It is one of the places in the world you can disappear into,” Cunningham wrote. “It is the Morocco of North America, the New Orleans of the north.”

And, like those storied locales, Provincetown has a mysterious allure that’s almost magical. “It’s a bit remote, it’s a little bit wild,” he says. “There’s something about it.”

Following in the vanished, sandy footsteps of Williams and O’Neill, Howey spent 13 weeks in P-town courtesy of an Ohio Arts Council grant in the steamy months of 2016.

During her residency, she tapped the energy of the inspirational ZIP code, writing scads of poems and a shooting script for “Exact Change.”

She did poetry readings, one with famed maverick poet and self-described “loudmouth lesbian” Eileen Myles.

As chance would have it, Myles is the ex-girlfriend of Jill Soloway, the creator of “Transparent,” the groundbreaking TV series starring Jeffrey Tambor as the patriarch of the Pfefferman clan who comes out as transgender to her three grown children. (In the show, actress Cherry Jones played a poet based on Myles.)

Howey wrote a defense of the choice to cast Tambor, a cis man, as Mort/Maura rather than a transgender actor, a decision that sparked outcry from some in the trans community. (“Cis” is short for “cisgender,” an antonym of “transgender,” meaning simply that you identify as the sex on your birth certificate.)

"I can relate," Howey wrote in a 2015 article for Dame magazine.

“As you observe the feelings flickering across Tambor’s very masculine face, a face that naturally defaults into a frown, the process of becoming a woman doesn’t look easy at all.”

In another serendipitous convergence, the kind Provincetown seems to foster, she met Sam’s uncle, Eric. He knew of her work from his mother, who had heard Howey do a poetry reading in Cleveland. Eric’s brother and sister-in-law were coming to town – would she like to meet them?

They gathered on the beach for a drink, cried and talked about Sam. How can we help kids? That’s what Beth and Adam Price wanted to know.

“They’re so mystified,” Howey says. “They were so approving – everybody was approving. All the friends, all of Oberlin. And she still committed suicide. That’s the issue.”

Sam was in the process of transitioning, Adam explained. It was still all so new. She’d started hormones only two weeks before her death.

“We used to think she was adopted, because she had such a happy disposition. She was so optimistic. . . . It’s just in such a contrast to what happened,” Adam said later. “She was just always giving of herself, probably too much so. She was under so much pressure and fell into a depression.”

One of the last things she did was cast a vote for Bernie Sanders in the Ohio primary. As they were going through her things, her parents found an “I Voted” sticker affixed to her water bottle.

When Howey returned to Cleveland in the fall of 2016, she felt an almost messianic drive to commit “Exact Change” to film.

Everyone associated with the project feels the weight of that responsibility.

“Several months ago, I asked her, ‘What do you want out of this?’ ” says Jeffrey Grover of g2h films, the Cleveland-based company shooting “Exact Change.”

“She said, ‘Jeff, I want it to be seen by as many people as humanly possible.’ ”

Read more: The making of "Exact Change," the movie

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Sam Price. The selfie is the first picture visitors to the website for the Sam & Devorah Foundation for Trans Youth, the non-profit founded in Sam's honor by her family. (Photo courtesy of the family of Sam Price.)

Creating a place to be

As her child lay dying in a Cleveland hospital, friends and relatives gathered all around, Beth made a vow: If Sam didn’t make it, she wanted to start a safe house for transgender youth where kids could come and feel support and love and acceptance. And it had to be in a natural setting, because Sam so loved to hike and camp and garden; it would spring from the Earth like Sam’s front-yard vegetable patch.

She and Adam chose an ideal spot in the mountains – the Berkshires in western Massachusetts, as wild and remote a place as the coastal Provincetown. They founded the Sam & Devorah Foundation for Trans Youth to help build it.

“Devorah,” the Hebrew of “Deborah,” is the name her family thinks Sam would have chosen for herself had she lived. Devorah is a powerful judge in the Old Testament.

Beth and Adam developed a trans youth advisory board to lead the work of the foundation and help them understand the needs of trans kids. It’s made up mostly of students from Oberlin, including Sam’s friends Wolf Pulsiano and Oscar d’Oliveira Soens.

“One of the kids there said, ‘You know, it’s really important that [the house] is in nature, because for so long, we’ve been told that we’re unnatural,’ ” says Adam.

Their application for 501(c)(3) status has been approved, meaning all contributions made to the foundation are tax-deductible.

“This is a big goal, and so we want to go slowly,” he says, “because we know that an organization, if it’s to be successful, has to start slowly and build a tribe, a community of support.”

While they’re pursuing the big goal of raising the roof of a haven in the Berkshires, they’re taking their mission – to create a safe place for trans youth – on the road to college campuses.

Toward that end, the Sam & Devorah Foundation is bringing Howey to Oberlin to perform “Exact Change” for one night only on Monday, April 17, at a student-run space.

“I think engaging students in a cultural event provides an accessible and entertaining way to promote dialogue and awareness,” says Adam.

“ ‘Exact Change’ is perfect for this mission – it is poignant, funny, moving and personal. . . . It is not just a trans story, it is a human story that everyone can relate to.”

And, unforgettably, it is about The Girl Who Lived.

“It’s a story,” says director Scott Plate, “that doesn’t end in somebody jumping in front of a train.”

Christine Howey appears in her one-woman show "Exact Change" at 7:30 p.m. Monday, April 17, at the Cat in the Cream Coffeehouse, Hales Annex, 180 West Lorain St., Oberlin. The event is free and open to the public.

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Poet and playwright Christine Howey talks about 'Exact Change,' her one-woman show chronicling her journey from Richard to Christine, now being made into a film.

