20 Simple Letters, Perfectly Formed

"20 SIMPLE LETTERS, PERFECTLY FORMED"
The story of a nine-year-old girl's immigration to America

"Immigrants. We get the job done!"
- Lin Manuel Miranda
Partial Lyrics from the Broadway play Hamilton

"Everywhere immigrants have enriched and strengthened
the fabric of American life."
- John F. Kennedy
35th U.S. President

"Remember, remember always that all of us, and you and I especially,
are descended from immigrants and revolutionists."
- Franklin Delano Roosevelt
32nd U.S. President

As The Olympia steams out of New York Harbor to Athens, childhood memories come flooding back to Pauline Pazos, a forty-seven year old mother of three, as she watches the city skyline disappear on the horizon. For the next 4,389 nautical miles, she will exist in a state of duality, simultaneously experiencing herself as a naive, nine-year-old Greek immigrant and a grown woman.

Thirty-eight years earlier, she and her father traveled on a similar ship from their small Greek village to America...and everything foreign. Today, she returns to her childhood home and everything familiar, the comfort and security of her family and the love of a mother she has not seen in nearly forty years.

Her father does not accompanying her this time, but she feels the closeness of his spirit guiding her home. And for the first time in her life, she realizes she is finally in control of her own destiny.