By Ronit Rubinstein
Of all the places I would expect to find the first draft of a secret admirer note I wrote to my 5th grade crush… my dad’s file cabinet would probably be last on the list.
A year and a half ago, my mother decided to sell our family home, which meant that it needed to be emptied. It also meant that I finally had to do something I had been putting off since my dad died 12 years earlier. In his office was a solid steel file cabinet, each of its drawers neatly labelled with a name: one for each of my siblings, one for my mom, and one for me. Finally, life was forcing me to go through the “Ronit” files.
I figured there would be old report cards… medical records… but I wasn’t expecting a secret admirer note that I forgot I wrote, to a crush that I forgot existed. How did my dad even end up with it? This question came up over and over again as I sorted through the files, and it started to dawn on me that my dad had essentially compiled an archive of every moment of my life from infancy through my mid-twenties.
How did he get all these things? And why did he keep them?
I’d been performing as a storyteller for about a decade at that point, mostly ten-minute true stories about my life. It started as a hobby—I went to a show and thought, “Oh, I could do that.” Initially, I told stories about times I’d embarrassed myself, strange celebrity interactions I’d had, and lots of stories about my mom, who is the most unintentionally hilarious person I know. My real artistic practice was writing plays, but storytelling shows were addictive, like being welcomed to a dinner party attended by the most charming, entertaining, interesting people.
And like all good hobbies, it started to shape how I lived my life. Bad date? No problem, it’s fodder for a story! My mom did something hysterical? Great – which upcoming show has a theme that fits? But there was one topic I never touched. My dad had died a few years before I started storytelling, and I knew there was no way I could make it through a story about him without breaking down onstage.
But last year, as I found treasure after treasure in my dad’s file cabinet, it became clear to me: this wasn’t just a story. This was, unfortunately, a whole-ass show. How could I separate my dad’s physical archive of me from my digital archive of him? For years, I had been rereading and sharing his hilarious emails that warned me of the dangers of household items. How could I separate any of this from his incredible childhood stories of wartime survival, which seemed absolutely intertwined with his tendency (and mine) to… hold onto things?
Up until this point, I had kept my playwriting and my storytelling totally separate. One was Serious Art, and one was just for funsies. Writing a solo show meant trying to make the two meet in the middle, which was more than a little scary. And where could I even perform it? As a playwright, I was used to getting rejection after rejection.
I reached out to Paul Aflalo, host and producer of Replay Storytelling, the show I perform on most regularly. In 2024, Replay had done its first-ever festival, which had featured a few solo shows. I asked him if he might have room on the 2025 festival for a solo show I had yet to write, called Things My Dad Kept. After ribbing me mercilessly (I had said for years that I would never do a solo show), he agreed to take a chance on me, based on little more than an elevator pitch for a comedic show about how grief evolves.
One thing after another magically fell into place. I snagged a spot in the Nightwood Creatryx 3.0 unit, a playwrights’ unit that met weekly through January and February, wrapping up exactly two days before my spot in Replay Story Fest. With their support, I got a first and then second draft done, and with Paul and the Replay team’s support, I did a workshop performance for a lovely crowd at the Burdock. Talking about my dad did make me tear up onstage, more than once. But I got through it. And luckily, the audience never once booed me for it.
Even more luckily, my number got pulled in the Fringe lotto—for the first time since 2008! My path as a playwright had been one obstacle after another: so many rejections that I lost count. But this solo storytelling show, the one I swore I’d never write? Every door seemed to glide wide open for it. If I were the type of person who believed in signs, maybe I’d take this as a big, flashing neon one that this is the type of work I’m supposed to be doing. But the truth is, I still love writing plays for big casts, and I don’t think I’m done with that sort of thing.
Still, for now I’m really enjoying spending some solo time with my memories of my dad, and with my surprising new discoveries about him—a gift I never expected to get 12 years after we said goodbye, and one that I never expected to find in a file cabinet, of all places. While the stories I’m telling in Things My Dad Kept are uniquely our family’s, grief and loss are universal. I’m so hopeful that Fringe audiences will laugh and feel alongside me… and take some time with their memories of their loved ones.
And maybe not wait 12 years to go through their loved ones’ files.
Mom & Pop Productions’ Things My Dad Kept, created and performed by Ronit Rubinstein and directed by Janelle Hanna, runs July 3-13, 2025 at Soulpepper Theatre’s TD Finance Studio as part of the Toronto Fringe Festival. Tickets and information are available on fringetoronto.com.
© Ronit Rubinstein, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2025
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Ronit Rubinstein has been performing locally as a storyteller for over a decade; she’s been a featured performer at The Toronto International Storytelling Festival, and has appeared on shows like But That’s Another Story, Tales Told Live at the Tranzac, and Replay Storytelling. As a playwright, Ronit’s work has been produced and read across North America, and in 2017, she won the Cayle Chernin award for Theatre Development. Things My Dad Kept is her first solo show. When she’s not performing or writing, Ronit spends her time helping people do better on standardized tests, and cuddling the world’s most enthusiastic cockapoo, Moishe. Ronit studied English and Theatre at Princeton University.
