You remember the counsel: "Hold fast to dreams-for if dreams die, life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly..." Langston Hughes reads and comments on some of his most evocative poems about dreams, sailing away to new places and aging through life's pleasures and obstacles. Evelyn Louise Crawford and MaryLouise Patterson(a San Francisco art consultant and a Professor of Clinical Pediatrics at Cornell) are the daughters of some of Langston Hughes's closest black friends and political comrades. They remained cherished friends and confidantes of his for over forty years. Their parents, Louise Thompson Patterson (1901 1999), William L. Patterson (1891 1980), Matt N. Crawford (1903 1996), and Evelyn Graces Crawford (1899 1972), were black Communist civil rights activists. Langston Hughes often stayed with them, and they all traveled together, corresponded about key issues of the day, and took a joint trip to the Soviet Union. Langston Hughes wrote poems to celebrate both girls' births.