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A follow-up on Audiographs—Songs from the Tenderloin created in 1987. Using the techniques developed for the earlier work, Wake for Tom takes interviews with people living on the streets of San Francisco and sets them in alternating environments: in the street and within a musical score. It explores the lives of the same close-knit group of alcoholic panhandlers. Many have died in the intervening four years, including Tom Scanlon, one of the principal voices in the earlier work. Interviews with him made just before his death are intercut with interviews with his friends and with the professionals whose job it is to deal with the death of indigents. A moving continuation of a sad, humorous, and virtually untold story about America's homeless.