Jennifer (Keller) Heriot has been in Australia for fifteen years. She moved there for two. That gap is the whole story.

A member of Martinsville's Class of 1999, she followed an arc that no guidance counselor would have predicted: University of Illinois for undergrad, then a doctorate in audiology at Washington University in St. Louis, then Los Angeles for a residency she chose specifically because she was certain she would never live there.

"I'm going to go someplace I will never live," she remembered thinking.

She stayed three years.

She met Drew, an Australian filmmaker. They moved to San Francisco, started a family, and when their two boys arrived fourteen months apart "not planned," she said flatly, they needed support. Drew's family was in Australia. The plan was for two years.

"At the end of two years, I said to my husband, I don't want to go back. I like it here."

That was fifteen years ago.

Life continued to pivot. Jennifer became a clinical affairs specialist for a major cochlear implant company, teaching audiologists across Australia and New Zealand. Drew worked as a filmmaker. Then, in kindergarten, something became clear about their son Eli. Eventually: autism. By second grade, he couldn't manage school. Jennifer left her work schedule and began homeschooling him four days a week while working three twelve-hour clinical days.

The therapy appointments multiplied. OT every week. Psychology every week. Until one day Eli looked at her and said, "What's wrong with me?"

That question became the center of everything.

Jennifer had always loved theater; she'd been in every musical Martinsville had to offer. She started introducing drama games to Eli and watched something shift. He was making sense of emotions, reading social cues, and finding confidence he hadn't found anywhere else. Meanwhile, she was volunteering at the local community theater and coming home frustrated. "This would be perfect for Eli," she kept thinking, but the acoustics, the overstimulation, it wouldn't work for him.

One evening, she came home to find something framed on the kitchen table. Drew had registered a business in her name.

"Well, you've got the business. It's registered," he told her. "What are you going to do with it?"

That question also became the center of everything.

Today, Jennifer and Drew run Full Spectrum Theatre — seventy neurodiverse children every weekend, six classes, three employees, and a philosophy that starts with a deliberate choice: they don't even mention autism. No labels. No deficit language. Just experiences designed to show kids what's possible.

Every class has its own lesson dressed as play. One week, Drew walks out juggling knives. The kids are scared. That's the point. "You can do anything in life if you chunk it down to bite-sized pieces," Jennifer tells them and then walks them from a scarf to a ball to flipping a juggling knife themselves. Another week, students take turns on a slack line, first learning to ask: "How would you like to be supported?" Some want applause. Some want you to look away. Learning, that is the lesson.

When kids drop the scarf, the room cheers. The program replaces "I can't" with "I can't yet." Classes close with a shout-out circle where students practice both giving compliments and receiving them, the second of which, Jennifer says, is often harder.

"We celebrate our mistakes here," she said.

Meanwhile, Drew's advanced troupe is performing a play he wrote about a boy named Lewis who feels superfluous in a world full of AI and Pinterest perfection. The closing line, when Lewis sits with a friend after saving the day: "What's the greatest part of your life? Just sitting with you."

That troupe also made a film last year. It's now in festivals around the world.

When Jennifer traces it all back, she circles to Martinsville. Her mother ran the flower shop downtown. Her grandfather farmed and led the Lions Club. She moved between businesses and fields and community meetings as a child, absorbing something she only named later.

"Growing up in a small town gave me more privilege than a lot of kids in the bigger towns ever received," she said. Leads in plays. Vice president of FBLA. Student council. Teachers who were safe harbors, Mrs. Weir and Mrs. Miller, whose names she still says with warmth.

A memory that stays with her: a farmer's wife was sick with cancer. The farmers of Martinsville showed up with their combines and plowed his fields without being asked.

"That still stands true to me about what a small town is at the core of it," she said. "And why I live in a small town today."

Last year, when Jennifer's mother was hospitalized, she brought her younger son, Bodhi, back to Clark County with her. He attended Marshall High School for a month; the Australian foreign exchange student in the same county that raised his mother.

The combines still show up when someone needs them. It turns out they do that in Australia, too.