the issue was that the function that myscript.py was calling was not returning the value needed by xcom.

further, the xcom needed to be assigned to a variable
`xcomvar = '{{ ti.xcom_pull(task_ids="1st_taskid_str" }}'

then using that in the bash operator

bash_command=f"python secondscript.py --dag_id '{dag.dag_id}' \
                            --task_id '{2nd_task_id}' --dag_conf configuration_string --file {xcomvar}'"