A good house concert last night – and our host, long-time friend Jamie – said some really flattering things about us in her introduction that almost got me a little teary. It constantly humbles me to realize that we have such an effect, that we capture hearts and minds, the imagination, with what we do and there are plenty of moments when I look over at my partners in all this, at Heather or Kristen or Rowan or Sharif and think “we are being paid to do this”. It’s so easy to fall into the belief that you only get paid in order to convince you to do something that you don’t want to do – but in the arts it’s ideally a different model – where people pay you because they believe there is worth to what you do, and want to make sure you’re able to continue doing it.
Thank you to the world for giving us the gift of what we do. We are fortunate that our talents and efforts allow us to scrape along in America… small business, independence, individual expression… it’s the American Dream.
We’re listening to Van Halen, cruising down one of North Carolina’s interstates – newly-constructed but already disintegrating under the weight of hundreds of thousands of speeding tires – a monument to the short-sightedness of democracy, where the unpopularity of paying for something means that they came late to the whole “big road” party, leaving vast portions of the state behind in commerce and education…. And when they finally got around to building them, 50 years late, they built them subpar and stretches are little better than the gravel roads found none too far off the main highways.
ilyAIMY dancing the night away at Bourgie Nights.
News from home shows that Maryland’s caught a little bit of short-sighted fever itself. Not a month in office and the new governor back home has axed millions of dollars in education and lifted dumping restrictions on the Chesapeake, single-handedly turning the clock back in my home state for not only thousands of students but the environment itself…
I was having a conversation recently with someone who’s actively excited about watching the world burn and is actively participating in voting in its demise in the hopes that he’ll have a front row seat. He feels that it’s fundamental to being American to want to lay things around him to waste in the interest of personal hedonism – I feel he’s somewhat missed the point of the American dream, but terrifyingly he’s not alone.
ilyAIMY enjoying the dramatic lighting of Bourgie Nights in Wilmington, NC.
