Yesterday was the first concert of the Goodale Park Music Series. I was nervous and wanted everything to run smoothly. The weather was spectacular and Dale Vanderpool & Friends whipped themselves into a bluegrass frenzy that everyone around the gazebo seemed to enjoy.
Several times throughout the day I thought I was going to explode with gratitude. My sister, my boyfriend, his parents, and several of my closest friends were there. A young girl danced and twirled throughout the entire set. Another young girl breezed by in a kid-sized fuschia convertible with spinners. That thing was phat and I want one.
And then this nicely dressed older man approached me before the performance and asked for a program. Now, this series is an XK-Red-27 grassroots operation. I focused heavily on local publications, websites, and social media and didn’t create printed materials in order to pay the bands and sound engineer as much as possible. So I wrote the dates and times of all our shows on a piece of paper and brought it to him. He was sitting by himself on a small lawn chair in the shade.
“I’m 95 years old and want to thank you for making this happen,” he said as he reached out to hug me. “I don’t have a computer so thanks for writing these down. I’ll come to as many as I can.”
That made all the efforts worthwhile. Long live community.
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