Cancer 26° (July 16)

After arriving at Liverpool Street yesterday, we had the yummiest, I mean the yummiest Szechuan meal at My Old Place. The only negative is that the chef’s sit outside to smoke, which wafts into the place and I had to ask for the doors to be closed. We got a car back to the house to regroup for a few minutes then set right out again to the Barbican on foot for the Lee Krasner. The show was so good I can’t even put it into words. We walked back, bathed, and it was already time to head to Brawn for dinner. We all arrived perfectly on time and the host moved the lingers at our booked table outside. M. had a beer, S. and P. had Lambrusco and something white, unfiltered and fizzy respectively. I had a Negroni which tasted like Compari on the rocks, so I sideled up to the bar and asked them to mix more gin into it and it returned with the balance just right. I had a crab, artichoke and walnut salad in a delicious creamy dressing followed by an aged sirloin with grilled romaine and those hammerwhatever potatoes. I don’t really care what the others had, although the cucumber-almond soup M. had looked deliciouso. We had a love carafe of Gamay. And M. was saying how he found out that Crispin Blunt and his boyfriend/husband who are big fans of his work are big fans of his work in large part because they met at a talk M. gave. He brought them together, in effect.

I’m going to lead with a little to-do list so that I can regroup my thoughts before the day begins and A. arrives to work with us on the collection. P. is setting back off to Suffolk and going directly to work in Woodbridge. I will find out from M. what he might like to do tonight for supper. S. thinks we should find a place that has an already cooked chicken and we can maybe make a salad and get some sides already prepared. The idea is to work with A. from ten to two then break for a late lunch and then work for a few hours more all the while getting clothes washed and repacked for the flight to Corfu. Okay back to the to-do list. First its about writing to the would-be sponsors to whom I’ve already written where I will say something simple like Dear So and So, I hope summer is going (often literally) swimmingly so far. In our Afterglow world we are just eight short weeks away from presenting our ninth annual festival. I’ve tried this year to be more hands-off (read: less pushy and annoying) than I’ve been in the past in regard to fundraising which hasn’t paid off, so here I go enter back into brash and strident mode: [new graph] We are still need to raise a good deal of budget to put on and pull off this annual festival as we continue to keep non-commercial, progressive performing arts alive here in its actual and spiritual birthplace. This can only happen non-profit. Our costs of doing this have more than doubled since John Cameron Mitchell and I founded this festival nine years ago, which only makes us more determined to fulfill our mission of providing sacred stage space in Provincetown to emerging and experimenting artists of all ages and persuasions. In the intervening years we have helped some seventy odd live artists get their creative works on their feet and some of whom were complete unknowns have gone on to great success and renown. In the process we’ve championed Provincetown’s heritage as an incubator for live performance—in some ways Afterglow is as much about Provincetown’s historical preservation as it is sustaining its artistic legacy—while fostering the artists themselves. The festival indeed enriches the town’s cultural landscape and, as we are now nurture a new crop of mainly totally unknown performers (as well as directors, poets, musicians, dancers, solo playwrights, sometimes embodied all in the same individual) we don’t expect the same kind of audience turn-out as we would for those aforementioned artists we first introducted to town (Bridget Everett, Justin Vivian Bond, Lady Rizo, Cole Escola, John Early, Erin Markey, Our Lady Jay, Taylor Mac, Drew Droege and so many others, including John Mitchell).

Not all the people of great wealth who have come to town since 2011 are as generous to Afterglow as you have been. There are some very famous folks in town now who ignore our attempts to gain their sponsorship. I guess what I mean to say is that gentrification (which is so extreme in Provincetown) has not only sent all our costs skyrocketing but it has also created a much more us-and-them dynamic where, unlike our well-heeled sponsors who have traditionally mixed and mingled with all the Ptown population, many of these new residents of note are rather unreachable if not untouchable despite having second, or sometimes third, homes here. And so we must work all the harder to garner the support of those who live and own businesses here and who benefit, not only culturally from what we do but financially as well. We drive all our audience and our artists, first and foremost, to those Provincetown establishments who happily support us. Anyway, I can rant endlessly on the importance of all this but I will close by saying: If you continue to believe in the value of the Afterglow Festival and would think it a shame if it were to go poof in Provincetown, please give as generously as you can to help us keep on doing what we do.

And the other thing I have to work out is the whole Sparkler set up. They can get the same or similar schpiel as above but I need to hit whom the fact that I tried a new, less proactive (read: pushy) approach to inspiring small Sparkler donations from people this year and it has decidedly not paid off. So I’m back to being strident (read: rather annoying) in my approach to move the fundraising needle. Typically around this time, (it’s just eight weeks out from the ninth annual festival) Afterglow is boasting scores of Sparklers. So far this year we only have a few. So forgive the blatant tagging but we’ve got some major funds to raise.

To view the original Sabian Symbol themed 2015 Cosmic Blague corresponding to this day: Flashback! The degree pointof the Sabian Symbol will be one degree higher than the one listed for today. The Blague portrays the starting degree of for this day ( 0°,  for instance), as I typically post in the morning, while the Sabian number corresponds to the end point (1°) of that same 0°-1° period. There are 360  degrees spread over 365 or 6 days per year—so they near but not exactly correlate.

Typos happen. I don’t have a proofreader. And I like to just write, post and go!
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