Taurus 8° (April 28)

 

I’m feeling my inner Penny Arcade today which means I’m a bit sickened by sycophancy and the loss of true artistry to the cult of worship and venal reward. Continuing the good fight to help truly progressive, emerging and veteran performing artists find more and more audience in a sea of gentrification. Translation: Time to crank up the fudraising machinery for our non-profit festival, series, and overall presentation work. To that end I will be working on this as a starter, editing it, massaging it into place. Something like:

Happy Spring 2019! I hope this finds you well and thriving. As the daffodilsclose out their seasonal performance here on Cape Cod, I too am in a spirit of renewal and thus reaching out to you and other hopefully returning Sponsors of the Afterglow Festival. This will be our ninth year; and there  has always been something magical about that number for me. So much so that, back in 2010 when I started this endeavor, I named the parent non-profit company of theAfterglow Festival, 333 Inc., nine being the number of the muses. And in our first year (though we comped many sponsors, colleagues, students and seniors) we ended up selling exactly 333 full price tickets! This was more than a fun fact for me—it still feels like something of a sign. And here we are, nine years later, hoping to continue to make some real magic.

In the ensuing years, the Afterglow Festival has preserved Provincetown’s birthright as the birth place of modern American theater and performance. The festival has premiered and developed scores of solo plays and pieces that have moved off-Broadway and to famed stages around the world—musical, comedy, dance, opera, hip-hop, cabaret and uncategorical genres—by artists who make headlines for their art and social narratives.

We have presented over seventy artists since 2011, many of whom have gone on to stellar career success on the stage, in film and on television. It was at Afterglow that much of our resident and visiting audiences first heard of artists like Bridget Everett, Cole Escola, Our Lady J, if not members of our own advisory board like Taylor Mac, Penny Arcade, Justin Vivian Bond, John Cameron Mitchell and other now more renowned performers. Afterglow has created a home in Provincetown for these vital artists who feel a spiritual bond to the town, to its theatrical heritage, and to our local audiences who embrace them.

Over the years, Provincetown has increasingly attracted big-name acts in season that garner desired revenue for the town’s for-profit venues. Then, suddenly late summer, the Afterglow Festival takes stage. And for the past eight years, Afterglow has won audience trust for its curation of superb live programming by performing artists they’ve probably never heard of, as evidenced by the steady growth in the festival’s annual attendance. Likewise, over the years, the costs of producing a festival like ours (including venue rental, travel and lodging for artists) have also increased, but with your help we may continue to bring tomorrow’s headline performers to Provincetown every September.

Afterglow is supported by Joe’s Pub @ the Public in NYC, where we have presented, for the benefit of our non-profit, group performances by the Afterglow “family” of artists. And in collaboration with the American Repertory Theater, whose directorship was impressed with our reputation and achievement, we launched our Afterglow@Oberon (formerly Glowberon) series, now entering its fifth year, bringing our artists to Boston-Cambridge audiences as well. The series has contributed to Afterglow’s overall outreach and praise by the media, from the Boston Globe, Boston Herald, PBS-WGBH and others.

Under a new 333auspice—Glow, “A Moveable Festival”—funded through separate grants and support, we began creating ancillary performances and small tours throughout New England for our arists who aim to entertain audiences with their works and seek to expand and evolve social consciousness more ubiquitously with their message. All of our artists, as it turns out, are activists of sorts who proliferate positive change in our communities, from local enclaves like Provincetown, to the global one at large.

As we champion the Afterglow performers whose careers have begun to soar since first appearing with us in festival, we continue to introduce and incubate new crops of gifted artists, giving them the opportunity to create, present, premier and develop new theater and performance works here in Provincetown; making for them an artistic home; and providing them sacred stage space to experiment, express and explore their art and craft.

I sincerely hope that you will return this year as a valued sponsor of Afterglow; and that we might welcome you to our shows, introduce you to our artists, and otherwise share in the joy that your valued patronage provides for our hardworking, devoted and talented performers, be they emerging or established, whom we are humbly privileged to present in festival. Afterglow 2019 takes stage September 10-14 at the Art House Provincetown, with special opening night festivities, on September 9, for artists and sponsors alike.

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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