Leo 20° (August 11)

 

What to do: Send Jarboe a check. Update the Sponsors and Sparklerson the website. Make some noise about Rachelle Garniez. Pinpoint ten people from whom I need things per day. Still grab Migguel and Molly info. Print out Missionary Sponsor Packets.Circulate the Baie info to givers. Set up an Afterglow One Hundred Page.Start the AFIG praise machine—three a day perhaps? Catch up on my In/Out and PC docs. You don’t necessarily need to know what that means. I do. Get some art work to JCM. Deposit checks in Provincetown.Maybe I can touch base with the lady on the IG front in any case. I think that’s sort of enough for now don’t you? These may all seem like small things but really they’re not. I’m going to spend the next hour working on som HA books and then I’ll come back to you. Print, sign and scan Molly and Kareem contracts. Go through my brown notebook from the boat and get more pleas out to more peeps. Including Eric Borgand the Stowaway guys. Also we neeed to post about a fish tank. There is such a growing list of things to do. No sooner do I think of something that needs doing, sometimes, that/when it vanishes from my mind (I cannot make the sentence structure happen). Anyway it is Sunday and I will try to set things up for the week. Ah I also have to get some information to press including Cape Cod Times, Banner, Provincetown Magazine.

Here some thoughts to put forth along with the press releases that are going out: Beyond the cut and dry Release and the Roster, here are my ever-evolving thoughts on the Afterglow Festival and the general gist of things I would discuss with a journalist. Perhaps if there were to be a story on our organization in advance of covering the festival itself? Probably a lot to ask but perhaps there is a way to weave some of this in. Anyway….

I would love to talk about the mission and what it takes to present mainly unknown artists year on year in an increasingly gentrified environment, non-profit, when so many sponsors have moved on to more affordable pastures to be replaced by lots of rich and famous absentee folks whom you’d think would be so giving but arent. And how that only strengthens our organization’s resolve to preserve Provincetown’s legacy as an incubator for progressive non-commercial talent, emerging, experimenting and forever on the fringe in a world of famous TV drag and Broadway stars in a town where even stage space is real estate.

A local or regional paper has never done a piece on our organization. We have presented upwards of 70 artists here (and in our Afterglow-at-Oberon series at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge) and we’ve had more of that kind of coverage from The Boston Globe and WGBH Open Studio with Jared Bowen but never a think-y piece on what we are doing by a home-town paper. We are thought of as more than an arts organization. We are also something of a cultural/historical “Save Provincetown” entity.

I dare say even our community theater has become rather star struck in recent years (not to mention presenting several Afterglow artists, even doing the exact same pieces we premiered, in new “festival” formats). I suppose imitation is flattery. But we are the grass-rootsiest thing going in the world of theater and performance in Provincetown and we aim to champion the rather ironic “tradition” of always presenting the progressive, new, non-commercial live artist and artistry. The first time any Provincetown audience saw John Cameron Mitchell or Lady Rizo or Justin Vivian Bond or Taylor Mac or Penny Arcade or Bridgett Everett or John Early or Our Lady J or Erin Markey or Cole Escola or any artist who has now become a household name in town (and ubiquitously) graduating toTV personalities or Broadway playwrights or movie stars, was here at Afterglow. We premiered pieces that have moved Off-Broadway and beyond to stages around the world.

And it’s not just about getting a bit of deserved credit. It is the fact that people (audiences) need to understand that (our) history. That before we brought such talent to town—we always know who is on the brink!—and drove these artists into Provincetown’s consciousness, the audience turn out for these artists’ shows was pretty meagre. But we can’t bring artists back for more than a few seasons because that’s not the mission. Sure a few can cycle back after a while as a sort of guest star. But mainly we are always presenting NEW talent. So that means audiences have to trust our curation and not rely on knowing the artists work already. This is a challenge especially in Provincetown. But Provincetown was always the place (until relatively recently) where genius weirdo talent could find a place and an audience and stretch and grow and expand audience’s minds in the process of entertaining them. This is what Afterglow is trying to keep alive. This is the kind of story I would love to see written by a home paper if ever possible.

 

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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