The thirtieth (!) entry in my guided tour has a pretty great story behind it. We started a Saturday with a small workshop with non-profit wunderkind, Joanna Lakatos who has been a Development Director at several places in our fine city, most recently and notably, Kartemquin Films. She spent an hour with us showing us the ropes of harnessing social media for community impact. Remember, this was only four years into Facebook’s omnipresence, and as usual, Joanna was well ahead of the curve. Her background in philanthropy, grant-writing, and arts production made our heads spin, but fortunately we still are close, as she’s a long-time friend of Beth Wiedner who invited her to present.
Later that afternoon, I met up with the inimitable Marshall Preheim to start the build of our Convertible Stage. While Beth and Joanna availed themselves of the Rumpus Room as a yoga studio, Marshall and I drove a box truck over to the home of the late, great Pat Kenneally, and loaded up the speaker stacks, mixing console, stage, and parachute of their venue, A\V-Aerie to re-install it into Nomadic Studio for one last run. I’ve known Marshall for an inordinate amount of time, and back in 2009, when Nomadic wasn’t even an idea yet, I had told Marshall about my lunatic plan to disassemble his closed down space and physically move it into another space to keep it going. Six months later, when I called him up, we were laughing because the lunacy was actually coming to fruition.
The reason I paired these two events isn’t just because they were on the same day, but because when Marshall and I returned, Joanna was still there, and they were both intrigued by each other. She ended up hanging out all day and evening for the A\V-aerie install and revival of the last night. Beth took Marshall and Joanna on a provisions run while I helped the bands load in, aaaaand….the two of them have been together for a decade now. As I had mentioned in a previous post, there were a lot of cool elements of happenstance during the exhibit, we just didn’t know that it would play Cupid, too. Salut, you two!
Faiz
