The Month Of June
Andrew walks into the trailer behind the stage balancing a rectangular box on his fingertips. Cupcakes from Charlotte. Who's Charlotte? Charlotte is our pan-Carolinian friend who runs double marathons in costume and brings us cupcakes at shows.
It's a variety pack, as always. I take a bite out of a red velvet. I love red velvet cake. I've heard the criticism: "it's really just chocolate,” or "you only like it because of the cream cheese icing,” or "this blog is supposed to be about The Revivalists; are you really going to veer off into a 300-word cupcake tangent two paragraphs into your first update since April?” Wrong. All of it.
Most of it. Let's get our tangent on.
In the 1970s, researchers performed an experiment where they fed test subjects a meal of steak and french fries under colored light. The meal itself was perfectly fine; the fries were crisp and salty, the steak cooked to an agreeable medium-rare. All in all, the volunteers participating in the experiment were probably having a nice time.
And then the researchers turned off the colored lights in the room. Under natural lighting, the subjects could now see that their french fries had been dyed bright green and that their steaks were blue. They were horrified. Some even became physically ill. It turns out the color of our food has a huge impact on how we perceive it: whether we think it's fresh, or safe to eat, or even if it tastes good. It's not even that crazy when you think about it. For hundreds of thousands of years before the advent of the microscope, our eyes and our noses were the only means we had of determining if something was edible. Imagine a bunch of hunter/gatherers skewering a wooly mammoth and splitting it open only to find it was blue on the inside. Unless they were on the verge of starvation, they'd probably leave it to rot.
So if a bit of blue dye can turn a mouth-watering steak into a stomach-turning abomination, then why can't some red food coloring enhance the experience of eating an otherwise boring-ass chocolate cupcake? Answer: it can, and it does, and red velvet is amazing. Boom. Science. Tangent over.
Hello, friends! Rob here. For a long time, I've asserted that there is a correlation, possibly even a causal one, between the sweatiness of shows and the quality of shows. By that metric, June 2016 was an amazing month of shows. It's been relatively light- a series of short weekends waking up at the crack of dawn, flying to one place, and flying home from another place- but all but one of our shows this month were outside. Yes, the rumors are true. Outdoor Municipal Concert Season is upon us. A raven covered in the logos of small local businesses arrived from the Citadel this morning, an IPA from a regionally distributed craft brewery clutched firmly in its talons.
I always like playing these shows because you get an interesting snapshot of the local community. Charleston's Grove at Patriots Point was dominated by the stereotypical boat-shoes-and-vineyard-vines crowd. Atlanta's Candler Park was a larger affair with diversity befitting a major metropolis. Jackson Hole's Snow King Center exposed us to an interesting mix of lawnchair dads and mountain hippies. Birmingham's Slice Fest dovetailed with an LGBTQ pride parade. There's something particularly heartwarming about seeing a supportive contingent from a local Presbyterian church (including a minister, white collar and all) marching side-by-side with a truckload of dudes from something called Spike's Leather Club.
Slice Fest was a block party, with the stage about halfway up a short city block in downtown Birmingham. The back side of the stage was fenced off at the next intersection to accommodate artists, crew, and our vehicles. The aforementioned parade ran down the intersecting street, giving us a close, virtually unobstructed view from behind the stage.
It also put us right next to the megaphone dorks.
There were two or three dorks, and one dorkette, taking turns on a megaphone, alternately preaching and protesting at the parade. Judging by his accent, I'm pretty sure one of them schlepped all the way from New Zealand just to tell a bunch of drag queens in a Mustang convertible to stop having such a good time. For the most part, the folks in the parade didn't let it get to them. They took the high road, waving, dancing, and generally being as unflappable as a flag on a windless day, or the wings of a bird that isn't in a particular hurry to be anywhere.
But these megaphone dorks. Man, they had some interesting theories. I jotted down a number of choice quotations with the intention of placing them in a blog later. My curated selections ranged from personal attacks directed towards a member of The Weeks who called them "awful people” ("you're in your twenties, but you look old. You look tired. Your lifestyle is weighing you down”) to absurd conspiracy theories implicating the entire fashion industry in a deliberate effort to normalize pedophilia ("now the men are wearing skinny jeans, and the parents are saying it's okay for all the men and all the women to look at your sons' butts . . . what's happening? More pedophilia . . . all roads lead to pedophilia”). Seriously, the guy said that. It was going to be a fun update. We were all going to read things that some crackpot bigots taking turns on a megaphone said, and we were all going to scoff at the silly, outdated views of these silly, outdated people and then get on with our lives, secure in the knowledge that history will stuff the megaphone dorks unceremoniously into the "man, what were we thinking?” drawer alongside phrenology, Roman vomitoriums and that weird Aztec basketball game where the winning team was sacrificed to the feathered serpent god Quetzalcoatl.
The very same night, a few hundred miles to the southeast, a man walked into a gay nightclub with a semiautomatic rifle and murdered forty-nine people.
The tragedy in Orlando was a lot of things to a lot of people. It was about guns, or homophobia, or radical Islam, or mental health. It was Obama's fault. It was the NRA's fault. It was the victims' fault- they all should have been strapped too. I agree with some of those sentiments, but to me, the big takeaway is this:
In an era like this one, where diversity is at least ostensibly cherished and celebrated in all its forms, it's easy to look at our marriage laws and our black president and brush the dust from our hands and say, "welp, we did it guys, there's no more racism” (or sexism, or any other harmful sort of -ism or -phobia), forgetting that the work is not done, that it may never truly be done, because although we may legislate against segregation, against discrimination, against oppression and prejudice, we can't legislate fear and hate and misunderstanding out of the minds that cling to it, out of those who were raised on it, and that yes, love can conquer hate, love will conquer hate, but that it is the verb, not the noun- to love is to conquer hate, that it isn't enough to be "heartbroken” by tragedy, to "send good vibes,” to "like” and "share”- we must do. Vote with your love. Volunteer with your love. Reach out with your love. It sounds crass, but spend money with your love- when you can afford it, buy products that support causes you believe in instead of whatever is convenient. And really, just love. The verb. Love the people you don't understand: the people who disagree with you, the people who make you uncomfortable or downright frightened, the people with whom you think you couldn't possibly have anything in common. Love the drag queens. Love the megaphone dorks. They're just as human as you are- just as nuanced, just as well-intentioned, just as scared of you as you are of them, and that gap- that chasm of fear and misunderstanding and frozen silence- is where hate grows, and love is the bridge.
To love is the bridge.
