Cloudy Afternoon

It’s Thursday/Friday, the last two hours of our ten hour/four day week and Monday was a holiday and I really am glad he weekend is here got me. Today has been a light day as I have watched a storm struggle to make its way into the Wasatch Front and scrub some of filthy atmosphere out of the City. I was able escape the office a little while after lunch—I was invited to a “focus group” for the Salt Lake Arts Council—hosted by VSA of Utah—no food just bottles of water in the new trendy art space of Art Access, a private non-profit I have been loosely affiliated with for them pas twenty years. Art Space is lack of better words Salt Lake’s art colony. Creative types with lots of political mojo wrote some grants, reclaimed a warehouse from the industrial district the city fathers are trying to bootstrap, clear the bums out, fumigate, paint and build some lofts. A perfect art space.

VSA of Utah Art Access is the Utah affiliate of Very Special Arts, the touchy feely non-profit maintained my the Kennedy Foundation. Bringing art to the crips is what they do. Yeah I know I’m cynical of these guys its hard not to but I have to admit I have been one over by VSA even if I still gag on their use of “Very Special” in their title. In another life I started an acting company and Art Access hosted the acting company and put on the plays we produced that I wrote. Art Access published my writing on a regular basis, every time they published their yearly offering Desert Wanderings. Lori, a good friend of mine, was the editor and she always make sure I had space if I had something to publish. It was cool, she even bought my work, it was not much but $30-$40.00 for q couple pieces of poetry and the write to say I have published work and not be lying and when Art Access would publish the volume Art Access always had an open house, where wine was served along with cheese and crackers. The press was invited and the opening was held during the monthly “gallery stroll” and I was expected to read selections. I even wore a black turtleneck and a sports jacket all I needed was a pipe and elbow patches. Heck, I even met a writer for the local news paper, we became close friends who has even done some fairly extensive stories on me. Again, I know it more then hokey buy this kind of attention feels good so I don’t have a problem when Ruth Lubbers calls ad needs people to sit in on a focus group now and then to show her board or another agency like the Salt lake Arts Council, they are reaching out to all the community in order to keep their funding money coming in. After all it’s Thursday afternoon, and gets me out of the office, its light duty—I’m here taking calls and not a whole lot else.