Displaying items by tag: Sarah Craig
Caffe Lena: Live at Noon Rolling Through a Neighborhood Near You
SARATOGA SPRINGS — At precisely noon on a May day in 1975, the Rolling Stones emerged atop a flatbed truck instruments in hand and performed live for a group of pedestrians lining Fifth Avenue in Greenwich Village.
Fast-forward to 2020: precisely at noon on Thursday, May 21, Caffe Lena will kick-off a celebration of the café’s 60th anniversary.
Billed as “Thursday, May 21: Caffe Lena Celebrates 60 Years of Song,” flatbed trucks will roll around town starting at noon with live bands playing music on the back. The café will announce the route in advance and say: we'd love to see you parked on the shoulder, waving and bopping in your decorated car.
At 7 p.m., a two-hour online program of stories, songs and photos will be livestreamed to celebrate each of the café’s six decades. The Tip Jar will be open for business and voluntary support for the event is welcome. The anniversary concert had originally been planned as Lena’s major fundraiser for 2020.
Meanwhile, Caffe Lena’s “Stay Home Sessions” broadcast at 8 p.m. and upcoming performances feature: Dan Berggren Friday, May 15; Chuck Lamb & Jorge Gomes Saturday, May 16; Peter Mulvey Monday, May 18, and Deena Chappell on Tuesday, May 19. For more information, go to caffelena.org.
Sarah Craig: Finding Understanding Through Stories
'Below the Surface of Life.'
“I was sitting at a local diner in Salem, looking through the classified ads,” she told me, “and here was this little ad that said “Nonprofit Arts Organization Seeks Full or Part-Time Executive Director.’” And with the flip of a page, Craig had stumbled upon the community that would envelop her for the next 25 years of her life.
“Just to be able to see someone's life evolve like that meant a lot to me,” she said. “I remember one day where I brought out a basket of toys for her kids to play with in the dressing room while their parents were up on stage, and I go back to check on them, and everything is spread out all over the floor, just toys everywhere. I thought, ‘These are Woody Guthrie's grandchildren.’ That's amazing to me. That's such a piece of American history.”
“You do get close to people,” she told me, "Art is all about being unguarded and opening up your inner emotional life to people. It's one of the most demanding things that you can expect of a human being.”
“I see music as the tool that we use rather than the end-product,” she said, “The end product that I’m trying to create is new friendships, harmony between people, getting people to see below the surface of life, getting people to wake up their emotions. On the surface it looks like I’m running an entertainment venue, but I’m actually trying to accomplish much more than that. And I think that people feel that. I think that the Caffe has always been that.”
“We're trying to get outside of our four walls and get the music out to people who would not otherwise be able to experience live music,” she says. Creating a live streaming option, varying genres and the prices of performances, and staging 60 shows out in the community, including schools, soup kitchens, and nursing homes, are all means to this end. Her work continues, as does its magic.
“I think that in order to be a whole human being, you need to be intellectual, you need to be emotional, you need to be open and curious, and I think that the very fact that art has just always been a part of the human experience tells me that it's one of those essential elements. It's just everything that we've talked about. People find understanding through stories. They don't tend to find understanding through pie charts and bar graphs. To my way of thinking, it's just desperately needed in the world right now, because so much of what we're seeing is people just defining everyone who's not like themselves as garbage. Through fear, through ignorance, through whatever. It's part of being a human being. It's hard to express though, isn't it?”