The Benefit

What if you had a benefit concert and nobody showed up? Yep, it happened. One of the staff at HBG organized a benefit concert for the HBG farm, to support the monks that come to HBG each year, and a local Boulder community organization. The benefit concert was yesterday. There were five or six headline bands. It was 7 hours long. I think maybe 40 or 50 people showed up . . . half of whom are staff at HBG. Nobody seemed to be bothered by it except for us out of town volunteers. Us out-of-towners have much more to learn!

My task for the day was to sell food from HBG and interface with the “public.” This required a tent. It has been extremely hot and sunny in Boulder and we figured a tent to cover the table – and me – would be a good thing. So we borrowed a sun tent from a friend in the community. It took approximately 6 or 8 of us to figure out how to put this tent together. Yes, we actually did read the directions. Yet we still had to reconstruct it several times. We never did get it together correctly, but did get it into serviceable shape.

Then we were off to the races – all 50 of us – with a really decent funk band from Phoenix, Home Jones. I was the only person dancing, and I had to dance in the tent because of my aforementioned responsibilities of interfacing with the public. Immediately after Home Jones' set, Wizard-of-Oz winds stirred up, lightening and thunder cracked and it poured. The meager audience of 50 became a more meager audience of maybe 40.

The upside is that I was assigned to interface with the public, in a tent. My tent became the refuge for the aforementioned public, and I went to work interfacing. That is to say, they ignored me for a while and talked town stuff with each other. Then I met the one and only Mayor of Boulder, UT. Bill Muse, the mayor, shook my hand. We chatted about who I am and what I’m doing in Boulder. He learned that I went to high school in Salt Lake. I learned that he and his wife graduated from the high school very near to my high school just one year before I was born. Then the mayor informed me that he is often plowing his fields adjacent to the HBG farm and that the view in lower Boulder had gotten much better now that there were lots of women working the HBG farm.

The rain eventually cleared. My tent was much shorter with the accumulated rain on the roof tarp, but all was well. The music continued. Eventually Vicki and Matt came on. This wife and husband are really talented musicians. Have any of you heard of The Waves? They are an Australian group. I had heard about them sometime in the past pre-Boulder. Well, turns out that Vicki of Vicki and Matt in Boulder, UT is the lead singer of The Waves.

Ahhh Boulder!