Street Poets....Literally!!

and i'm not kidding.
so "the neosoul collective" is part of the performance lineup for "Art After Dark"(thank you joey), proceeds benefiting the Austin Fine Arts Museum. Beautiful setting. Tickets are $55 to get in this MOFO, mind you some patrons paid even more...good cause. Yes, $55 for a ticket, sooooooo it was going to be an interesting crowd. to say the least!!
a volunteer gave us our access passes, but first we had to sign a waiver of liability...just in case we fell off the stage or something, which you will see proves to be quite HEE-LARIOUS!!
a volunteer guides us through the crowd, directing us to "stage 1." she stops. points. says "straight back." ok, thank you. we continue walking.i see the barriers. no stage. i see the edge of the festival. no stage. i see a belly dancer. no stage. i see 2 yellow stripes in the middle of the road...leading to the mic. um, there's our stage.
alrighty then. like i said street poets LITERALLY!!
but you know what? Neo did the damn thing!! A few stayed the whole performance, interesting that they were of color. a few walked by trying not to notice. a few stayed for awhile, quite intrigued. i'm sure 99% of the spectators had never even heard of or seen a spoken word performance.
reactions were interesting...from why are YOU here? to WOW!
it didn't matter the reaction.
what mattered was-spoken word and poetry is an art in itself. we shared a lil of ourselves with a group who would not normally be exposed to this. whether they like it or not...who cares.whether 1 or 100...who cares
what mattered was the young lady who silently wept during my piece or the older gentleman who nodded during BFran's. a nod of solidarity.
to touch just one...to bring circles closer
that's what it is about, really.

Life is Wonderful
Hold on tight!