National News: Local Man Does Local Thing

So last week’s Wall Street Journal feature on the project has had a pretty big impact. More about that in another post. Here I just want to talk about the story’s karmic genesis. 

I’ve courted press coverage since before the project launch, including from a couple of national publications. A core goal of my project is to amplify and normalize conversation around the climate crisis, so (ego aside) I see media attention not just as a means to boost the project but also an end in itself. Thus far though, none of my efforts to gain national notice have come to anything. 

The WSJ’s Betsy McKay, on the other hand, randomly walked into a concert at a senior living center in Rutland Town where she was visiting her parents, who were residents at the venue. The performance, unlike virtually all the project concerts, was semi-private, on account of Covid and the distinguished age of the core audience. Although Rutland Town, with almost 4,000 residents, is not small by Vermont standards—it ranks 40th in population out of 252 towns and cities—it has few public buildings, the villages having been absorbed into what is now Rutland City or split off into what is now West Rutland and Proctor. So I wasn’t so much “settling” for a non-public venue as I was fortunate to find any group space with a piano where I could check off Rutland. And I like playing senior centers. (The way a lot of concert audiences are trending these days, likewise the median age of Vermont’s population, behind only Maine and New Hampshire, I play to a lot of seniors anyway.)

But for all that, playing a no-fee concert at a senior center feels distinctly beneficent, a mitzvah. I think it’s sweet—and exemplative—that the project’s first major* national recognition, a front-page feature in the country's largest newspaper, happened because I played a small rural retirement home.

*There were two previous out-of-state stories: this early story was picked up by the AP and ran (among other places) in USA Today, and this regional feature in the Northeast edition of the AAA’s Explorer magazine by Kim Knox Beckius, who did a fantastic job of capturing the project in under 200 words. These, too, came about organically, not directly from my outreach efforts.