“Music, art, and performance are not spectator sports,” I said from the stage as the emcee of the 3rd “Angola’s Got Talent, “They are all things we can take part in.” That’s how I was quoted in the Herald Republican, our hometown newspaper. Angola is a town of 8,500 in a county of 30K residents. And yet, the urge to create is strong here. Each year, I see more and more creativity being displayed publically. Whether it is the downtown sculpture tour or the college drama dept putting on more ambitious productions, people here love the arts. But to an outsider, it would look like “home grown” arts. There is very little “4th Wall” between performers and audiences. We have that small town thing where everybody knows everybody by name or at least by face.

A June night in Indiana is just about the fairest of the seasons. A couple hundred audience members witnessed 18 contestants in the gem of an auditorium that is in the Furth Center for Performing Arts in Angola.

What makes the night special are the kids who have never performed in public, or in their own name, or in such professional room – complete with marble, velvet, and spotlights, etc.

My kids Abi and Zeke entered a dance-duo. The did a pantomime interpretation to “Anything You Can Do (I Can Do Better)” from Annie Get You Gun. From my vantage point back stage, not only did I see their choreography, but I also saw the faces of the audience glowing not only by foot lights, but by laughs and smiles of delight! Abi would do pointe ballet to Annie’s lines and Zeke would do tap dance in the cowboy’s response. The performance won them 2nd prize in the adult category, I was so proud!

Above the Fold played the role of house band, and we made a lot of new fans.

I debuted a new song, from my O Indiana experiement, “Imagination Everytime.” I played it while the judged deliberated. Fans could download it for a dollar each and procedes will go to Cahoots – “a space where youth thrive.”

In 2020 the board of Cahoots, the youth non-profit coffee house where I used to be the executive director, dreamed up a fund raiser with me. One that wasn’t an adult event that raised money for kids – like a golf outing or a casino night (which had both been tried historically in the organization’s history.) Rather, my hope was an event where kids could participate with adults side by side in a mutually supportive way. I had been running a monthly open mic night that did just that from 2019 on, so the logical leap to a public talent show for youth and adults – with local sponspors and “celebrity” judges, wasn’t too diffcult to make.

This year, the event felt like it became the thing we dreamed of back in the belly of covid. When the night was over, smiles and conversation overflowed in the parking lot, to the night spots downtown, and the ice cream shops up the road. The warm Indiana twilight held for quite some time, just a few days from the solstice and new lightning bugs dotted the cloudless sky.