Tonight there are one hundred Fun Palaces.

100 Fun Palaces. This means so much.
It means you too, can have an absurd idea and it can happen.
It means I can have an absurd idea (about taking on someone else’s ‘absurd’ idea) and it can happen.
It means that people understand and believe in the politics around Radical Fun – engagement, what our Planning-Evaluation day today uncovered as ‘unearthing what is already there’, that we can trust that community arts might truly be a thing. Not a thing treated with snobbery, but a thing welcomed as engaged and part of ‘the arts’ – that our making work (as artists) is a CONTINUUM of making work, not an end in itself.
We all know this.
Those of us who make work are doing it because of this connection (mostly), many of us wouldn’t bother otherwise – it is the reach, the change, the leap that is the point. That makes it worthwhile.
100 Fun Palaces.
Absurd, amazing, right.
(As would be two, as would be two thousand.)
The far distant as important as the one up the road. The first two counting as much as the latest. People who are makers/artists engaging with actual, real community. And vice versa.
I’m shattered (6 months of cancer/surgery/healing/surgery/healing, father-in-law death, astonishing work, amazing support, fantastic understanding), hopeful, and grateful. (And so looking forward to the next 6 months!)
Thank you all, those who get in so wholeheartedly, so many of you already working at other full-time jobs (in arts and not), already making other work, and now making Fun Palaces the thing we didn’t even know it was going to be.
I don’t know what this is going to be.
Our Evaluation-Planning day today made it even more clear to me that we (all) really don’t know what this is going to be.
Thank you SO MUCH to those of you leaping in – anyway. WE will work this out. Together.