A friend of mine invited me down to see the Bummer’s vinyl release at Strongwater Food and Spirits on March 6th. I was unfamiliar with both the Bummers and the other bands on the bill, and had also never seen Strongwater function as a live music space. At least things promised to be educational; I bundled up on what turned out to be the last cold night of the year.
  The cool kids release vinyl these days folks. CD’s are yesterday's beer coasters, relegated to traditional Celtic Music and Chad Mitchell Trio compilations. I think the vinyl thing is a little precious, a triumph of hipster revisionism, but that’s probably sour grapes -- the needle on my record player is broken.

The Charity Crowe Birthday Show at the Double Happiness club in the Brewery District turned out to be one awfully sweet way of kicking winter in the shins on its way out. Mammy, wotta night!
  A rainy-ass Friday night it was, the thirteenth as it were, and unlucky it wasn't. Well, maybe for the two lone singer/songwriters opening.
  Not sure of their names but I don't mind protecting the guilty. A twenty-something lad in jeans, jean jacket and hat strongly strumming a well-tuned guitar was the first of the night. He seemed to be on a futile quest his entire set to find the right key for his voice. Dylan based a career on this. So he went, singing and searching, ultimately crafting his own 'key of me,' the verses were OK but the choruses proved a vocal bridge too far. Not a song didn't he go off the rails when it came to the money lines. Ah, well. Dylan's done alright. I can't stand him sometimes but I love him.

By the time I leave Kentucky's federal prison center, where I'm an inmate with a 3 month sentence, the world's 12th-largest city may be without water. Estimates put the water reserve of Sao Paulo, a city of 20 million people, at sixty days. Sporadic outages have already begun, the wealthy are pooling money to receive water in tankers, and government officials are heard discussing weekly five-day shutoffs of the water supply, and the possibility of warning residents to flee.

“I wanna be ready . . .”

And suddenly the glass case shattered. You know the one, perhaps. I’d been agitated by it for the past hour or so, sitting as I was maybe 25 rows back from the stage at Chicago’s ornate Auditorium Theater, watching the Alvin Ailey troupe dance their hearts out, moving their bodies with such lithe precision and grace.

A huge hunger, a wanting, a hope stirred in the cage inside my breast. “Appreciating” a “performance” wasn’t enough. Oh God. This great inner wanting yearned for a freedom we don’t much talk about these days, in our relative affluence and comfort, but the music and the movement of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, with its roots in Africa, in Gospel revival — in growing up black in America — went so much deeper than that. I didn’t want to feel separated from the dancers, some disengaged spectator watching fine art in motion behind the glass case of culture. That felt so wrong.

<i>Gena Smith is a combat veteran of Iraq, and suffers from both PTSD and MST (Military Sexual Trauma). She’s a veteran advocate who volunteers for VETWOW, Veteran Women Organizing Women, which has over 3,000 members and nearly all are victims of MST. As the war on terror pushes through a second decade, it’s becoming tragically clear that for many veterans, the only way to deal with MST or combat PTSD is suicide.</i>