S2 Ep014 Music as Civic Space: with Sarah Craig, Executive Director of Caffe Lena, Pt2
Can a music venue create space for civic life? Sarah Craig, Executive Director of Caffe Lena, the famous historic live music listening room, shares her insights and experiences about:
What music contributes to health, even if we don’t fully understand why;
The special capacity of music to effect change, and why folk music has a particular relationship to this potential;
Her conclusion that civic engagement was a natural part of Caffe Lena’s work;
The brilliant community-oriented programs that Caffe Lena has developed to fulfill their mission as a non-profit music organization.
“Folk music sings about and is the music of a lot of social movements. It's certainly associated with the Civil Rights Movement… so there's always been an overlap between peace and justice and folk music. I was thinking about, we sing these traditional ballads… but you know what, this is real. These are actually people's lives and how does that live in our world today? Who are these people that we are singing about?
And I had a wonderful opportunity to work with a partner, In Our Name initiative, they were mostly focused on mass incarceration and things like solitary confinement, and prisons, and bail reform laws that were being looked at in New York State. And I was like, these are the people of the ballads. These people. And so let's put these voices on stage, real lived experience, because these are stories that we need to hear as a community… and really tangle with this as a real world problem.” -Sarah Craig
Transcript
Season 2, Episode 14 (Part 2) : Music as a Civic Space: with Sarah Craig, Executive Director of Caffe Lena
Sarah Craig, Executive Director of Caffe Lena:
Folk music sings about and is the music of a lot of social movements. It's certainly associated with the Civil Rights Movement… so there's always been an overlap between peace and justice and folk music. I was thinking about, we sing these traditional ballads… but you know what, this is real. These are actually people's lives and how does that live in our world today? Who are these people that we are singing about? And I had a wonderful opportunity to work with a partner, In Our Name initiative, they were mostly focused on mass incarceration and things like solitary confinement, and prisons, and bail reform laws that were being looked at in New York State. And I was like, these are the people of the ballads. These people. And so let's put these voices on stage, real lived experience, because these are stories that we need to hear as a community… and really tangle with this as a real world problem.
[Rhythmic sounds of electric train pulling into station]
[Subway chimes arpeggio played on mandolin]
Cevan Castle, Host:
This is “Towards a Kinderpublic,” a podcast exploring issues in public space, and ways to achieve a kinder public space that better meets our interconnected needs. I’m Cevan Castle, and along with Annie Chen, we are Kinderpublic.
My guest today is Sarah Craig, Executive Director of Caffe Lena, the famous live music listening room in Saratoga Springs, New York.
In this episode, Sarah will share her thoughts about the special capacity of music to effect change- whether that is physical or social change- and why folk music has a particular relationship to this potential.
In addition to being a historic music venue, Caffe Lena is a non-profit that has made a strong commitment to the health of the community, which it activates through an incredible and varied set of outreach programs. Sarah will speak about some of those programs and the intersections between being a platform for live music and a partner for strengthened connections within the community.
And while Caffe Lena is the oldest continuously operating folk music listening room, a recent major renovation and investment in technology has given this venue broadcast and streaming capabilities that allow anyone to be present for the intimate music performances that are the signature of the iconic venue. We’ll hear more about caffelena.tv and remote concert attendance, as well as the way that Caffe Lena has put their broadcasting equipment to work on sharing important civic information.
At the end of this episode, enjoy listening to a tune from a recent live performance by Dan Berggren, and Oona Grady and James Gascoyne of Drank the Gold, playing the Tennessee Mountain Fox Chase for the Folk Club Kids- a weekly livestreamed event that you’ll hear mentioned in this episode.
We are really grateful now to be able to share this amazing conversation with Sarah Craig and hope that you find within it some new connections and supportive ideas.
[Subway chimes arpeggio played on mandolin]
Cevan:
Music seems to have the ability to create an enveloped space or environment that functions differently with respect to the boundaries of our personal knowledge, body abilities, and political beliefs. Can you talk about live music as an art form? What is special about music and is there something about folk music, which in traditional interpretations, relies so much on the practice of memory and person to person relationships that gives it particular strength?
Sarah Craig:
I will start my attempt to answer this question <laugh> by saying there are people who get PhDs in this, and I'm not that guy. I mean, I think that many people have explored the power of music from many different angles, but I can definitely speak to it a little bit. One of my favorite books is a book called This Is Your Brain on Music. And it talks about some of that kind of chemical level, you know, synapse level reaction that the brain has to music and what it does to the whole body, what it does to mood, what it does to memory.
And it's a fascinating book that's very validating because I hear these stories all the time from customers. I see it every night that we open. I see people come in kind of harried, you know, trying to find their tickets on their phones, which they don't even need to do, you know, hoping they're gonna be able to find their friends that they agreed to meet here.
Kind of just, you know, in that hubbub of life that people are so caught up in all the time. And then when I see them leaving, I see them with this sort of radiant look on their faces. And I think what's happening is that they're just reclaiming something of their humanity, you know, by listening to live music in a space with other people and sharing that experience.
And I've heard very specific stories from customers, a couple of them have really stuck with me. There was a woman who talked about her husband, he has Parkinson's disease and he was not quite in a wheelchair yet, but having a really hard time getting around. But they would put on The Rite of Spring, which is a piece of classical music, and when he would hear that he would just be able to move his body in a whole different way. He would be able to, he would just kind of dance, he would just move his limbs and, you know, turn in circles, and just allow his body to just, you know, rest on the currents of music in a way that he couldn't when the music was not playing.
Just this past weekend, one of my dear friends and a very long time musician here, Jim Gaudet, stood up on stage at Proctor's Theater and received an award. He told us a story that 14 years ago he was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease and the doctors told him at the time that it would be about five years before, as they said, ‘the wheels would come off,’ and his musical career would no longer be possible. That was 14 years ago. He's nine years past that now, and he's still playing sold out shows, and making incredible music, playing beautifully, singing. When he is not on stage, it is difficult, the tremors are significant. When he is making music, it's just different.
I saw another one of our musicians, Eric Lowen, who had Lou Gehrig's disease, who just continued past all odds to continue making music and, you know, being able to be steady within the songs. So, I see those kinds of physical effects of music. I see the spiritual effects of it. I know that it's powerful.
Folk music in particular is participatory and storytelling in its form. And so, I think that it holds our stories and memories in it in a very specific way. It binds communities together. Different communities have their songs. And I've become very interested in how we move from singing ballads to interrogating who the people are that we are singing about in the world today.
And so, you know, folk music always down through the centuries, has sung of prisoners and slaves and the poor outsiders and the brokenhearted, it's also sung about the world changers and, you know, the people who beat their swords into plowshares and led people in the streets and into the halls of power to liberate and to make things more fair and to stop wars. And it's also the music that leads people into battle, and that celebrates the fallen. So, it starts wars and it stops wars.
And I think that makes me feel that it is just, people express themselves musically. It's part of what our animal is. I think it's fundamental to the human experience.
Cevan:
Mm-hmm. Hmm. Thanks for sharing that.
Sarah Craig:
Yeah. So, one of my favorite books is Station Eleven. I don't know if you've ever read that novel, but it's a wonderful novel. And in it, it shows essentially a post-apocalyptic world. It was a pandemic that swept through, and in that case, it took the lives of almost everyone overnight. And there are just a few people left, but there are members of an orchestra who have found each other and they have their instruments, and they load them into the back of a pickup truck. They've removed the engine from the pickup truck, it's pulled by horses, and they go from all these little kind of community outposts that have popped up, you know, throughout the landscape of the survivors. And they play music and put on Shakespeare plays. And it's just this band of artists.
And so when the pandemic hit, it happened to be during our 60th anniversary year. And so, I was like, how are we going to celebrate? Because we'd had all of these celebrations planned at such a milestone, we're so proud of it, and the whole community's proud of it. So we talked to the construction company that had done all the work on our building here, Bonacio Construction, and asked if they would provide some flatbed trucks for bands to get on the back of them and to just sort of circle around downtown. And I was like, they're not being pulled by horses. We still have gasoline, but <laugh> that was sort of my nod to this concept that no matter what the music will survive.
Cevan:
Mm-hmm. <affirmative> Right. <laugh>
So you were diversifying the programming and expanding beyond the walls - I hadn't imagined the truck story, but <laughing> - yes, really expanding beyond the walls of the Caffe, by streaming performances and events. Did you begin streaming during COVID? What is Caffe Lena TV and why are you building a broadcasting platform in continuing to stream shows?
Sarah Craig:
Sure. <laugh>, that's a great question. So actually, we started streaming in 2012 when a couple of recent graduates from Harvard got in touch and said that they'd started this thing called Concert Window. And they would give us a camera that we could put in our room and we could attach it to the internet, and people would be able to watch our shows from other places in real time. And, uh, we thought at first, hmm, then why would people come here if they can just watch it from somewhere else? And then we started to think, but if people can watch it from anywhere, then what about all those people who used to live in Saratoga and moved away, or people who don't have a, a wonderful venue like ours in their town and wouldn't otherwise have access to music, or people who've gotten too old to come here, don't want to drive at night, can't manage the stairs [before renovation].
And we decided to give it a try. And it was really fun. We would get a whopping like maybe 10 people a night watching, you know, not very many, but it was a little community. It was another little community that existed online. When we did the renovation, we decided to invest more seriously in the streaming. And one of the reasons was because I had a conversation with Arlo Guthrie and told him what our plans were to renovate the cafe, and, you know, we'd be going to about 110 seats, and what did he think of the whole thing? And he said, what you do is wonderful, but it's only ever going to go just so far because what can you do with that many seats? It’s so limited. If there were a way to get your shows out beyond the four walls, I think, you know, you would find there was interest out there.
So we decided to invest more heavily in the streaming system, and instead of just having one camera mounted on a little stand at the back of the room, we had three cameras that were operated by a dedicated technician from a separate space. There's sound mixing that could be done specifically for the broadcast, and it sort of becomes a really nice product, with moving shots and, you know, a little bit more dynamic.
Well, then when the pandemic came along, and on Day One, as we were all getting ready to shut down, one of my board members said jokingly, well, if you can't have anybody in the space, just put a band up there and just stream it. And that sounds so obvious now, but at the time it sounded like a big joke. And then we thought, no, wait, that's exactly what we'll do. That's what we'll do.
And, you'll appreciate this, the very first people who played were Oona and James. They had a children's show planned for a Sunday or Saturday afternoon, I think it was. And, we had a certain number of people signed up to come to the children's show. We let them know and said, tell your friends and we'll be live streaming it.
So I remember some, some parents were saying in the live chat, oh, we're just going stir crazy! The kids have been home for a whole week and we just, you know, everybody's going crazy and they love watching this show, and they're dancing around the room, and this is just so wonderful.
And we had 140 households tuned in, and I just told you, like, we used to have a good night would be like 10. And so we're like, oh my goodness, this really is something that's going to be helpful to people. So not only were people able to watch the shows, and that was really nice for all the people to feel like they were connected through this live streaming experience, but they were tipping unbelievably generously into this virtual tip jar. And over the course of the shutdown, they ended up generating more than a hundred thousand dollars in income for local regional musicians who were able to come here.
Cevan:
Wow!
Sarah Craig:
The state of New York allowed us, under the emergency, to be re-designated from a live performance space to a broadcast studio, which enabled us to be an essential business. So even during the darkest days of the shutdown, when, you know, we could only have, most businesses could only have one person in the building at a time, we were allowed to bring in a band.
It was like hospital level sanitation. Nobody was vaccinated, you know, but we would have bands up there on stage, and just the barest minimum of tech support. The bands were considered to be essential workers legally. So they could, they could come out of their houses and come do this work. And, it was really remarkable. And things happened, like, Freihoffer’s Jazz Fest wanted to have some semblance of a jazz fest and came to us to put shows on our stage to broadcast out through our streaming equipment.
So there's just like no end to how that streaming system ended up being used. It was just fortuitous. It wasn't a plan. People always say, oh, you had so much foresight. Like, no, we didn't. We just bungled our way into it, and it happened to work out great. But that's the beauty of being small. You know, you can take chances, you can be nimble, you can respond quickly to things. It's not this big cumbersome bureaucracy. You can just roll up your sleeves and decide to do something.
So why do we keep doing it now? Because we grew such a huge community out there and we don't want to let them down. It definitely costs us more than it brings in, so that's a little bit tough. And we would love to, you know, change the economics of it, and make it at least break even. I do think, though, that there are people who will never come back for in-person live music, who will just want to watch it online now, their health has changed, their attitudes have changed about what it feels like to be in a group of people, and it's just a way to keep the music out there as much as possible.
Cevan:
What is “Caffe Lena on the Road” ?
Sarah Craig:
Oh, that is such a great program. <laugh> So, we started that in 2018. I finally found somebody who was willing to give us the money to do it, and he gave it with such joy, he really saw the beauty of this vision. So, there are two needs that we're serving with Caffe Lena on the road. It essentially consists of taking our headline bands and putting them out into the community to play in unconventional places where people would not otherwise have access to live music. That's the concept.
It does two things. One, it does give people all of that healing and magical experience of live music, people who need it more than anyone else. Like, people who are homeless, people who are going through terrible health problems, people who are very elderly and nearing the end of their lives, people who are caring for shut-ins at home, you know, families who are doing all the caregiving. There are recovery groups, you know, drug and alcohol recovery groups that we go out and play for. There's a youth shelter and there's a school for teenage girls who have, you know, been through all kinds of mental and emotional and often substance abuse problems. So, it puts music into those places, and the impact of it is profound.
And it also gives work to our musicians at a time when they usually have downtime during the week. So, you know, it's easy to get- not easy, it's hard as hell- but, you can get gigs on weekends, but it's really hard to fill those midweek dates. And bands are always looking for opportunities to play midweek, to try and make the economics of a tour work better. And so we're able to take advantage of their downtime and give them some really meaningful and fulfilling work to do.
A lot of musicians are, you know, unofficial therapists and healers, there's no doubt about it. Many of them have been through substance abuse themselves, that's rampant in the music community. A lot of them have faced, uh, have developed music as a response to psychological struggles or traumas that they've been through. So they are very compassionate, caring people, and many of them quite experienced at playing music in a therapeutic kind of way. And love to teach what they know, love to share what they know. So that's what Caffe Lena on the Road is. It's just a chance to take that untapped capacity that our musicians have, give them a little extra income, and do something pretty wonderful for the community. I <laugh>, as word gets out about it among musicians and booking agents, we definitely have more requests to participate than we can accommodate. So it's just a matter of finding as much money for it as we can. I think it could be its own organization, frankly.
Cevan:
Hmm. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, that's interesting too about filling up that middle of the week moment between, you know, engagements.
Sarah Craig:
Yeah. There are a lot of local musicians who make a little bit of extra money playing at nursing homes or have created wonderful educational programs for the public schools. So definitely there are local musicians who do that. But our particular agenda was to give midweek work to artists who are out on national tours.
So… the level of music! <laughing> I mean, we've had like Grammy nominees going and playing for the soup kitchen. I mean, and they love it and they're wonderful. It's really exciting.
Cevan:
That's really meaningful.
Sarah Craig:
Yeah.
Cevan:
That's great. And another initiative that you have, what is the School of Music and why did you turn towards teaching the music?
Sarah Craig:
Oh, the School of Music. So, we've already discussed that Caffe Lena is a non-profit organization. So we have a mission that goes beyond just putting on great shows. We are very invested in the continuation of this musical tradition, and the musical tradition, not just playing and, you know, knowing a body of songs, but the way that music lives in community is part of our tradition.
So part of it is to carry that on very intentionally. Another part of it is that there's a lot of concern in, you know, in classical music and in folk music, about an aging audience. And, particularly at Caffe Lena in the sixties and seventies, it was a lot of young families. And, you know, all the time on weekends, I'm hearing from somebody who's, you know, my age now, in their mid fifties, who said, oh yeah, I used to come with my parents all the time when I was little. I would fall asleep in Lena's lap and, you know, I would fall asleep under the table. And I was like, I just want that back again. Because, I want 50 years from now the children of today to be telling those stories to whoever is standing at the top of the stairs here.
And so, the School of Music was partly to find a way to bring more young families in and to reinvigorate that practice of having music be part of family life with, you know, parents playing with kids, and people playing music with real instruments around their households and singing together.
And that is not going to come from any place other than venues like Caffe Lena. You know, somebody has to care about that and decide to keep that tradition alive, because Nintendo is not going to do it, and Live Nation is not going to do it, and the big record companies aren't going to do it, you know, it needs to come from the grass roots.
And so that's why we decided to start the School of Music. We launched it March 10th, 2020, which was not the right week to be launching a school of music. But, our School of Music Director, Vivian, in collaboration with the staff here, quickly created a Zoom option, everybody was hearing about Zoom for the first time, but created a Zoom option for the children who had registered. And, the families decided to go along with that. And it really ended up being pretty wonderful, as an activity that really helped create something fun and in a bright spot in the days of, you know, families who were pretty cooped up during that year.
As soon as we could though, we came in person, because that's really what our intention was for the kids, was to have them in a circle in the middle of our performance space, playing music together. And they learn to play by ear. They learn some traditional songs. They sing together. They come in planning to play fiddle and end up seeing the ukulele and decide they want to do that instead. And so, they know fiddle and ukulele. Oh, then the guitar starts to look pretty fun too. And they play all kinds of instruments and they show each other what they've figured out. And it is a beautiful thing that has now spread to adults. And, we have groups of senior citizens coming in and learning to jam together. And I can't wait until we can get the kids and the old folks in a band together making music. That's the next step. <laugh>
Cevan:
<laugh> That's great. I love that the program is so exploratory, too, the way you talk about people moving from instrument to instrument. It's very satisfying that way.
Sarah Craig:
It's natural, yeah.
Cevan:
It’s very social, too.
Sarah Craig:
Yes!
Cevan:
Which is so wonderful.
Sarah Craig:
That’s really… I mean, our idea of success is that a child is having fun, is wanting to sing the songs when they go home, or play their instrument when they go home, that they made some new friends. If they decide to dedicate themselves to, you know, a career in music, well, you know, maybe some of them will, and that's a great thing. But that's not our goal. Our goal is simply that joy of holding an instrument and doing something creative and making friends through that process.
Cevan:
I think what's interesting too, is- as an adult who had a child enrolled in the program- that was the closest I had been to an instrument in a while. And it felt very different from, for instance, the sort of more isolated lessons and school play. It was, like you said, it was living in our house and it was shared. And I think the way that the music was learned, it was something that the child felt was easy to pass on, you know, and, and it just had a different, um, a different feeling to it. And, I did end up joining a class as well, which was so great. So I thank you so much for <laugh>, for including adults, because it was, um, an important thing to lean on. And I realized I miss music in my life as a one way of, you know, processing my day.
Sarah Craig:
Actually, my New Year's resolution last year, after seeing all of these people come in and starting to learn how to play instruments, I was like, okay, Sarah, admit it. You don't know how to play a single chord on a guitar. You're gonna need to learn at least four chords. That was my rule. And so I'm like, oh, but it's so hard. And I started doing it. And that feeling of holding the instrument against your body and feeling that vibration, it's almost like holding a baby or something. It's just really, it goes all through you. It's really wonderful. Yeah. Instruments that you hold close to you are different than, like, a piano, which is out there, you know?
Cevan:
Mm-hmm. <affirmative> That's a really good point. Yes. Yes. It is different. It's really great. And I didn't realize I missed it, but then, I was happily reunited. <laugh>
Sarah Craig:
<laugh> That's wonderful. I'm so happy about that.
Cevan:
One of the things that I noticed about Caffe Lena is the amount of community connection, which we just touched on right now, but the amount of community connection in this organization. It's not an insular art space that concentrates solely on art. There's a lot of ongoing involvement in the surrounding community, and in issues that might seem outside of the concerns of a performance space. You also have interesting partnerships that show the fluency of Caffe Lena in many different fields, including civic engagement.
I attended one community event, the opening night for the Little Free Library at your front entrance, which is dedicated to frequently banned books. I was really impressed at the partnerships on that library installation, which included the League of Women Voters, I believe, and more.
The free exchange of ideas and intention to support a diverse community is clear. Caffe Lena also seems to be deeply knowledgeable about the ‘how’ of civic life. What is the changing role of Caffe Lena in the community? And I'm especially interested to learn more about The Art of Community: The Impact Sector Gatherings. What are The Art of Community gatherings and how did you come to have this initiative? <laugh>
Sarah Craig:
I'm so glad that you asked about this. And, I agree that this is an unusual kind of track for an organization known for putting on concerts. It's unusual for us to go in this direction. All of this initiative started before the pandemic, but I think became, to my way of thinking, inextricably linked with our purpose for being here, as a result of what I saw happen during the pandemic. What I would say is, the way I understood all of this at first, was something I already talked about a little bit, which is that folk music sings about and is the music of a lot of social movements. It's certainly associated with the Civil Rights Movement. And, a lot of people know those songs, “Down by the Riverside,” and all kinds of songs that just live in our culture as a result of social movement.
So there's always been an overlap between peace and justice and folk music. And that's kind of where I started with it. And then I was thinking about, you know, we sing these traditional ballads, maybe it's a girl who, you know, got pregnant and her lover threw her in the river, you know, to take care of the problem. And, you know, there's all kinds of folk songs about that. I'm like, but you know what, this is real. These are actually people's lives and how does that live in our world today? Who are these people that we are singing about? What are they doing now? What do they look like? What do they sound like? And I had a wonderful opportunity to work with a partner, In Our Name initiative, they were mostly focused on mass incarceration and things like solitary confinement, and prisons and bail reform laws that were being looked at in New York State.
And I was like, these are the people of the ballads, these people. And so let's, let's put these voices on stage, real lived experience, because these are stories that we need to hear as a community, not just sing about them as an art form that, you know, feels like a fantasy, but really tangle with this as a real world problem. And so, that's how it started.
And then during the pandemic, during the shutdown, we were just, you know, we had time on our hands and we wanted to stay as busy as possible and put our space to use as much as we could because we had this, you know, blessing from New York to be able to be in here and do stuff. And, all of our nonprofit partners around town were very isolated and unable to be in their spaces and couldn't do their annual fundraising event and couldn't do a lot of the things that their followers supported them for, and so we wanted to put them on stage and say, how can we help? How can the community help? What are you up to? How are you being useful now?
And so we just started to sort of tease out some of the stories of what was going on. Oh my goodness. And we put on so many benefits for people. We had an organization called Beyond My Battle, which is essentially a support organization for people who have chronic illnesses that they're not going to get over. And, how do they have the best possible quality of life while dealing with that challenge. And one of their sort of therapeutic activities that they do is make paintings.
And so, we had a couple of people from the organization bring in- collect paintings- that people had just made and bring them in to the Caffe. We were able to train the cameras on them and share artist statements and have the people talk about the paintings. And it was like this quiet, holy kind of moment, with everybody watching from home, and feeling like they were with their community again. And for all kinds of people who were just tuning into Caffe Lena all the time, like, there was hundreds of people at that point because people were so cooped up, discovering this organization, watching the creativity of people who were hidden away in their homes.
What we learned through that, and through all of our Caffe Lena on the Road stuff, is that there are so many groups of people out there who are contributing in some way to making this a healthier world, a healthier community.
And that is what Caffe Lena is doing too.
It's making it a healthier community by creating these performances. And it's not like the social services are over there, and the political groups are over there, and the arts groups are over here. We're all on the same team trying to create a healthier community. So, that's what Art of Community is all about. It's like, let's get all of these people in the same room once a month to learn from each other, support one another, and share what we've figured out.
So, how that works is each month I tap the executive director- usually the executive director- of a nonprofit organization. This last month was Therapeutic Horses of Saratoga. I've done an organization that serves homeless youth. We've had the director of the senior center, just like people doing all kinds of work in the community. And I asked them about their lives, and what they know, and what they've figured out, and what their challenges are, and what they struggle with, and how they learn, and how they keep themselves inspired, all of that. So, everybody has figured something out.
And sometimes, I don't catch the lesson in that half hour conversation. Sometimes it's a week later something comes across and their voice comes back to me and I remember what they said, and we've learned so much from each other. And then, so we talk, have a formal conversation for a half hour, and then we break out and just have coffee and eat cookies for a half hour. And it has completely changed my landscape in Saratoga. I can go to any gathering now, and I know all kinds of people there. Not because I read that they were making some pitch down at City Hall to try and get their program funded, but because I really know who they are, and what inspires them, and why they do this work, and what their hopes are for our community. And I really love that program. It's a monthly program and everybody's welcome. Whether you make a donation to a nonprofit or volunteer at a nonprofit or work at a nonprofit. Everybody's welcome. It’s the last Tuesday of every month. Every Tuesday afternoon, um, from four to five o'clock. Mm-hmm. Free coffee if nothing else. <laugh>
Cevan:
Sounds a little bit like your kitchen <laugh> your kitchen conversations. <laugh>
How can listeners find you online, view performances, and support Caffe Lena and your important work?
Sarah Craig:
Well, thank you for asking <laugh>. So, our website is caffelena.org, and Caffe is spelled the Italian way with a double f, so it’s caffelena.org, is our main website. And that's a good jumping off point to find out what's going on here, buy tickets, learn a little bit more about our stories, sign up for a class, do all kinds of things like that.
From there, you can also find the live streams, or you can go directly to our live streaming platform, which is a separate website, caffelena.tv. So instead of dot org or dot com, it's TV. Caffelena.tv. And it's very easy to watch all of the shows from there. It generally costs about $5 to watch a show, and all of that money goes directly to the musician. If you want to subscribe to the service, then that subscription, which is $10 a month, supports Caffe Lena, and we greatly appreciate that.
You can become a volunteer here. That's a wonderful way to be involved. We need about five to seven volunteers for every program that we do. And we do about 400 shows a year, and then many other kinds of things happen in this space besides that.
So, you can get involved in a jam class in the afternoon and just come to open mic. There are many, many ways to get involved, but we're right downtown in Saratoga Springs, 47 Phila Street. We'd love to meet you.
Cevan:
Just gotta get up the stairs and find that wonderful cozy spot. <laugh>
Sarah Craig:
Yep. Overcome it. We have an elevator if you're not comfortable with the stairs. That's a new edition since the renovation. We have a beautiful stairwell lined with all kinds of new and historic photos, and it's a really neat spot to visit, so poke your head in during the day if you're just in the neighborhood, or come for a show at night.
Cevan:
Thank you so much for sharing all of this. It's such a wonderful place, and it's so interesting to talk to you and hear all of these ideas behind the programming. It's so special.
Sarah Craig:
I'm so happy to have had the chance, you got to all kinds of things I've never had a chance to talk about, so I really appreciate that.
Cevan:
Thank you so much.
Sarah Craig:
All right. Good luck with your work, and I'm sure I'll see you very soon.
[Excerpt from Folk Club Kids event at Caffe Lena fades into background, sound of tuning note played on instrument]
Oona Grady: Should we go kinda fast?
James Gascoyne: Yeah, fast!
[Sound of foot tapping the count of the music]
Oona Grady: One, two, ready, go…
[Dan Berggren, Oona Grady, and James Gascoyne play Tennessee Mountain Fox Chase]
Cevan:
Links to more information about our guest and the topics mentioned, as well as a full transcript of the conversation, are available on the podcast section of our website, kinderpublic.com.
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I’m Cevan Castle, our guest has been Sarah Craig, Executive Director of Caffe Lena. Here is the Tennessee Mountain Fox Chase played by Dan Berggren, Oona Grady, and James Gascoyne live from Caffe Lena’s weekly Folk Club Kids livestream. Have a very good week!
[Music ends]
Oona Grady: That was exciting!
Dan Berggren: That was so much fun I wanted to play it over and over and over.