When: Monday nite 6/8 7:30pm ET

Where: https://youtube.com/live/M1SFU4uGjkc?feature=share

10% to: Arlington Youth Counseling Center https://www.ayccma.org/donate

http://paypal.me/vancevancevance or https://venmo.com/vancevancevance or VanceFunder P.O. Box 17, Arlington, MA 02476

*PRIVATE COACHING AVAILABLE - Songwriting, performance, and voice.

***CUSTOM SONGS - Expensive, sure, you want one about you, your family, something.

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HOW DO YOU LOVE PART 1 & 2, & THE ANSWER

PART - 1 - You were a brilliant craftsman. However, you openly stood for the idea that the demise of brown folks somewhere was Biblically pre-ordained. You died. Now that you are no more, I‘m tasked for heeding my own song Old White Men and finding a way to unconditionally love you. I am to put the Christian and Buddhist doctrines of love above anything else as triumphant in my relationship and memory of you. OK.

PART - 2 - A young person I love and respect recounts something from a show 6 months earlier. I made fun of my own pronunciation of a video engineer’s name, butchering it over and over until I said “OK whatever”. Someone sitting in front of them saw the exchange as unfunny, even as it was seen funny to both the engineer and the house. They underbreathed something to the the effect that I was insulting, and left. What gets me is not their resolute departure, but this young friend’s, “I’m telling you what went down with love...” Of all I did at that show - the songs of ally-ship, love, illumination of the marginalized - this is what they remember to me. Thanks for the memories.

ANSWER TO AND FOR ME - Pay attention, Vance, but pay no more than that. Be cognizant and yet be gentle with yourself. Don’t wear the shamecoat of stray droplets when you’re painting the wall of love. Poke, prod, walk that thin line of humor and hurt, continue to open your arms of love while you shining the light on shite, but don’t fold up and die at the instant replay played on loop because someone misunderstood the transitions from one wall to the other. Like with the departed in Part 1, it’s a big garden of love and you can pick out the good that works. Like a new song of mine says:

It’s a world full of lemons
It’ll let you down
But you Mamma din’t raise no
Give up quitter, now did she?
She’d say,"Tighten up your laces
Straighten out your crown
When everything’s backwards
And upside down
How do you expect to rule this town?”

Carefully. But not too carefully.