It's Feel Good Friday. Zippity! Five items below of beauty, interest, and humor. As Carrie sings in the blog title song, "I can hear the heartbeat in everything around me". I hope you can, too... :-)
~ One Bright Thing: Need a little lift? Amid the bleakness, 18 New York Times writers shared moments that lightened their mood (be sure to scroll past the jump to read them all.)
~ QuaranToons: Broadway.com illustrator Tug Rice has been thinking up what our favorite Broadway characters are doing while theaters are closed and they're at home social distancing.
~ Coconut Macaroons, Two Easy Ways: I am not a baker, so I am shouting this recipe from the virtual rooftops. (I used JustEgg to veganize it, and added cinnamon and a splash of vanilla. Easy-peasy, and so yum!)
~ ElizaLive! Songs of Comfort and Consolation, Friday April 17th, live from Eliza's Living Room via Facebook @ 5:30 pm Central.
From Eliza: Dear Friends, it has been disappointing to not be able to tour my new record “2020” when it was designed to motivate and inspire during a critical election year. But the Coronavirus puts things in a whole other perspective. And while I remain focused on making sure we can and will be able to vote come November, I also want to perform music for my friends as a way of reaching out and staying connected in a more communal way. We need to stay sane, grounded and hopeful, aware of each other and our vulnerabilities as well as our strengths... Someday we will gather in person again and we will speak of this time in our lives as the challenging and deepening process it has been. I look forward to that with all my heart.
~ Help Luna Star Cafe Survive the Coronavirus
When Luna Star Cafe is closed there isn't any trade.
No one’s sitting at the bar, no music’s being made.
No one’s drinking any beer or ordering from ‘the board’.
No one’s tipping Monica who’s much loved and adored.
No one’s there with any cash, no one’s there at all,
Now Alexis’s cafe bank account is seriously small!
So send in your donations. Help Luna Star Café!
If you live in another state, send something anyway!
Imagine you drank a beer or two and paid the cover charge.
Imagine you ate a pasta dish served on that plate so large.
It’s easy to thank Alexis with applause and words of praise
Now let's thank her with with donations till the VIRUS goes away!
SONG: New Mexico by Carrie Elkin
BOOK: Journey to the Heart: Daily Meditations on the Path to Freeing Your Soul by Melody Beattie
POEM: Heart by Maggie Smith
A child of, say, six knows you’re not the shape
she’s learned to make by drawing half along a fold,
cutting, then opening. Where do you open?
Where do you carry your dead? There’s no locket
for that—hinged, hanging on a chain that greens
your throat. And the dead inside you, don’t you
hear them breathing? You must have a hole
they can press their gray lips to. If you open—
when you open—will we find them folded inside?
In what shape? I mean what cut shape is made
whole by opening? I mean besides the heart.
QUOTE: "A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened." ~ Albert Camus
