For Mimi with love: Mimi Fariña on Books

LOCAL HEROES - THE REBIRTH OF HEROISM IN AMERICA

by Bill Berkowitz

Interview from the book:

Local Heroes
The Rebirth of Heroism in America
BILL BERKOWITZ

This is my favorite interview (so far) and i wish it would never end because i would devour a one thousand page book of it very efforthlessly. I laughed a lot, i tought "i am so like this", "and like this", and the "i don't give a damn, i just want people happy" made me really happy as well.

I believe this is a 1984 interview since it mentions Solo was released a year later.

Photo from 1985

You find yourself talking to your children about what you could have done. Than in itself should be enough to kick you into action.

You can script your calls to movie theaters, as Ellen Cassedy did, yet later on bring corporations to their knees. You can sit all day with your dolls upstairs, yet carry the fight at Love Canal. There aren't contradictions, we ought now to realize, but aspects of the same personality. They seem incongruous, but incongruity suprs change. If them, and maybe change them, by taking action in the world.

Mimi Fariña brings this point home again. She started Bread & Roses, which brings free professional entertainment to institutions, hospitals, prisons, convalescent homes, and others - mostly in Marin County, north of San Francisco. She's candid about what were her own insecurities; the direct connection between them and her community work is clearly stated. Once more, inner conflict brings out best performance.

There's more, of course. Mimi Fariña is a folksinger, and folksingers are supposed to have a social conscience. She gre up in a politically aware family; that's also a factor. Yet it's one thing to put some energy into a cause, and quite another to create an organization that emergy into a cause, and quite another to create an organization that delivers dozens of free institutional shows each month, to stay on top of it for more than ten years, and to subordinate your own singing career in the process. So we keep looking for underlying sources of action.

Mimi Fariña has quick humor and a big laugh, and you sense that the structure of the Bread & Roses office holds her antic self in check. (She's been an actress in an improvisational comedy troupe.) And she's into the structure right now, in earnest: she talks at lenght about boards of directors, leadership styles, and job descriptions - this even thogh Bread & Roses had hung on for many years, if somewhat shakily, with not much structure (or planning) to speak of. There are questions, which surface in the interview, about whether the tighter structure is a sign of organizational maturity, as Ray Shonholtz suggests, and whether there's a spiritual price to pay. Mimi has ambivalence.

The office itself seems pretty serious. Fund-raising is still a dominating issue. The tenth anniversary banquet is coming up, and invitations are being mailed out - the kind with enveopes within envelopes as in weddings. It's one hundred dollars a plate, which is serious money, and they're running behind schedule. Lunch is friendly and short.

Mimi doesn't go home at 5:00 (though sometimes she's away on tour.) She's single, perhaps with fewer outside agendas, to use her phrase. She has a stiff neck from pushing herself, and she's going to a masseur. She returns phone calls herself, and handwrites her own thank-you notes.

When Bread & Roses started, it was a great place for me to have a scheduled time off the road. When you travel, and when the plane arrives in San Francisco, and I go home - then there's empty space, and how to deal with that for me was always very threatening. And I think it is generally, for people, it's a time when i suspect people do the most drugs.

So how to organize those weeks and those days always kind of threw me. I mean, I would fall into one kind of emotional depression or another, and be confused as to how to deal with the time. So inventing Bread & Roses gav me a place to be, and gave me a structure when i got home. And it has always reamined that.

I have remained involved for so long because it serves that purporse for me. I don't lose interest in what we do. And the performers in the institutions are a constant reminder to me - to come back and hear music and watch jugglers and see people relate in a way that i wish would happen on stage in the commercial field, it's always kind of a relief, and it reenergizes me.

In the early 1970s, Mimi had a dispute with her record company, eventually leaving it. I had run into antagonistic feelings with the industry and could not for the life of me understand how art and business were supposed to be connected. It just never made sense.

Peple would interview me and talk about "How's your recording career?", and "Are you going to have a hit single?", and "Gee, we love to hear you sing, but we don't hear enough of you on the radio." I was supposed to be veering into a commercial career, but I wasn't as sucessful as I wanted to be, didn't know how to be, didn't want to what we then called sell out, and be as commercial as the record companies wanted. It was always irritating me.

So this opportunity came up, through a cousin of mine who was at the time running a halfway house. He said, "You're in such a state of confusion over your singing, and what you seem to be complaining about most of all is the commercialism. Why don't you try singing somewhere where that doesn't exist and see if you enjoy it?"

So I said, "Yeah, not a bad idea," and did that at this halfway house. It was a...kind of uncomfortable evening, you know, with agitated unconfortable people, mental patients, for lack of a better term. And they kind of half-listened, and they were not very responsive. It wasn't a great sense of joy in the performance. But on leaving, I began to think that is might have meant to be able to perform without the pressure of being in a club and having to impress someone in the audience - just the pressure I wasn't ready for, and was putting myself under.

So this became an idea, and I would talk about it at interviews and answer questions, and the more I talked about it, the more I convinced myself.

I came home from a tour, must have been I think about a year after I had the idea, the seed had been planted. And I was sitting and staring out the window feeling lost, you know, knowing that I had several weeks of nothingness in front of me, and being very aware that it made me feel kind of sick and lost and directionless and meaningless, and I don't have terrific self-esteem to begin with.

So I was in that slump of just arriving home, and I went for the phone, picked it up, and started calling local convalescent homes and said, "I'm a performer, and I'm interested to know if you'd like to have some music brought for no cost..."

And it was...it was a wonderful sensation; the difference between being passive about being depressed and being active about it is a major jump. I knew when I was picking up the phone that that's what I was doing. I'd been in therapy long enough to know that it was "probably the right thing to do at the time (laughts)." And the fact that I was utterly alone and that it simply came to me and I wanted to do it at that moment, all made it feel very much my own...That would have been early '74 - must have been summer, yeah.

Well, the institutions said, "Oh! Sure!" Some of them knew my name and others didn't but it sounded good, and they would turn me on to what they called the "activities coordinator." I had no idea how these places were run. Then my cousin said, "Why don't you go to the volunteer bureau and Marion Kelly knows everything about the county, she'll tell you which places to go visit." In Marin [County]. So I did that, and they were very excited about the idea, and gave me a list, and some hints, you know. So I was mildly prepared.

That week I must have seen ten or so institutions. Those were just visits.

Just to see what they were like, if institutions had stages or platforms or pianos, or equipment, or who was in them and what could I expect to take to those people to be entertaining. I became more and more knowledgeable with each institution. I just kep going, to one after another, and being moved.

And those are still some of the most signigicant moments for me, when I think about why Bread&Roses got underway, I really was not with any education, any background, anyone guiding me in terms of what's supposed to get done. It was really my own. My premise didn't have to be messed with anyone else's idea of what ought to be happening. I didn't have to compare myself to anyone or anything, which is always a problem. So I felt inspired.

My main premise was that people who are isolated and lonely probably would like some music, and joy in their life. Everything I saw verified that I wasn't discussing it with anyone yet, so everything I saw from a very pure solo point of view. I'd see a blind kid sitting in a room with a red sock and a white sock on, listening to the radio, and I'd go home with that image, and it would feed on me. And each institution seemed to leave it's own impression, and kept feeding on - the more I do this, the more I feel involved, and I can't stop. It became a snowball, I couldn't slow down.

So I got my fill of seeing underdogs and little vegetable kids who probably wouldn't live long, and leukemia, and old folks slumping in their wheelchairs. And I started calling friends, three or four fiends I thought of who seemed organizing types, or who had ben involved with sixties political events. And one said, "Oh, you won't believe this, I was just thinking yesteraday I've got to find something to do and I'm really up in the air". And she became the cofounder, and a better girlfriend that she had been before.

I found a place, through my cousin again, a room in Larkspur, and the day we were having the phone but in [my friend] brought her typewriter over. I'd been scribbling ideas down, but Lucie was much more eloquent, had gone to college for one, which I hadn't, and she was interpreting my thoughts in a very appropriate manner. So we were developing a brochure. And that was exciting.

There was no furniture; we were on the floor, sitting here and writing stuff and typing things.* Then after we got phones, we decided to go to the local radio station and ask for volunteer help. I had help from the beginning. We had meetings with a local group called Public Media Center, went over to their place and sat around and brainstormed a lot of ideas aout how this place might be run, essentials like where do we start getting our nonprofit status, what do I need a lawyer for - all the things that wouldn't have occurred to me, 'cause I was not a planner, hadn't grown up in a business world at all.

* Mimi is describing their present Mill Valley office. She and Lucie moved from Larkspur shortly after they began.

I really was never a goal-oriented person, and the lack of education, of college education, made me feel pretty inferior and insecure. So I did need those phone calls to people to say, "Hi, I have the idea, and I don't know what to do with it. And where do I take it next?" I did need to rely on friends.

So the name went from Reach Out to Interchange to lots of things that sounded like highway signs, and then Joanie calls, my sister called, and said she had heard the phrase Bread&Roses on the East Coast, and wasn't it pretty. And I said, "That's real nice." So it was actually her phone call. And I had a dream of some roses and some wheat, and we eventually put that into the logo (laughts).

Then we have to fund-raise. Our first proposal was written by a friend who had just come out of prison for protesting the war, and we started shooping it around. The Sand Francisco Foundation, and smaller foundations - I can't remember if they were in the foundation book or if it was advice through friends, probably both - and approaching them with this proposal that we had. And after a while, people started answering.

And we started off in bars. I said, why don't we as a group learn how to produce concerts by doing local, really small stuff to get the experience of production? So local people would [perform] in bars and restaurants, who would lend us a place; and the bar would take, you know, the liquormoney, and we would take the rest, the door. Then local clubs started letting us come in, very small, maybe three or four of them. We kept doing one after another just to bring in more cash, we had no concept of a budget yet.

It wasn't till '77 that we did benefit concerts. I think our first major event was at the Berkeley Community Theater with Bonnie Raitt and Maria Muldaur and the Gristman Quintet. And that went smoothly. We learned how to take out ads - we did that with [the rock cocnert promoter] Bill Graham. His advide was forget the cause; put the name on the ad, and that's what people are going to come and see. It sounded very crass at first but i'm convinced, however, that he's right.

These [shows] are the fund-raisers for the visits. The visits are going on the whole time. I did the fewest, I must admit. But auditioning performers, and then taking them to different institutions, I guess in the beginning I did a lot. I would sing myself or else I would take somebody, try out different experiments, you know. I'd know an actor who could read poetry, and I'd say, "Let's go try that."

So i was finding a place for myself, and all of that was very satisfying and exciting. It wasn't hard, becuase I was so caught up in the energy of it.

And it really was the first sensation of success that I was feeling, I wasn't somebody's wife or somebody's sister. I had direction in my life, and this was for me.

And people were always asking me along the way, "What are the main problems?", da da da da. And I was either blind to them or they didn't exist. I never saw any. I was in such heaven, just moving so fast, and getting so much support, and doing this work that was turning out to be fun and great. There just weren't any roadblocks; everyone thought it was a great idea.

But that evergy has to dissipate, at some point. The struggles came later, with funding. To sustain what we had created.

Another person might have taken the tack of expressing anger about the institutions themselves, and saying, "These people just can't sit there all day," or suff like hat.

I started out doing that. I remember watching a TV show that I had been interviewed in, saying something about how these poor people sit there all day long, and the nurses don't seem to care. Well, it was a very naive statement, because many of the nurses, and even more so the volunteers, are very caring, and have a horrible job. And you get used to it, you get used to dying bodies and fecal material on the floor, and you get hardened. You're not as a social-worky and lovey-dovey as you may have once intended to be.

I think the institutions need to exist. I think they need to exist. Not forever, perhaps, but the way things are now, if they were suddenly, radically taken away, number one, all the people would simply drop dead. Where would they go?

The prison institutions - the prisons are such a part of some people«s youth - kids from the ghetto are familiar with prison as part ot ehri lives from birth. So it's not such a big deal for some people to go to prisons. They're set up for it from an early age.

My original feeling was, "Locking someone behind bars? (shocked tone), How could you?"; then beginning to get acquainted with inmates, how they respond to life, what they expected out of life in the first place, where they see themselves, how they could possibly integrate back into society, and how terrifying that is. Getting out may be more horrifying than going in for [some] people.

So those things I've learned to consider, where I didn't know them before. I had my charitable missionary point of view, which had very little to do with being there and understand the situation.

You're less of a missionary now?

No. It's just I know more.

I'm sure you've head this before - the Band-Aid criticism, that you're just going in, doing something, going out in two hours, and people go back to their TV sets or whatever they were doing before.

Oddly enough, I don't take that as a criticism...I'm usually very ready to be criticized, and feel belittled. But I have such a firm belief that this is an appropriate thing to do, that there's nothing wrong with it. In the scheme of things, it's a plus all the way around. There aren't any negatives. If I could do some more, I would be doing more, I don't know how right now.

I would like to see us not be just a social service agency. I would love to see us be a social change agency, I don't know how to do that right now. One day I will. And there have been ideas, like the conference on life in institution, for families of people who are institutionalized. There are things we can do when we have the money.

And there's nothing the matter with taking entertainment in and leaving. It's better than what they've got. So it's one step in the right direction. And I have always seen this as a stepping stone for something that's going to happen in the future. I don't know what it is, and I don't have grandiose ideas or visions either.

But would you rather be a social change organization, rather than a social service organization?

No. Not one or another. Both. And who know what that means, anyway? You know, it's a matter of degree. I Think they're both pretty much the same. Social change, from the sixties anyway, implies radical change, rewriting a script somehow and changing the blue print; but I think change is gradual, and takes a lot of forethought and time, and I think we're doing that.

And if it takes ten years to get wealthy rock-and-rollers to think they should come here, because we're a place that can maybe do things having to do with social change and music, then that was then ears well spent, not trying to be too aggressive about changing, but establishing ourselves as credible.

The staff has been like a family - and I've used them for that too much so in the past. I have been aware that this has been my social life, and my family life, and we have changed all that very conciously.

When we started out and were a small collective, we behaved like a family. We would get together over meals and think up ideas and come to decisions and go out and do a benefit. And our dreaming and our scheming family-like-get-togethers - meetings at people's houses, meetings over meals, staying late at night, the way everyone did in the sixties. So in time, that has had to change.

Why?

I think when we created enough structure - in other words, forty-five shows a month; a three-day weekend benefit, a humongous show once a year; and the newsletter - there were things that began to be espected of us. You know, the public was waiting for the festival next year, and fory-five institutional shows were waiting for us.

And so when that became so organized, we then had to become more organized. So how are we going to fund that, to keep that going, in an organized way, and not just, "Oh, let's throw another benefit."

Yet when you talk about people having meals together and sitting around with each other, that sounds nice.

Yeah, I miss it. I was interrelating like family, for sure. And it was imbalanced. I was a family member coming and going, going off on tour, coming back; they were here doing a job, coming in the morning and leaving at night. And they had other things in their lives, generally speaking, and I didn't.

So that dependency, I think, was not only healthy. And if I were to do it all again, I loved that initial stage, and I'd probably seek that in some way again - cause that's a real high. And I do miss it. But in order for us to survive now, we are an organization that hires and fires and acts like grown-ups, that awful state of being (laughs).

When our festival lost money [begining around 1981], the energy in the office went way down. It was, "Ohhh, noo"; it's not us, the famous Bread&Roses kids anymore, it's a big situation where all of us may not get our paychecks. And it got to be serious, and this is a job, and we're out there doing that benefit in order to keep our paychecks coming in. It all became much more realistic. Much more tangible. It wasn't such a party.

When we were in such trouble, I called in a consultant. Here I am empty, you know. What's happened? How did Mimi mess up? What went wrong? I was really spinning. I felt pretty out of control. I didn't know how to be a director. I had this weird title (lowers voice) "executive directo", I didn't know what that means, and either I had better discover how to handle all that, or ghance the organization, or quit.

And it looked as though we could close; financially, it certainly looked as change, because of what i've learned in therapy. I think that it takes a long time, and it's a serious business, and I think it's what we do all of our lives. To me it means progress. I began to sense that it might have to be a different organization in orde rto survive.

And maybe I should hear what others have to say, and stop being such a kid and such a Committee actress and merry prankster.* I've gotten away wuth that for so long time; let's see what happens otherwise.

So the consultant came in and interviewed everybody and read through all the files and came up with the conclusion that indeed it was time to mature. She really felt that the place wouldn't be the same without me, that I had certain qualities that would maintain the organization better.

"Mimi, you're the leader. You're the "...oh there's another one..." spearhead." I always thought that was fun. "Spearhead," I walk around...(laughs). Spearhead, a leader - oh, the creative guidance, the creative force, all kinds of stuff that has no tangible meaning to me. I can be sitting at my house and totally depressed and it doens't help me to hear that I'm a creative force (laughs). I need a job, you know. Outside of the fund raising events, I'm retty lost. And I need some direction.

Anyway, what that meant for Mimi was that she needed an associeate. In fact, I didn't do things that an executive director does. I don't read a budget. I don't know from a time chart, etc. I learned how to write a job description, and I wrote one of an associate director; things like plan, you know, oversee the staff, create budgets, write proposals, everything that I didn't think I could do that ought to get done.

So i spent a year and a half hiring an associate director, and ended up hiring someone who is very organized, who has all the Robert's rules in her head, that's where she comes from. She also has experience living in Berkeley through the sixties and isn't a total Junior Leagher, by any means. And so i'm experimenting with that. Luckily, she and I get along very well.

I've always resisted school....The idea of timelines and flow charts, those very words were to me things to be ridiculed. And that suited me just fine. I now find, this year, finally, ten years later, that I'm creating timelines and flow charts, and beginning to be able to read a budget, 'cause I realize it makes sense to be able to do that now. I don't like it, but it's part of growing up is how I'm looking at it.

It's better that way?

I think - it may or may not be, I don't know yet.

Like we have a personnel committee meeting, we have now developed committees for the board. We're developing policies. So I take a deep breath and, okay, it's probably going to resolve problems more quickly in the future, so let's get these policies, let's see what they look like, let's not make fun of this anymore.

So the question the other night was, "Well, Mimi, now do you want your policies to read that people take vacations one week at a time or two weeks at a time? Everyone gets four weeks a year, but how would you prefer it to be?"

(Sighs) I don't know, I don't care, so I'm sitting there straining and struggling and remembering something that the associate has said, which is it's easier on the flow of work when people take one week off. So I say, "Well, it's really easier on the flow of work if people take one week off."

It's not me talking; I don't give a damn, and my true answer is "whatever is going to make people happy," which is a lousy answer for a director. I know that is has to be more organized than that.

I'll try it, it's a new suit of clothes. I'll try it on. And when it gets to where I know it doens't fit, I put my foot down.

I am aware of what I get out of Bread&Roses. It's given me a level of confidence, that I certainly didn't have. Purpose, that I didn't have...Self-esttem. It gives me a lot of strucure, it gives me an identity, it makes me look good, that's for sure; no one would have a clue as to my cynicism and my depressions and my other self that comes through sometimes in my music or in other situation. But this - I mean, look, peachy keen, [I'm] the director of this marvelous organization. It's a great image I built for myself. I was real sneaky about that.

I've found so much contentment here. People always want us to be out there, changing the world, but I think, well, there's so much going on here. It's not as if...it needs to be that much bigger. It's still in its youth, it's still learning to be what it is. So to have monster dreams of consuming the world seems silly to me.

I know i'm a perfectionist, so I'm pretty concerned about getting this down, getting this right. I don't think I can handle anything bigger than my own back yard. My sister takes on the world. I love to travel and do international things, but in terms of what I think I can handle with a job, I'd like to learn how to do this well, then I'll be happy (laughs).

There's plenty of work cut out. Conference, banquets, more festivals. And so far, there are enough back burner ideas here that I don't see this coming to a halt and me having to move on to a whole other area.

My hope this year has been that we would be organized enough that the staff could go on a numer of prison tours, which means we go on the road. I would very much like to see a book on how to produce benefit concerts come out of Bread&Roses; it's been started and stopped, and started and stopped.

I would like to involve more wealthy entertainers, to do our small shows - those people who care and who hopelfully are guilty enough that they're wealthy and not doing much with their lives, seeing us as a place to come with ideas.

And promoting other organizations like this, that makes sense to me - to keep them small, to keep them localized, so they have their own personalities, so that they work with their own communities. And I would love to network, and maybe have a conventin once a year in Kansas, or some part of the country where we come together and discuss what we learned that year and how to improve, cause its still new, it's still a new project.

Another secret ambition - this is more where we're talking legacy, which is more where my mind goes - I've had this dream of creating a situation comedy for television, out of a nonprofit office. This has so many elements - it has perfoemers who come and go, famour and not famour. I mean, I'll be in here trying to read something, and there'll be a belly dnacer with baby boa constrictors down the hall doing an audition - it has the most hilarious aspect, that could be very television oriented. There are chase scenes, I mean, "Late to the gig, will we get there on time?"

This is daily. I mean, I sit in here in hysterics sometimes hearing what's going on, thinking this is too good, it's being wasted, God, this is the part that I want to remember, that I want to go down in history - the nonsense of having a nonprofit and the agony of the funding, (mock dramaric tone) and then how we finally pull the banquet together, and all the arguments that go down before you get there. The real human element - what goes glossed over when you become a grown-up. When your organization has matured, you don't talk about these things. But it is so funny, and for me it's so much what is the reality of the situation, is the humor.

But in the meanwhile, the next two years, and I would suspect a couple more, will go into perfecting how to run what we've got, and do it well, and get some stability before we can have the money and the time to leap into other ideas, which I think is necessary in order to keep eeryone stimulated. But all of that takes money, which we don't have either, at Bread&Roses or in my life.

So I need to make dough before I dream. And I got a call yesterday that there's some interest at Rounder Records to do an album (softly). They had rejected a demo about four years ago. The same produces calls, and they may be interested in listening to the demo again. I said, "Do it"* O got a CBS contract in '77, made an entire album, it wasn't released. They released me, instead of the album...

* It was done. Mimi's first album in fifteen years, Solo, was ealeased by Rounder about a year later.

Coming back to the community service issue, and going beyond Bread&Roses, there's a lot of room for people to get involved in their own communities. So are there ways to------

Inspire?...Well, it always is going to depend on getting someone motivated. Whether it's out of frustration or anger - one would hope it wouldn't have to be, but probably it will be. I think it was easily defined as something positive, and I really think that can be done.

I don't know; I think in the past few years I've seen less and less of a desire to make [community] improvement. I'm judging that on the interviews I've done for hiring here. Before, it was the hippie era where people would come in and say, "I just think you people are beautiful, and I just want to do anything for you." And that faded with the Me Generation, there pompous kids would come in and say, "Well, what does the job have to offer me?". And I'd think, "Get out of here. What are you talking about? This is a social service; what do you have to give?"

So if that's rea-----

I think it is.

What is to be done about it?

Flog them; I don't know (laughts) (♥). Put them in jail (laughs) (and then they would benefit from free live music concerts from Bread&Roses!). I get really annoyed with it, I really do. I think if they can't come here and see the fun that exists, and they're going to come in full of credentials and full of themselves, and wanting a big paycheck, then I'll do it myself.

I do think that it's a matter of media and popularizing. I thik it is a dependent onwhat's popular, and Lord knows the work ethic went out the window a long time ago. God, there are very few people who get a thrill out of working. I think my associate does, and she and I can stay here late hours and feel it's what we want to be doing. Everyone else drifts off at five, and I used to resent that years ago. But I don't now.

I just don't know what I would do if I left every night at five; I don't know quite what I would do. I don't have another agenda waiting for me somewhere; no, I do sometimes, but it's off and on. I just feel happy, and it's appropriate, and I like to be needed here; so I like to stay late. But I don't think many people do...And you're called a workaholic if you do. And usually - i don't know, "burnout" - it's made such a big think of. And yes, it happens...but I think it happens to people who are expecting a lot in return.

I'm sick of hearing about burnout, I really am. Either people pace themselves or they don't. I'm learning much better how to (arches voices) "timeline my schedule" (laughs), how to find out when I get too tired. I'm doing a bad job this month, 'cause we took on not only the banquet, but then at the last minute decided to do a video at it, and I'm involved in somethingI probably shouldn't. I've got a stiff neck and I'm overworking right now, but I love that. I don't think about myself so much.

You love the overwork?

Yeah. I mean, I love to have a purpose. I love to feel that I'm needed to get something done, and I know that it'll be crisis time right before, and then we'll pull it off, and we'll all be able to feel some sense of success. It's like putting on a play, or performing, and in that chaotic world of performing, which I'm used to, I can handle all that. Even though it is tension-making.

(Laughs) It's all in here, in my neck (laughs). No, last week it was plenty crazy. Addressing envelopes, and volunteers in and out, and the newsletter is late, and so hollering through the hall, "Did you want that to get in the newsletter?" It was chaos last time. It's pretty horrible (laughs).

I'm sure that there weill be community leaders in any community. How to make them surface or give them a boos or tell them, "Yeah, right on, listen to your heart" - I think that's probably what you're looking to do, and I don't know what to say.

It is worthwhile to try and inspire people?...I would want to answer that of course it is. If you don't try out ideas, they rest with you for the rest of your life. They rest in the back burner area, and you find yourself talking to your children about what you could have done. And that in itself should be enough to kick you into action.

Only I think I would say that at nearly age forty, I wouldn't mind being manipulative in doing that. I think that most of the society is very manipulative; we're manipulated by the media, by Readan, by - everywhere we look we're being manipulated. And because that has become so natural and acceptable, i would join that, rather than trying to do it grass-roots and through the more honest down-to-earth, one-to-one methonds. I would at this point in my life not be afraid of what we used to call selling out. And i would use the media, and I would use stars, and I would use market techniques, sell techniques, any gimmick I could get my hands on before i vomit and it goes too far.

It wouldn't be my choice originally to have to market what you're talking about, but I would say it would be a useful technique. 'Cause I do think it needs....sex appeal. Pizzazz. It needs to look pleasurable and look like fun. And it is. People just don't know that.

POSITIVELY 4TH STREET

by David Hajdu