Indie Author Road Trip (Day 4): Community, Les Mis, Poly and Mono
Continuing their road trip from Charlotte, NC, to San Diego, CA, Reid Mihalko of http://ReidAboutSex.comand Allison Moon of http://LesbianWerewolves.com bid a fond farewell to Cathy V. in Dallas, TX, and head off towards Albuquerque, NM. En route, they discuss Shawna Hamic’s Les Mis calendar project to benefit Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, “Ladies of the Baricade” – http://www.broadwaycares.org/store, and the nature of community support for artists, and community building for sex geeks!
Reid: Hello everyone and welcome from Texas. What highway are we on?
Allison: We’re on West 32
Reid: West 32.
Allison: We just left Bali and run our way to Amarillo.
Reid: And eventually we’re supposed to end up in Albuquerque today. We had a long day ahead of us. Its 11 hours of driving at least on the road.
Allison: Yes.
Reid: What else?
Allison: So I was thinking last night we had a wonderful evening with our friend Cathy in Dallas and other friend Shawna who’s in town for the tour production of Les Mis the 25th anniversary production. She was in Dallas came to visit while they were on the tour. It was great. And we had a great little conversation about pretty much being artist and what that means nowadays and how she’s been successful on her tour of Les Mis and she’s paying it for work by giving a lot of money to her favorite charity which is Broadway Cares actors against aids, a wonderful organization and she shot calendars in order to support the organization.
Reid: Ladies of the brigade.
Allison: So basically all of the women from Les Mis tour production she shot them and it’s beautiful. She share her pictures with us.
Reid: Yeah. Well I link it on the YouTube description.
Allison: [Inaudible 00:01:18] that means really pretty. So that was really enjoyable and reminded me of during the holidays I had a friend who’s done me a lot of favors in the past, asked me if she could have a couple of books to give to her community members and friends for Christmas and I was prepared to just give them to her because she has done me so many favors and I really appreciate all of that she’s done for me but she insisted that she pay full price for each book which was shocking and difficult for me to accept but I did accept it and Shawna when she was leaving last night, she decided to sponsor a day of the tour of our sex geek road trip, Indie Author road trip and hand it Reid.
Reid: A hundred dollar bill. We have our first sponsor. We weren’t even trying.
Allison: Exactly and that’s the thing about independent artist. Shawna obviously when she was after New York was struggling actor just like we all are at some point. I’m a struggling writer right now and we have a lot of friends who are all independent artists in the way we support our community is that we pay it for work. My friend only wanted to buy gifts from independent artists for Christmas so that was her way of using capitalism to support her community and supporting your community can look on all search ways it doesn’t have for you financial obviously but for a lot of starting artist finding financial is really a great thing.
Reid: Yeah and also the things out at is if for those of you were a sex geeks like me we’re like, “[inaudible 00:02:42] artist”, it synonymous for the entrepreneur anyone who has the hassle for their own pay check, you starting up some sort of project or your own business or you work in corporate America or have a job and secretly you yearn to be doing this other thing or being a participant in community.
If you’re thriving for community, my advice for you is one, be the change like if you can’t find it, you might have to create it. Build it and they will come which is very much how I ended up creating the sex — positive community around me. For those of you who don’t have the gumption, like, “I want a… I’m a community leader at heart. I want to create a community”, find people like us and basically leech off of our communities. Become a part of a community and figure out how they did it and just cut and paste because you might be out in the middle of Texas and not have a sex geek community or self — publishing writer’s community to be a part of. Assume that there are people around you who have the same desires, they just don’t know where to look and you might have actually be the change you want to see in your area.
Other things easy places to go, check out https://fetlife.com/ for your sex positive geeks. Check out http://lovingmore.org/. If you’re a non-monogamous geek, then check out just in Tristan Taormino’s http://OpeningUp.net, I believe, which has a listings of bunch of different communities. Seek out other sex geeks go on Facebook, sexologists, something, something. There’s a whole group.
Allison: If you’re a geography is not your friend, the internet is.
Reid: The internet is your friend. So we lost of been promising to keep these videos under a half an hour long, so we should probably…
Allison: Willie Nelson play us out.
Reid: Play us out, Willie. Why is it never working?
Allison: Adios.