Grant

Tonight a particularly close and dear friend of mine took me out for my birthday. A busy travel schedule makes timely birthday excursions challenging but not impossible. So tonight we went out to a beautiful concert venue located at the Mountain Winery. This concert hall is actually located high up in the mountains of Saratoga up where the houses are the size of small hotels surrounded by neat rows of grape vines. The road up to the winery is a winding path full of snakes and coils and the occasional full u-turn. Ever higher you climb until at the very top you can see the entire Bay Area practically from lower San Francisco to well south of San Jose. A breathtaking view.

On this night it is an overcast night, one night before a full moon. You walk through rows of small winery buildings until you get to the original main building. It was built in 1825 and looks like an old English church with ivy so thick it is impossible to see the stone beneath. This church like structure is actually the backdrop to the outdoor stage that is surrounded on three sides by old wooden bleachers and folding chairs in front. Both quaint and intimate at the same time. With glasses of wine in hand people mingle and let the stresses of the day and week slowly ease away while looking at the breathtaking vista before the sun fully sets.

Before we know it, it is show time and without further ado, Amy Grant. Amy Grant has a voice that can mesmerize the soul and captivate the mind. She talks to the audience as she would a close friend, explaining what the circumstances were around a song and truly creating a scene or setting for each song. With a calm and understanding demeanor she not only acknowledges a crying baby but actually gives the mother a round of applause for getting out and living life. She ensures she plays each song the loyal fans requested during the sound check and even songs yelled out by the audience.

She tells this story late in the evening with the sun fully set, the church like structure behind basked in a quiet pink/amber lighting. The natural mist from the cold night air meeting the former warm air of the afternoon, plays about the feet of the musicians. Amy is cast in this blue backlight that provides a halo like effect, while her front is basked in a pale canary color. This next song was inspired by a TV show on NBC she is helping with. It is called Wishes, where they set up a tent in a town and they invite everyone in town to come and make a wish, and then they will grant three of those wishes. Well you can imagine the number of people that come out to have their wish possibly granted, the line taking many times all day to fully partake. Toward the end of a particularly long session, she has a woman come up and of course answers the first obligatory question of her name, and then for her wish she simply says, ‘I wish you would grant the wish of the woman in front of me’. Now we don’t know if they were friends or just became friends standing in line for several hours, but we can take this in the most optimistic view and see this as people supporting other people. For aren’t we all in this together and shouldn’t we all just take a little while to help each other out? And as the mist glided off the stage and onto the audience it was like a steady reminder that to stay warm we need other people (or a really big fire place).

Later in the evening her daughter Karin (age 4) was invited on stage to dance with mom. Being a typical 4 year old she was immediately shy on stage, but from our vantage point you could see this adorable girl just dancing her heart out on the side of the stage for the rest of the show. How wonderful it would be to have that innocence and care-free manner. To not know the evils or pains of the world, but just to throw your hands up and dance and dance, until you are so dizzy you fall down, and then dance some more on the ground.

So I will confess I have been a little distracted the past few days ever since Ben came home from NY. Not knowing exactly how to feel when hope is soon to become loss, and yet something about this group of people all singing about hope, love, friendship, those basic emotions that mean so much to each of us, well helps re-energize. Do I still feel absolutely petrified of what we all know is coming? Absolutely, but with close friends we are going to go into this together, for as a group we pick each other up and bring ourselves to new levels.

Thank you J for the wonderful evening, it was very much needed.