One Small Miracle Gala At McCune Mansion
The McCune Mansion casts its other-worldly glow from the hill on Main just before the turn to the Capitol is made. You could walk your dog, run, or look at Christmas lights up and down the block your whole life and know it only as that house. That one: the one with the godly staircase to the terrace where angels and artists wait for their chauffeurs to arrive.
This was the setting of the One Small Miracle Gala, an event I plugged in my piece: “The Vulnerability Ensemble,” found in Salt Lily Magazine. One Small Miracle is a nonprofit designed as a safety net for the service industry for when unexpected health emergencies become the everyday. An industry which employs thousands in the Salt Lake community, but due to the nature of the industry— usually small businesses or “mom and pop” shops employing minimalistic staffs—the service workers are without health insurance. Inspired into creation by its founder Mathew Pfhol who suffered a stroke without medical debt relief, the non-profit’s outreach has impacted many of the inner Salt Lake service industry when a hospital bill becomes unmanageable, and further, when the injury (say to the wrist) inhibits the individual from working.
One Small Miracle’s partnerships reach from downtown Salt Lake City—you can often catch members and partners at their industry favorite bar Water Witch—to Park City. This vision of cohesive and intimate care for the workers in an industry of shifting financial uncertainty has been backed by dozens of partners in and out of the service industry. The Gala was to take that vision of Mathew and his board to the elevated heights with a spectacular evening highlighting the vision for many hand selected guests and beneficiaries. Board members Erin McCallister and Tracy Gomez were the graceful hands behind the curtains to curate the evening, and Chelsea Keefer the lead creative director. The event honed-in on the path one takes towards metamorphosis, and the six emotions as the scaffolding to parse out that path. All performers and musicians were hand-picked by Chelsea and the performance of their chosen emotion came down to their own specific curation all set to the minimalist masterpiece “Metamorphosis” by Phillip Glass. It promised Gatsby-ian grandeur of an orchestral performance with the intimacy of your favorite haunts back table with your favorite vinyl record lover.
I arrived at the Gala at 6:48 PM, immediately found the familiar eyes of Dayna Taylor of White Horse and Beehive Distillery who checked my coat. JJ, of Copper Common and HSL, handed me a drink and I traversed the crowd through the entryway. In the brazen golden light of the dining room, the mezcal is already ringing and dinging in an aura of an exploded occupancy as dinner arrives. Subtle and aromatic earthy tones that wash me in autumnal spices. There is a conscious breath I found between courses to call that which runs its fingers through the August air: aromas to coat decadent meats, crafted accompaniments, and inspired desserts. Between these courses I found myself swimming the channels of co-mingling with regulars at my many places of work all over the state, friends behind that and at the bar. Having measured conversations about business, writing, and even soccer with bar managers and other members of this ocean of decadence
As dinner closed, I gathered myself and another drink to ascend the stairs to a room of spectacular brilliance: mirrors mirror the frames of cresting golds and bronze.
It’s less about the complex richness that sinks into you with such immense beauty, and more about this serene feeling I suffered there. One to mirror the journalistic approach to write a review of something that has already happened and won’t again. How such things can be so illustrious and beautiful to you yet so quintessentially rare—the walls themselves made of a bone-meal pressing with bronze that takes months to prepare mere inches of. This feeling also holds the dynamic pressure of what it means to remove something in order to add value to it: to remove the clean bite of an approaching event by way of referring back to it and filling that tension of not knowing with description and engagement instead. This room is carefully crafted to remove the clairvoyant white light from sources in the street to frame the upcoming performance in gold. Removing the clamoring noise dense orchestrations of Glass’s work for a preferred minimal approach of accompanying strings and one deft hand at a music-producers stand. Or simply to remove the unfamiliarity from everyone in the room, by tying each of them together to the performances in. This creates a social-tether, a point we can all relate to as we are all a part of it, regardless of the amount we know each other.
The performances, with the removal of the ability to take pictures out of precious care for them-- which, if I can spare an opinion for, is always appropriate to performances. I am of the opinion any sort of performance should be phone free for the reasons to follow—they will always hold a special ensemble of vulnerability. The notion to exist once, and only once—then to write a review about it strangely—is shrouded in the murky discussion of phenomenology. But this isn’t about that nauseating post-modern mucking of thought, but about the surrealist notion of suspending moments of such godlike beauty: as with any spectacular performance. It creates both new pathways for beauty and sensory detail to exist while defining the presets we all inhabit within ourselves. These presets create the codex of language we use to describe all things. For example, I could say that I felt the tantalization of a slender fear—like that being on the breath of ocean on the rocks of the famous painting “The Wanderer above the Sea of Fog”. That my feelings took on a new life of meaning and then escaped that life to indulge in a surrender only formed by the words of the others watching, myself included. I was beside myself: enraptured in a bliss both brilliant and awful beyond the notion of even explanation.
And with the even pressure of everyone who observes such a performance knows as a coming back to reality, it subsided. The room hung in reverberations of static which teased me like the ghosts of conversations I would have liked to have had with everyone in that room. The performance was a pronouncement of a great gratitude for life, for the ability to observe and inhabit space, and also the unique symbol that is not being able to describe what happened. To gawk with guile at the profound balance of a dancer’s calves; to see your beating heart echo in a mirror of a dancer’s chest; to fall and crush the lingering footprints of who you were with the practiced pace of performers.
Together.
The evening was a rapture of severe celebration of the times we have together which can fill an entire presence of being. To be overwhelmed with libation, with sound, with setting, with people, with your people, and with, as a writer, the pressure of observing and communicating. I stood lastly in the dancing hall beside where we ate having been handed another mezcal and this pressure became light. It billows and wafts out exhalations of the need for meaning. In sending it away, the primal call to dance encases me on the floor with everyone. And I feel welcomed by One Small Miracle; welcome to live a life with the safety net of care and vigilance. Welcomed here as a person who has never lived in a place the size of one of these rooms. Welcomed to meet the occupancy of meaning with everyone forging their own value from this event. I checked out my scarf, drunkenly kissed my dear friend at the counter on the cheek and met the evening chill with eyes brimming with life.
