A political party. The kind where music is played and money is raised.

I don’t blame. Frankly, I get it.

I sometimes feel some version of that even as a writer. I’d like to muse more often on topics beyond politics—traveling, love, the squirrel in my front yard, my cat Georgy, why my penmanship has gotten hideous since grade school—but, strangely, when I do meander toward those more apolitical themes, less readership is sparked, typically less than my political rants. And that, after all, is what it’s all about, right, building readership?

Well, no, not completely.

Yes, I want to build readership, of course. I want all of you to want to click each pithy headline to see what my latest “musing” is about. But more importantly, I want to intrigue, provoke, entertain, and inspire while widening the spectrum and offering, perhaps, more varietal opinionating. One-note pontification (not that I’m doing that, certainly, but in general) can be both creatively unsatisfying, and, I’d guess, occasionally redundant. So I am going to mix it up a bit, “view stats” be damned … maybe I’ll even get my friend’s interest back.

Today that focal-veer inspires me to talk about why performing with my band is my most organic form of political activism (see what I did there … politics and creativity!).

But let me first lay the groundwork by addressing the impulse behind this week’s headline: We are at critical mass crazy. Every single day there’s some new outrage to ingest, and the constantly percolating rage is keeping us, as a nation (world?), in a state of cortisol-inflammation. Which is not good.

This week’s short list includes:

• “AI is going to kill us.” We’ve been informed by countless perpetrators of the AI invasion that now that they’ve built and released their “agents” into the wild, those wily robots have learned to escape their “sandboxes” to wreak havoc, eliciting from their creators a rather tepid, “Oops, sorry; they’re might/could/are going to destroy humanity… and maybe pretty soon.” That sort of thing will keep anxious people up nights for decades to come.
• Trump continues his swooning love affair with evil overlord Xi Jingping, inviting the dictator, with gushing pomp & circumstance, to enjoy our White House where he (Trump) demeans the former president, behaves like a mincing crush-buddy, and achieves absolutely nothing.
• Whack-a-mole seems to have become the norm for conducting an election, at least for protectors of the realm (democracy) like Norm Eisen and the indefatigable Marc Elias and his Democracy Docket team (talk about being exhausted). Give these people your money, attention, and support whenever you can.
• Pete “Gee, I wish I was an army man” Hegseth continues to behave stupidly while putting human life at risk, whether blowing up faceless boaters, or, most recently, inviting vacuous influencers with bad hair to skulk the Pentagon and give vacuous speeches (see: The Pentagon has unveiled its secret weapon: two idiotic influencers).
• And so on…

The sheer volume of all that crazy is undeniably exhausting. I know I’m exhausted. I imagine you are too. So I appreciated Rev. Benjamin Cremer’s recent comment:

“If you are overwhelmed by all the cruelty and tempted into hopelessness, you are a good person and on the right side of history. Those in power want nothing more than to steal your hope and drive you into apathy. Keeping your empathy and hope alive is an act of resistance.”

Amazing thing to say. And true. It can be that simple, resistance. Keeping empathy and hope alive is something everyone can do, even without leaving home. Even without joining a movement, knocking doors, writing postcards, or wailing at rallies. I think good people are doing just that … while metaphorically holding their breath, waiting, hoping, for an essential shift in the dark continuum.

Read that again: Keeping your empathy and hope alive is an act of resistance. We can all do that.

But back to me and singing … it connects, I promise.

My most joyful act of resistance is setting up shop with my band and offering our music to fundraisers helping to fill coffers for Democrats—the party in general and/or candidates specifically. Yes, I’ve done postcards, marches, mailing list promotions, etc., and have been more than happy to participate in all those ways. But I can think of no better reason to get up on stage and tap into that most exhilarating of art forms—singing—than to help save the sanity of our country. That’s a noble reason to sing, but damn … it also feels like the very best quid pro quo.

Someone once said to me that every single person loves to sing and wishes they were a rockstar. I can’t confirm that, but I bet it’s true. It was certainly true for me, both parts of that. I may have aged out of the “rockstar” option, but singing? Never. And how delightful that I have a group of brilliant musicians with whom I can do just that, and together we can take this thing we love and do something good with it. Truly a gift.

Because ever since I was a little girl riding my bike down May Avenue toward Nippersink Creek park by the baseball field, climbing into a tree on the park’s edge and belting out, “I Could’ve Danced All Night” to no audience at all, the act of singing has felt to me like a blessed event. Transformative and exhilarating. I actually conjured up a quote I gave to one of the fictional characters in my last novel, Chick Singer, that completely encapsulates the experience for me:

“It climbs through you like electricity; up from your gut and through your throat, bursting into the air with such sound and fury you couldn’t hold it back even if you wanted to. It rushes ears, explodes senses; raises goosebumps, until they wail and scream and move to the floor, arms flailing, leg pumping, every word shouted in tandem, and when that happens, and you know it was you—your voice, your energy, your electricity—that inspired the joyful clamor, you rise up out of your body in pure exhilaration. And sing louder.”

Probably not hard to figure why getting up and singing for the benefit of a benefit is my most favorite form of political resistance.

We’ve got one coming up in a couple of weeks. By the time we’re on stage entertaining fundraiser guests on Saturday, October 10th, we’ll be just 24 days from November 3rd’s Midterm election … a very big election day. I’d love everyone I know in the LA area to come join us to help support that election. I’d love everyone reading this to click the QR code in the flier below to donate (the hosts have designated 50% for the Democratic Party, 50% specifically to James Talarico, that’s how important flipping Texas is!). Mostly, I’d love all of us to benefit from the success aided by the money raised, success that will help change the course of our country.

Join me however you can, from wherever you are. Mostly, though, keep your empathy and hope alive. I will certainly join you in that.

I’m also going to keep singing, with intention, resistance, and joy … and as loud as I can.