My Accidental Musical
“I spend more time than any human being reasonably should thinking about Gerald Ford” - Ben Bradford, Landslide
I first heard those words, from Ben Bradford, creator of the Landslide podcast, within a week of the episode’s April, 2024, release. I had already fallen in love with the podcast and all its surrounding serendipities. A top-flight series exploring ‘70s presidential politics coming into being amidst my own deep odyssey into that world felt kindred/electric.
“I [too] spend more time than any human being reasonably should thinking about Gerald Ford.” And How.
Today, August 9th, marks the 51st Anniversary of Ford’s East Room inauguration. It’s the only Presidential Inauguration ever to be held in the East Room, the very spot in which, One score and 15 years later, Lin-Manuel Miranda performed a song from his Hamilton Mixtape for the Obamas.
I remember my first experience watching--admittedly weeping as I took it in. I had, not long before, seen the Hamilton Tony Award performance. To time travel backward from the epic culmination to a glimpse at its raw, vulnerable, and electric roots--the testament to process, journey, and realization--was simply overwhelming. (And to think we’re at Hamilten now!)
Whatever the quest, I’ve always savored the process. The experience. The becoming. The transcendent power of collaboration. I’ve since found many opportunities to achieve a weeping state with my own musical enterprise, and they're usually sparked by those moments of living in the magic contributed through the lifting powers of others.
For those who've been witness to my arc, you know the central thread of my endeavors has been generating opportunity structures for cultivating connective engagement. And now, all of that culminates in the bringing into being of WIN—a musical odyssey that has turned a happenstance road trip stop at the museum of an accidental president into the driving mission of my midlife.
Here, with you, I get to share it—how it happened, as it happens.
Welcome!