This is a story I have told here before, but it’s worth telling again.
When I first moved to Minneapolis in 2005 (or this may have been in early 2006), I met a writer named Brad Zellar at a party in Uptown that Rake magazine editor Julie Caniglia had invited me to. I’d been giving everyone I met that month a copy of a 3x5 photocopied book of drawings I’d made at Kinko’s. Julie introduced me to Brad, and after talking for a bit, I thought he seemed like a person that might enjoy the book. I gave him one of the last. He leafed through it, and look up at me.
“Do you have more?” he asked.
“Uh, not many,” I told him. This was true. I’d only made about 50 or so, and they were dwindling fast.
“Are you going to make more?” he asked.
“I hope so,” I told him. “But I don’t have a job yet, so I, uh, don’t really have any extra money to do anything like that right now.” This was also true. I had perhaps $40 in my checking account.
With that, Brad reached into his pocket, pulled out two twenty dollar bills and told me to go make some more copies of my book. I was dumfounded. No one had ever subsidized my work in such an immediate way before (and rarely since, actually). I think it is with that incredible act of kindness that I realized if Minneapolis was full of people as profoundly generous as Brad, I was almost certainly in the right place.
Since then, Brad and I have become good friends — he has been on Salon Saloon twice, and we’ve collaborated on a few things here and there (like calling my dad to help solve a math problem). We have a really exciting project together coming up in 2012 that I can’t wait to tell you about. And of course, there are few better ballpark companions.
In the past year, Brad has had some health issues, stemming from a neurological disorder; a few bad episodes have landed him in the hospital on several occasions. Brad is underinsured, and the costs of these visits, as you can probably imagine, are exorbitant.
Brad also happens to be turning fifty this week, so a few of his friends are throwing him a party at the Amsterdam Bar and Hall, in downtown St. Paul, this Sunday night. it’s a birthday party that doubles as a fundraiser for Brad’s medical bills. There will be bands, and a silent auction featuring work by (among many, many others) artists such as David Rathman, Paul Shambroom, Carrie Thompson, Eric Ruby, Karl Raschke and Alec Soth. Perhaps the best prize of the evening: Soth, a well-known and wildly talented photographer and artists book publisher, is also auctioning, via eBay, a portrait commission, with all the proceeds going to Brad.
(I’ll also have a piece in the silent auction for sale for a couple of dozen bucks, so if you’ve ever wanted to own a piece of vintage Sturdevantia with the proceeds going to a good cause, now’s the time to pony up. It’s baseball-related, of course.)
Come by Sunday if you’re in town — here’s the information. Knowing Brad has been a blessing, and the fact that I am able to participate, even in this small way, in repaying the sort of generosity he is known all across these cities for is a blessing, too.
