Plans | The Harold Lounge

So, other than shoveling and hanging out in your snow fort, what are you up to this weekend? There’s the Super Bowl of course (anybody planning to join the cheddar heads at Will’s?), but there’s also the Spring Flower Show and first “Sweet Saturday” at Garfield Park Conservatory (one of my favorite places in the city), and free music at the Chicago Cultural Center tomorrow (one of the shows in the “Music Without Borders” Concert Series. (Actually, they have music all the time there: Classical Mondays, Jazz/Blues Tuesdays, Fancy Stuff on Wednesdays, and open Jazz Jams on Wednesday nights, along with World Music on Fridays, and more. All FREE!)

Or maybe you’re going to stay in and make your plans for next week’s 51st annual U of C Folk Festival?

What’s your story? What’s happening out there?

So, where is this all going, you might ask?

This site, as the opening post suggests, is not going to be a one-man show. It is a collaborative space for HWC faculty members, full time and part time, and a resource to keep each other informed, seek and provide information, and discuss the things that need discussing but cannot be due to our collective, disparate schedules.

It is only as viable as its participants make it, and it will be only as useful as it is a regular part of the faculty members’ weeks.

Over the next week or two, I’ll be asking for information (and contributors) from the various Faculty committees listed as pages on the right side and working to develop a team of people to be regular contributors. If you are interested in being one of those people (either as a representative of one of the committees or as an at-large wild card), please send me (Dave) an email at drichardson2@ccc.edu . If you are a leader of one of those committees/groups and want to have some information on your page (leadership, membership, charge, minutes, whatever), please let me know what you want and I’ll put it up or put you on as a contributor and show you how to do it. For the moment, anyway, there are no rules to this thing, just a little structure and a lot of hope that, as the disembodied voice in Roy Hobbs’ head put it, “If [we] build it, they will come.”

I do not want to make new work for my already overloaded colleagues, and it is my dream to have a thing that has no committee. Yet I want, sometimes desperately, to have a space where we can get and give information, argue, discuss, and understand things that affect us in real time, rather than drabs and dribbles. I think The Harold can fulfill all of those desires. At the same time, The Harold cannot exist as a viable entity without a team of people willing to do a little of the lifting.

If you’re willing to do a little lifting to help make this thing work, please drop me a line. If you don’t have any time or energy to spare, I understand and empathize; I hope, at least, you’ll come back semi-regularly, vote when you can, and comment when you have an extra minute.

The Harold can be a community or an echo chamber. Which it becomes is, in the end, in your hands.