Your Dream Is Your Only Scheme
“Move on up,” Curtis Mayfield exhorts from my iPod, urging me to stack up sweaty minutes on the elliptical trainer. “Your dream is your only scheme, so keep on pushing.”
An hour later at Bay Weekly, I see what the R&B singer, who died in 2009, is talking about. News of hundreds of dreams pushed into reality cross my desk every day. You read about many such schemes each week in our pages.
The Peace Corps has inspired dreams since its founding 50 years ago this month. Most of us only dreamed. In this week’s paper, you’ll meet six Chesapeake Country neighbors among the 200,000 Americans who moved their dream on up into reality. Whether they joined in their 20s or their 60s, their going gave them world citizenship. For the rest of us, that’s just one more dream deferred.
A life in journalism has taught me that Mayfield — and Dream Deferred poet Langston Hughes — are right. The happy ones among us move our dreams on up.
Such dreams we dream!
Once upon a time, I can imagine Keith O’Leary and a real Margo Morrison saying, wouldn’t it be fun to make money staging interactive murder mysteries? Now their scheme is Murder Mystery USA and Murder Mystery Weekend, which returns this weekend to Chesapeake Beach Spa and Resort (last minute reservations: 866-312-5596).
The scheme of the Lothian Ruritans has Bay Gardener Dr. Frank Gouin in his Upakrik Farm kitchen all week, cooking the four varieties of tomato sauce the Ruritans will serve at the annual spring spaghetti fundraising dinner on Saturday (8 Days a Week, page 12).
Like getting anywhere on the elliptical, dream to reality is a sweat transformation.
All the hundred-some events in 8 Days a Week took dreaming followed by scheming and sweating before they could be announced in our pages.
Such was the annual Bugeye Ball, which last weekend raised over $50,000 for Calvert Marine Museum by turning its galleries into a gala, glittering Monte Carlo on the Chesapeake.
And the South River on a Half Shell benefit to fund the South River Federation’s environmental advocacy. The “delightful evening” of hors’ oeuvres, cocktails, music and auctions at Homestead Gardens raised $60,000, reports Sarah Boynton, who worked with “lots of volunteers and an auction committee on the amazingly wonderful event.”
The sweat is still flowing to make the Chesapeake Bay Blues Festival’s 10th anniversary the charitable fundraiser’s best ever, as you’ll read this week in “Blues to Hit the Shores of Sandy Point.”
All this moving up makes optimistic jobs of editing and reading Bay Weekly.
Keep on dreaming.