#goodbye emails

The lights dimmed and the herd pushed forward.  As a spotlight illuminated the mike stand, a roar crashed and flooded the stage like a tidal wave.  For the next few hours, the world ceased to exist beyond those four walls and I was consumed by energy, by love, by passion by anger; I was consumed by music.

It hadn’t been my first concert ever, but it was the first concert I saw in New York City and had a discernible effect on me.  Having been surrounded by music throughout my life whether as a child studying dance or as a form of escape or enlightenment throughout my teens and college years, I knew that as I commenced my adult life I would only be content working amongst peers that shared my passion, and artists that fueled my fire. At this concert, in the front row at Hammerstein Ballroom, I finally felt like I was getting closer to making that dream a reality.

This dream lead me on a pilgrimage that uprooted me from a small suburban town in south Florida, to a city thousands of miles from everything I had ever known.  A pilgrimage to Mecca that many others had taken before me, to a city that breeds as many bums as it does bass players, and where hookers and Hasidic Jews share the same streets as up-and-coming bands in the Lower East Side neighborhood I moved into.

Not that I had any idea I’d ever work for MTV, much less the music department.  It just wasn’t in the realm of possibility for a teenager in Hialeah .  I still remember seeing Fiona Apple’s Sleep To Dream video in the Buzzbin for the first time and running to SPEC’s to buy a copy, or Alanis’ You Oughta Know and telling my friend “YOU HAVE TO LISTEN TO THIS” when I stumbled upon it at a music kiosk at Bayside.  I feel incredibly lucky and posses an overwhelming sense of gratitude to have had the opportunity to participate in a dialogue that will impact other kids the way the way I had been.