A is for Art Bar and Other Awesomeness

So my partner, the spectacularly-bearded Santa Cruz street poet Kevin Devaney, just launched the IndieGoGo campaign for his truly awesome & amazing solution to the gutting of funding for arts education. It's called the Art Bar and the basic, brilliant way it works is this: since artists are always broke and working at bars anyway, what if you opened a bar that specifically hired artists and used the money from the beer sales to help them fund outstanding arts programming and free arts education in local schools? That is, what if the beer you're out buying on Saturday night was actually paying for your kids and your community to do poetry, painting, theater, visual art, dance, design...? Sounds like a great freaking deal, right? Right. (If you want to donate the cost of one beer to making this model of sustainable funding a replicable reality, you can do so by clicking here! You will get many thanks and also poems and other great perks!)

Did you know there's a whole category on Wikimedia Commons called
"Drunken People in Art"? I was looking for an appropriate illustration for
"Art Bar" but I just couldn't resist this. It's by William Holman Hunt and
it's called "The flight of Madeline and Porphyro during the drunkenness
attending the revelry (The Eve of St. Agnes)" from somewhere  around
1847. The Art Bar will not look like this, of course, except maybe for that
swell pink cape the  guy is wearing. Swell pink capes are always welcome.