My mom just told me a story that her friend Thelma passed along to her this morning, and I thought that I’d share it with you guys and maybe you could tell your friends. Thelma’s little church is just down the road from the location of TomorrowWorld, an amazing electronic dance music festival that came to the United States from Europe back in 2013. I remember when art director Sean Jennings Ryan first showed me this video of TomorrowLand…
…I was amazed at the production, the music, and the cute European girls – so when the announcement that TomorrowLand would be coming to ATLANTA in 2013 I was astonished.
The first year of TomorrowWorld went really great – several of my friends attended and camped on-site, and my friend Alfeo was hired as a camera operator and he had a terrific time shooting the crowds and the DJs. I watched the live stream on YouTube and it was a pretty terrific party. Joyous, I think is the feeling that most attendees might say. The 2014 edition of the event went pretty well too, and many of my friends returned and had a great time.
This year TomorrowWorld had a very public weather-related hiccup, leaving thousands of attendees stranded, earning the event’s promoters a great deal of bad press and I’ve started thinking of it as TomorrowMud. Attendees walked for miles, looking for civilization. Many slept on the side of the roads, or in the woods. It was a terrible, terrible time for a large number of people and the bad press was entirely deserved… but let me continue with my story…
Some of those people from the TomorrowWorld Disaspora decided to sleep outside of the old Campbellton United Methodist Church; that’s the church where my mom’s friend Thelma worships. Here’s a photo of the place:
Now some might expect to hear that a bedraggled mob of EDM fans, trailing beads and feather boas, left a wake of destruction in their angry exodus from TomorrowMud, but from what Thelma told my mom, those people actually left around $800 in a donation box. As someone who attends a similar tiny church (and is the chair of finance there) I can tell you with some authority that the $800 left by those folks was an unexpected blessing to Thelma’s church, which is down to a regular attendance of around 11 or 12 people each Sunday and in financial distress.
This is the TomorrowWorld that I will remember when I talk about the event – not the muddy disaster of TomorrowMud.