Ask Father, Darling: A Modest Proposal for the Daisy Chain Fields Situation

I have now read, several times, and each time with mounting confusion, an article about a young woman named Olivia Rodrigo who apparently gathered a great many musicians into a field and asked them all to sing near some nonprofit organizations, and I confess, I am simply exhausted, in the deep, structural way one is exhausted by hearing that someone has been reinventing a wheel that was already sitting, quite comfortably, in the garage the whole time.

The event, I gather, is called the Daisy Chain Fields Festival, which is a lovely name, truly, evocative of the sort of meadow one might have a small picnic in before the help clears it away, and it was, and I quote, "inaugural," which is a word that tells you immediately that someone intends to do this again, annually, forever, as though the problem it is solving were not solved the first time. It brought together, the article says, "musicians and nonprofit organizations," for "a day of community celebration," with an "atmosphere of celebration and shared purpose among attendees and performers alike." One simply must ask — shared purpose toward what, exactly? Because as far as I can discern, squinting at this from every angle available to me, the entire architecture of the day — the stages, the sound engineers, the security perimeter, the merchandise tents, the poor interns in matching t-shirts directing traffic with glow sticks — exists to solve a problem that has a much shorter solution, which is that someone simply asks Father, and Father, being Father, writes a check, and everyone goes home in time for a proper dinner instead of standing in a field eating something out of a paper boat.

I do not say this to be unkind. I want to be extremely clear about that, because I know how this can sound if you are not listening closely, and you must listen closely, because my heart in this matter is, I promise you, enormous. I am simply baffled — genuinely, structurally baffled, the way one is baffled by a crossword clue that turns out to have seventeen letters and no vowels — by the idea that raising money for good causes requires a full day's labor from dozens of people, weeks of rehearsal, a whole festival infrastructure with porta-potties and daisy-chain branding, when the entire sum in question could, in my experience, be secured with one telephone call and possibly a slightly disappointed sigh from Father about how I never call just to talk anymore. I am told these festivals raise "awareness" as well as money, and I have turned that phrase over and over like a stone I cannot identify, because awareness of what? The nonprofits were already aware of their own causes. Presumably that is rather the whole reason they became nonprofits in the first place, no one wakes up one morning founding an organization for a problem they have not yet noticed. So the awareness, I must conclude, is being manufactured for the benefit of everyone else — the attendees, the "community" — who apparently did not know, until Olivia Rodrigo sang at them about it, that there were problems in the world requiring money. Which, if true, strikes me as a far larger and sadder story than the one being reported, though I note the guardrails around my own generosity of spirit and will simply observe that it seems like an extraordinarily circuitous way to deliver information one could put on a postcard.

Here is what I find truly exquisite about the whole affair, in the way one finds a badly fitted hem exquisite, meaning one cannot look away from it: the labor. The sheer, cascading, unnecessary labor of it all. Somebody had to book the acts. Somebody had to coordinate with each of the nonprofit organizations about their tables and their signage and their little tri-fold displays. Somebody had to secure the permits for a "single-day festival," which I am given to understand is its own bureaucratic ordeal involving fire marshals and noise ordinances and, I shudder to think, insurance. Somebody had to feed everyone. Somebody had to build a stage and then, the very next day, take the stage apart again, as though it had never happened, as though the whole shimmering edifice were a sandcastle built purely to be walked back into the sea. And all of this — all of it — in service of accomplishing what a single wire transfer accomplishes before lunch. One does not, in my experience, need a stage to give money away. One needs a pen, and possibly a bit of stationery, and Father, who has never once, in the whole of my life, made me stand in a field to get him to solve a problem. I find I keep returning to the interns. Someone's children — someone's actual, treasured children — spent their summer being paid, if they were paid at all, to staple flyers to a fence, when they might instead have spent that same summer developing a personality, or learning to sail, or simply lying somewhere pleasant and being young, which is a limited resource, unlike, apparently, nonprofit organizations, which appear to be limitless.

I want to say, too, because I think it is important and because I am nothing if not fair, that the performers themselves are clearly extraordinary and generous in the way they meant it, and Ms. Rodrigo especially — I am told she is quite talented, and I believe it, I have no reason not to, and organizing an entire festival out of nothing, from scratch, with her own two hands, so to speak, is the kind of initiative I find myself almost admiring, the way one admires a dog that has taught itself to open a difficult latch. It's not that the latch needed opening by the dog. It's that the dog didn't know there was another way, and so it worked terribly hard, and now it is very proud, and one doesn't want to be the one to explain to the dog about door handles. I simply think it is worth someone, somewhere, gently mentioning that "community celebration" and "shared purpose" are, ultimately, luxuries invented by people who have run out of the much simpler option, which is calling home. The poors do this, I've noticed, endlessly — they build things. Committees. Bake sales. Festivals with names like fields of daisies. Elaborate, beautiful, collaborative structures, entirely to produce an outcome that already exists, quietly, in a drawer in Father's study, in the form of a checkbook he has told me, more than once, not to leave sitting out where the dog can get at it.

So here is where I have landed, and I say this with the specific, weary generosity of someone who has genuinely thought this through: it was, I am sure, a lovely day. Community was, I'm told, felt. Joy, allegedly, occurred. And if it must occur again next year — "inaugural" does rather imply it will — I do hope someone considers, gently, as a friend, that there is a version of this where nobody has to build a stage at all, you know? One simply asks. I remain, as ever, disappointed on everyone's behalf but my own,

Cynthia