UPDATE: Awesome!! is canceled due to weather.
Looking for something to do with your Tween and Teen kids tomorrow? Gather up the family and bring them to Nishuane Park for Terry’s Serendipity Café’s Awesome!! Festival. It will be going on all day Saturday.
Terry’s Serendipity Café is an organization run by Baristaville students, with adult volunteer advice and supervision. The café puts together a live musical and artistic event featuring all types of performances and music from classical to rock, from jazz to hip hop. They also have open mic time set aside at each café for people to come up on stage and perform.
Edwin Carine, an adult coordinator of Serendipity Café, spoke with me about this awesome organization and the event recently…
Georgette: What’s the story behind Serendipity Café?
Ed: Serendipity Café was founded in 1995 by a group of Montclair High School students who wanted to do something positive for Montclair after all the negatives of that winter/early spring. They got the Township, through parks & recreation, the Police Department, through Roger Terry, and the general public, such as Charlee Swanson, and Kathryn Weller and the Clergy, to help found a live music/spoken word/poetry/film event, run every month and open to all people who cared to join in. We still run at least one live performance event per month.
Georgette: Tell me about the Festival on Saturday, what can we expect?
Ed: Everything about the AWESOME!! is on the web . There will be performances by local artists, such as Parents Who Rock, Little Kids Rock, Luna Stage and national artists, such as Pearl and the Beard and Ben + Vesper. There will be skateboard demos, graffiti art, auctions, and much more!
Serendipity Café’s Awesome!! Festival
Who: Kids and parents who like cool music and art.
What: Festival of music, skateboard demos, graffiti art, auctions, crafts and food.
Where: Nishuane Park, 240 Orange Road, Montclair, NJ, 07042.
When: Saturday, April 11 from 11:00 a.m. – 9:00 p.m. (Rain date 4/18)
Cost: Free
Have you attended a Serendipity Café performance? Will you be going today?
What were “all the negatives of that winter/early spring.”?
I wish Ed would have done a better job at explaining the history of the group. He needs to study Parents Who Rock who are always very clear in its mission and who it is.
And have they decided to not speak about who Terry was?
His story is not here or on the website.
Strange that there is a proper name in the title of the cafe, yet no mention of who the person is….
Negative = the post office shooting, which happened in March 1995.
And so my point neighbor is, why couldn’t Carine say that?
Much like our Magnet School System and why we have it, it is imperative for folks in the position of Mr. Carine to articulate things so the new members of the community (and others) understand what he’s talking about.
Instead of putting everything under the catch-all, dumb rubric of “all the negatives”…..
When folks fail to explain the proper history of things, folks then question why it exists— witness all the dumb statements on baristanet/watercooler about the Magnet System.
Witness the oddity of the lack of explanation of who “Terry” is…
Maybe it was Terry’s family who chose to have limited information on website.
Well, fine.
But then say that.
(Regardless, odd, no?)
I agree the history should have been better explained.
Really, if I knew nothing about the cafe and was getting my info from interview alone, I could surmise that the cafe was named after, say, Roger Terry, since he’s the only “Terry” mentioned in the conversation.