Friend a Day – Windy Bowlsby
I’ve known Windy more than half my life, I think. We met at the Renaissance Festival, helped form CONvergence, and have recently done a lot of theatrical collaborations. She is brash and self confident and filled with nearly limitless energy.
Windy and I are very similar and that means we’ve had some epic arguments over the years. It is a testament to our friendship that we have consistently managed to remain friends in spite of those arguments. Because I’m not kidding – they have been epic.
She is someone who is tenacious and will fight with all her might to achieve that which she has set out to do. Be it teaching, roller derby, dancing, singing, costuming, or being a mom, she doesn’t do things halfway. She jumps in with both feet and dares the cosmos to make her fail.
If you know Windy, you know that the cosmos would run and cower in the corner rather than cross her.
Her passion for life and for the things she does are always fun to watch. She’ll drag others along by sheer force of will. I’ve seen her come up with some crazy ideas and my typical response is “if anyone can make this happen, Windy can.”
And you know what? She always makes it happen.
If she’s afraid of failure, she never lets it show. Instead, she will focus her considerable talents on figuring out a way to get it done. If she does fail, she will never fail the same way again.
She also does an amazing Captain Kirk impression. I’m pretty sure Shatner himself would be impressed.
I’m pleased to have been able to call Windy a friend for so many years.
Windy doesn’t have a blog but you should definitely follow her on Twitter and listen to her podcast, Xanadu Cinema Pleasure Dome.
Putting it Together – Friend a Day
Sometimes I think it is hard to look at a good idea someone else had and accept that it is OK to do that thing too.
Image from Levi Weinhagen
In music, that happens all the time. You hear a song that you like and you decide you are going to cover it. As an artist, it is tremendously flattering to have someone cover your music because it means what you wrote something that resonates with someone else.
I’m not talking about music, though. I’m talking about an idea.
My friend Levi Weinhagen started writing a friend a day blog series at the beginning of this year. The goal was simply to write something nice about a person in his life every day for 100 days. I was fortunate enough to have been one of those people.
When he started doing it, I thought it was a great idea. An idea I wished I’d had.
I’m a cynical guy. I try to write jokes for a living. There are many things I do well but being sincerely nice to someone is something that I can handle for an entire sentence. Maybe two.
To write four or five paragraphs of nice about the same person? Now that’s a challenge.
Talking about a challenge means I’m talking about the benefit I derive from such an exercise. The benefit to others is so much more than that. How cool is it to log on to Facebook in the morning and see that someone wrote an entire blog entry just about you? It makes you feel special and important.
And we all deserve to feel special and important every now and again.
Grail Diary 