My friends had been talking about how great this "art gallery" was for weeks. "It's part art gallery, part concert venue, and it looks like an abandoned building," they said. And they weren't lying. Driving to the benefit concert that night, we passed straight through the parts of Wilmington I had gotten to know over my ten months living here, and into areas I hadn't know existed. Well, that's not exactly true. I knew there had to be something under the big bridge downtown, I just didn't expect it to be an "art gallery." When I show you pictures of this building, you'll understand why I keep putting "art gallery" in quotations. None of us really knew what the benefit concert was for, but one of my favorite bluegrass bands in town was playing and it sounded like an interesting night.
As we pulled underneath the big bridge, with the faint thump of cars driving overhead, a building sat to our left, overlooking the river. From the outside it looked pretty nondescript, white walls, big factory like windows, gravel parking lot. It looked like it had had multiple uses during it's life span, maybe a psychiatric hospital or a hog processing plant (I'm from Eastern North Carolina. We have a lot of hog processing plants, and they all looked pretty similar to this art show/benefit concert I was about to walk into.)
We unloaded from the car, walked past the sign that read "Art Factory," and stepped into the building, hot/muggy air meeting us halfway. Apparently they don't air condition buildings that resemble hog processing plants. A sweet looking elderly lady met us at a folding table set up just inside the entrance, surrounded by concrete. Concrete walls, concrete floors, everything was grey.
She handed us a flyer for the event that read, "Living Will Coalition" at the top. Apparently, in the pursuit of our favorite bluegrass band, we had stumbled onto a benefit for an organization that advocates for people to have a plan for their end of life care. She directed us to the next table covered in pink slips of paper where a large man with lots of tattoos and a pony tail that stretched to his waist asked if we had given any thought to our end of life care and if we might want to go ahead and fill out a living will tonight.
It's an odd feeling, standing inside what appears to be a place where your pork for your last family BBQ was butchered, listening to wagon wheel, talking about how you would like to die. But it was one of those random nights I absolutely loved, good friends, good music, and a good story by the end of the night.
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