Dream Beyond: My Letter to the Creatives Staying in New Orleans

In 2001, I took an unpaid internship with Hidden Beach Recordings.

Nobody paid me. I need to say that plainly because of everything I have written about creatives deserving compensation. I know the tension. I lived the tension. But that internship still gave me something I carry to this day, and I am not going to pretend it didn’t shape who I became.

I met Jill Scott. I met Mike Phillips. I met Jeff Bradshaw. Being in rooms with artists at that level cracked something open in me. It showed me what was possible when talent met vision and got the machine behind it to match.

But the highlights are not what stuck with me the most.

What stuck with me was the work. The collaborative, in the trenches, figure it out together work with Terence Thatch, Kym Stewart, Teisha McKie, and Ethan Johnson. That’s where I actually learned the craft. Not from being starstruck in a room with somebody famous, but from grinding alongside people who were building something and letting me build it with them.

That’s the part I want to talk to you about. Because I left after that. I lived in Houston. I lived in Brooklyn. I lived in DC. I chased opportunity outside of New Orleans for years, and I don’t regret it.

It was my relationship with Ethan Johnson that brought me to Brooklyn. That relationship, built from the same collaborative work I learned at Hidden Beach, is what led us to create Luv & Learn Your Hair with Taren Guy. Our first event was free. We forgot to set a maximum number on Eventbrite. Hair Rules Salon could only fit 200 people. Over 1200 showed up. We had to bring Taren outside into the New York cold just so she could address the crowd. We were doing the thing, and then things happen.

But that’s the same thing that happens when you build real relationships and do real work together. We went on to create and win proposals with Vita Coco, L’Oreal, Hairfinity, Motions Salon, and Hair Rules Salon. That didn’t come from me alone. It came from the relationship. It came from the collaboration.

While in Brooklyn, I would go to Anthony Mackie’s bar NoBar to watch Saints games. Anthony actually remembered me from the coffee shop I worked at in New Orleans, before he was Captain America. I met another native New Orleanian, Asante Amin, who was working with Ethan’s friend Chen Lo on an incredible project named Soundtrack 63. Our people show up in the most unexpected rooms, in every city, carrying our city with them.

But this letter isn’t for the ones who are leaving.

This is for the ones staying.

For the creatives who love this city too much to abandon it. Who want to build here, grow here, and figure out the machine here, together with the people already standing next to you.

Here’s what I learned that applies just as much to staying as it does to leaving. I didn’t have the confidence beyond my reality. I could see what was in front of me. I could work hard inside of it. But I could not always imagine past it.

Your imagination has to be bigger than your reality.

That doesn’t mean you have to leave New Orleans to get it. It means you have to stop imagining small just because the infrastructure around you is small. The talent in this city has never been the problem. What’s been missing is creatives deciding to build the machine for each other instead of waiting for somebody to import one.

Terence, Kym, Teisha, Ethan. That collaboration didn’t happen because we were all trying to outshine each other. It happened because we showed up, did the work, and trusted each other with something bigger than any of us could build alone.

That’s what staying and growing with your brethren looks like. You don’t have to leave your city to think bigger. You have to leave the mindset that says only somewhere else can grow you.

Find your Terence. Find your Kym. Find your Teisha and your Ethan, right here, in this city. Build the collaborative in the trenches work with people who are staying too.

Even though I found my people outside of New Orleans, that wasn’t luck. That was The Program. Hidden Beach Recordings had an internship structure that put me in rooms and connected me to collaborators on purpose. That’s the part we have to replicate at home. Not the leaving. The infrastructure that makes the connecting possible in the first place.

If Hidden Beach could build a program that connected me to Terence, Kym, Teisha, and Ethan, New Orleans can build the program that connects our creatives to each other without ever having to leave. Let’s keep our intellectual property at home.

I want to be a part of the solution for our creatives to stay and collaborate with each other.

Now I have to get out and network and be that MF’er to make this happen. We deserve it. The next generation deserves it.

I’ve always had the vision. What I didn’t always have was the gumption to move on it. At 50, I finally do. You’re not what you think. You’re what you do. Let me do.

Dream beyond the size of what New Orleans has offered you so far. Then stay right here and build it bigger, together.