It is a football field’s distance between The Ryman Auditorium and Tootsies in Nashville, Tennessee. It’s a hot and humid Friday night and there is a woman on both stages, playing music.
One woman at The Ryman is standing before 2,000 adoring fans, who are stomping and clapping to the banjo she is playing and the songs she is singing.
The other woman at Tootsies is singing to 400 adoring fans who are stomping, shaking and dripping with joy; but to the songs she did not create.
Mind you, both performers are plenty happy and so is their audiences. This is what they live for, and the results are in the proof pudding.
After all, its not a bad way to make a living either.
But there are still a couple differences rooted above the whiskey drenched concrete.
The Ryman performer spent 20 years to get to this point, and the audience carried pieces of the 20 years of work she put in, right into the venue with them.
The Tootsies crowd had no pieces to bring in. They just showed up. The words sung on that stage are the words sung by others who took the leap.
The Ryman, after all, is just a leap away.
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