Red Light Cafe Presents Penny Grune-Fae, DJ Hollow Life, Edie Roberts, and Factory Lavender 5/10/18

Thursday was a strange day. I met my friend Mullarkey at their apartment in St. Pete and we drove to Ybor City together to see our friends Penny and Joe play at the Bunker. I felt weird and soft and fuzzy all day so I decided to photograph everything that day and night to reflect how I felt. I used a plastic Diana+ Super Wide lens (although still way too narrow in my opinion) on my Canon DSLR, with a purple gel rubber-banded to the front. 

When we arrived we spent a few minutes speaking to the roosters and hens that were hanging out across the street from the Bunker. Ybor City famously has many chickens roaming its streets.

Edie Roberts
Edie Roberts performed first. They did spoken word and their face and hands were very expressive and full of emotion, their voice broke a few times as if choked by tears, and what they read was very moving. It matched my mood and I lost myself in their words. 

Penny Grune-Fae
Penny played next. I feel like Penny probably always plays the way she is feeling. Maybe I'm wrong. It's just that it usually feels personal to me, and it feels like her personality. It feels genuine. Her set on Thursday had that strange mix of happy and sad which touched me because again, it matched my mood somehow. Was everyone just vibing with me or was I searching for a mirror within them? It was like seeing the face on Mars.
I don't know if that matters, really. It was still communication. 

DJ Hollow Life/Joe Billingsley
played after Penny and was great and made me go inside my head for a while and one of the things he played was written during and about our last big hurricane and it was funny and I laughed but it also struck me deep inside because I remembered feeling the way
​he was describing in this song. 

Factory Lavender
was last and were amazing. I didn't want their set to end. It was funky and drummy and shouty and twitchy and I-don't-care-y. The Big Feelings it made caused me almost to cry, but everything that day was sort of making me cry or almost cry, like I was having every emotion at the same time like a tidal wave hitting me inside. It's good to cry sometimes. It's so good to experience peoples' expressions of themselves in words or in music when it is so sharp and right that it goes straight into your heart like a pin and stays there.