The Show Must Go On

It is summer concert time...grab your friends, load up the bus and head out to the sun drenched venue to see your favorite national act perform. Everything is perfect: great music, wonderful weather and a sense of community...the feeling of a group people leaving their troubles aside for a while. Then everything stops and chaos ensues.

The good times put on hold by the terror of a concert goer jumping to his death onto the stage.

This was the scene at the Saratoga Mountain Winery a few short weeks ago. An event that will change the way people view music and their cherished escape to it forever. The band left the stage and a community of love dissolved into a paranoid rush to the exits...what just happened?

Possibly the most unfortunate take away from this event is that the man who died by suicide on that evening was cast off as a criminal. His mental illness and the misunderstood pain of his existence cast aside.

In recent years the following people have died by suicide:
Mark Linkous
Hunter S Thompson
Vic Chesnutt
Elliot Smith

They join countless others of every age group, culture and place in society. The evening at Saratoga Mountain Winery and the fallen notable performers bring the epidemic of suicide to the unfortunate masses.

There is a stigma to suicide. An unspoken sense of disappointment for all who have fallen. An effort to dismiss rather than to understand. Dark secrets covering the elements of a life undiscovered.

What can be done?

All I can tell you is I have lost a few close Friends...people who filled any room they walked into with extraordinary confidence...and then they were gone.

All that I know is that each and every one of us is infinitly complex in our own uncatagorical way. That our actions and feelings often fool us, so how could we be understood by others?

We Are Trying...

The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention is an organization dedicated to finding a way to stop the stigma. To educate in a pro-active manner, to bring secrets out into the open, to save lives.

I want to ask you for one dollar. To look at this page and acknowledge accordingly. Everything helps....

Please Visit Our Donation Page...

We Need Your Help!

Thank you for reading!

Dave and Friends