"Jazz Parade for Democracy"interview with Nancy DeWitt
Nancy DeWitt was the co-creator (with Isabelle McMahon) of Indivisible Charlottesville's "Jazz Parade for Democracy" (staged November 1, 2025). Nancy, a retired elementary school teacher, was relatively new to political activism. She talks in-depth about the creative process that made her collaboration with Isabelle so successful, and how the idea for the production evolved into a complex 90-minute outdoor extravaganza featuring 2 choirs, a marching band, and 30 costumed actors with props.
Nancy in red T-shirt at the right (Photo by Rebecca George Photography, used by permission)
Dan Doernberg: Had you ever written a play before?
Nancy: I had never written a play before. I had written some poetry many years in the past, and kept a journal on and off through my life. Expressing myself through writing was something that was always meaningful to me... BA in English… Master's in English from UVA… as well as a long career as an elementary school teacher. So as I thought about it, I realized that my love of language and literature and drama and storytelling is a thread that just runs throughout my life. But no, I had never written a play before, this one just evolved. As Isabelle and I remarked sometimes when things were crazy; “We feel like we're riding a wild horse, and sometimes it lets us have the reins, and other times it doesn't, and it kind of runs on its own.” So we joked about that numerous times throughout, to reduce the stress that we did feel sometimes, but it was a new experience for me. Very worthwhile.
Dan: Always growing, always learning; that's a good way. Did you do your teaching in Charlottesville?
Nancy: Mostly in Albemarle County. I was a special ed teacher to start out with. At some point when I was burning out a little bit on special ed I did think about becoming an art teacher. It runs in my family, and my mom was good at the visual arts, and I have a sister who had an academic career as a professional photographer, and I thought art teaching might be a way to go. I actually took some classes in it, but never actually tried a position as an art teacher, but arts and music and literature and drama have always been, at least in my mind and my emotions, a big part of my life.
[1:36] Dan: Political groups, activist groups… any past involvement before IC [Ed.— Indivisible Charlottesville]?
Nancy: My first taste of political involvement was during my undergraduate years at the University of Alabama, where I participated in some of the political protests against the Vietnam War, but at that time, I was just a member of the crowd, not a member of any organized activist group. And then through the years, I've always thought of myself as a progressive, but I've never been a member of a political party. I always tended to vote Democrat, but didn't become politically active until February of this year, when I attended my first rally in Richmond at the State House, in response to my concern about what was happening with the new Trump Administration, and seeing that they were going to move quickly to do the things they wanted to do. And so I just knew I had to get involved.
[2:28] And so soon after that, I looked for some like-minded people in Charlottesville and somehow I found Indivisible, but I found myself in my first political Zoom meeting. I think you were there. I think Joe was there. Then I didn't know any of the participants, but I was glad I had found my people, because I could see that everybody there was kind of saying, “We’ve got to do something here.” At that time, I had my hair on fire about it, and my memory of it [Ed.—was that] people were debating back and forth: should we have a rally, or should we wait? And I was like, “Have a rally, have a rally, I'll come!” So the rest is history. I found my people, and am so happy to have done so.
[3:09] Dan: Oh yeah, your contributions have been huge all the way throughout, so we're glad you did. Do you remember what group it was, or how you wound up in Richmond?
Nancy: I saw it I guess on social media, I think it was 50501 was going to have a rally at the State House. I didn't know anybody else that was as upset about it as I was. And so I just bought two pieces of poster board and made a couple of signs and jumped in my car and just drove to the State House and joined all those other people.
Dan: You and John Smith were the two big proponents for “Indivisible Charlottesville needs a band!”, right?
Nancy: Yeah. We had gotten involved with you and Joe with the political rally planning group [Ed.— Indivisible Charlottesville’s Public Protests and Rallies, aka PP&R], and it would come up occasionally there, and then I learned about Signal. I was in several Signal groups, and we had people that talked about. I really can't remember who started the IC band Signal group [Ed.— Kristin Szakos]. It wasn't me, because I don't know how to start a Signal chat, but it was back in the late spring. John and I were both enthusiastic and frequent posters on that chat, sharing musical clips and wondering about the idea of having people who love music just gather informally on the Downtown Mall; we weren't thinking of it in terms of a huge production at all, we just thought, “Let's get some people together.” Music in the past has always been a big part of protest movements, back to the labor movement with Woody Guthrie and people like that. You know, always seem to come up with music, the folk, the music of folk protest. I knew the history of that. And as a progressive, I always appreciated the way they used music in the labor movement and back through the years, and political songs from when I was in college. Bob Dylan was an inspiration to me in those days.
[4:57] And so I just thought, maybe get some people together. Maybe we'll meet at the [Charlottesville] Free Speech Wall, march around a bit, do some percussion or some kazoos (because neither of us could play a musical instrument, but we just love music)! So trying to find a way to just bring some joy and movement, maybe some dance, some just some fun involvement, rather than just being, you know, all serious and channeling our upset about what was happening on the national scene in a more joyful way. These are the things that John and I talked about or envisioned.
[5:28] Isabelle and I had met back in the spring as two of the founding members of the Charlottesville Visibility Brigade, which was also an offshoot of the rally planning group, just a smaller group of like-minded people who wanted to be very active in-between rallies; we just really like to get out there on bridges and overpasses and shout to the world what was going on and get people to pay attention. I'm still active in that; in fact, we have a deployment this afternoon.
As I got to know Isabelle, I admired her can-do spirit and her activist mentality, her quest for excellence in the way we developed and improved our signage for the Visibility Brigade and our deployments.
[6:11] Isabelle and I had both seen some of the Instagram posts of people from Europe and America having what they called “funerals for democracy”; dressing in all black clothes and carrying signs or fake tombstones and playing a dirge. And we watched a couple of those, and we both found that idea and its presentation to be very powerful, and we knew that we could do something similar. So as we talked about presenting some kind of funeral march, and transforming it in some way, we started bouncing ideas off each other and slowly evolved the idea of what we wanted to do.
At first, as I said, it was all in the heads of the two of us. And then at some point, I think Isabelle as I remember, started by writing down a kind of bare bones outline for what we had talked about. And then it developed.
[7:04] Isabel being the amazing organizational spirit that she is, immediately began contacting other people and bringing in other possible players, trying to reach out to get other people interested. Other people became interested through that IC Band chat and through just people that we knew. So when we knew for sure that we had John D’Earth’s commitment to be involved as musical director, Isabelle called a group of us for a meeting at her house about it, and we sat around her kitchen table, and, oh, the ideas were flying in all different directions! And there was some, I don't want to say dissent, but you know, among everybody there, there were different directions they all seemed to want to go. So John finally said, “I need to see a script, you have got to write it down!” So Isabelle said, “Nancy, that's your job.” So I was happy to take that job.
John D'earth leading the band during "Jazz Parade for Democracy" (Photo by Rebecca George Photography, used with permission)
[8:00] And so from there, I sketched out — from the creative, dramatic point of view — what I thought could happen. But we went through many drafts, so many that I lost count, just communicating back and forth with Google Docs to develop it as it grew. She always seemed to have good ideas for, “Oh, we could do this to make it easier… we could do this to make it better.” I just appreciated somebody who always took the initiative to come up with ideas for making things better or more streamlined or more impactful. Whatever it was, she always seemed to have good ideas.
[8:37] The interesting dynamic that developed between Isabelle and myself: she thinks very logically and precisely… and organization and structure, all that, as you know, from knowing her… come very naturally to her, and she's very skillful at that. I recognized her as the leader of the project, because I knew I didn't have the organizational skills to bring it all together on such a grand scale, and she did. So I feel like we worked well with each other there. I tend to think more intuitively, more in images, and in my mind, I see scenes of actions that are dramatic and tied to emotions. And so in our discussions, each of us brought that part of ourselves to the way it developed.
And most of the time we could play off each other's strengths there, but sometimes it wasn't easy. Looking back, I guess I like to be open to changing things that we've decided. If I get a new idea that I think would work better, dramatically, for instance, and that I hadn't thought of before, before we set a certain structure in place, and then she might say, “No, we can't do that, because the structure is already there. And if we change that part, we'll have to change these other things too, and that just won't work in the time that we have available to prepare and to make the event happen.” So that was a little frustrating to me. But then there were other times where I would say, “No, Isabelle, we really need to put this part in, because if we don't, it won't have the emotional impact, or it won't make sense in terms of the dramatic transformation that needs to take place.” And then at those times, she would understand and she would bend a little bit and say, “OK, we'll find a way to put that in.” We, you know, we had our back and forths.
[10:29] Those tombstones in particular… we saw how powerful they were [Ed.—in others’ videos]. I remember having a discussion with Isabelle and saying, “Isabelle, we just got way too many tombstones, I don't think we're going to get enough people to carry them… and visually, it's probably just too many.” And she said, “No, every tombstone has on it a right or a freedom that has been threatened or taken away. People need to see that, and carrying them through the Mall, and having people… maybe people who hadn’t been paying attention enough to know how many things actually were threatened... each tombstone was a tangible reminder of that.”
[11:03] From the beginning, we knew we didn't want to do just the funeral part, it was just too bleak and too somber. We wanted there to be, I at least had in my mind at that time, an element of transformation and redemption to whatever we would eventually develop. And then, when we were able to get John D’Earth to come onboard as our musical director, he was adamant that he did not want just a funeral. He seemed also to be at the same place we were at emotionally and mentally, wanting it to be a transformative thing to model action and transformation of the negativity of the moment into something positive.
[11:37] [Ed.—- As far as] old ideas that we initially liked… I can't really think that there were. As I said, new ideas would come in from time to time. As a perfectionist, I wanted it to be as perfect as it could be, but as we brought in more and more people, and these people got involved and had their own ideas, then I knew that we all had to work together to make it happen in the time frame that we had, because we had already committed to the November 1 date. I think we had almost a month. But even that was not enough time from my perspective, as far as [Ed.—being] as perfect as I would like it to be, but it turned out to be very effective, nevertheless.
Dan: Oh my God, absolutely.
Nancy: So that was some of the creative process, stuff that went on kind of behind the scenes.
Dan: When did these conversations start? When was John D’earth invited in? Some stuff happened in September, or was it even happening earlier, like in August?
[12:38] Nancy: No, not as early as August, and in September…, maybe she and I were talking about it, but hadn't really initiated anything. Or at least I had not, maybe she had, you know Isabelle… but I had not. We were just talking about it, seems like it was around October 1. We had that meeting at her house with John. And at that time, as you recall, we had No Kings [Ed.— 2.0] coming up in mid-October [Ed.— October 18]. And then there was even a talk that another event would take place at McIntire Park. Remember, where there was all that flux going on and different people having different ideas. And. And we got kind of scared about our project, because we said, Oh no, how are we going to get what we need to put this on with limited resources and people's involvement with different things? But then it all worked out. The McIntire Park event kind of receded into the future, and I hope is still in the future to come. And we did, did our part for No Kings as best we could. At the same time, in those first two weeks of October during the planning for No Kings, we also were working and beginning to gather people and props and ideas together, at least that's my memory of how it developed.
[13:54] So once No Kings was in the books, we started intensively working together. You know, we went to Wonderground and one of their practices, and met their people, and, you know, kind of forged our bonds with them. That's how we found Emily, whom we did not know beforehand.
I think what was really just magical to me was once we got it started, it's like talented people just came out of the woodwork and we were just able to find them, or they just appeared serendipitously, to help us bring our vision to life. As I said, we had those four main people: Sage, Rich, Dana, and Emily were the four main actors. Of course, we had many wonderful people, but they in particular were key to just pulling it all off dramatically and visually.
Sage Bradburn imploring the spectators for help (Photo by Rebecca George Photography, used with permission)
[14:44] We knew we wanted to work with Sage at the beginning, because we had seen her in her role as Lady Liberty at the Science rally back in the fall or No, back in whenever it was that we had that science rally in the spring, she and Mary Stewart and that group of people, we I had seen them then in the little drama that they put on where Lady Liberty is sick. And so Isabelle and I said to each other, when this idea came up, “We have got to have Sage again to reprise her role as Lady Liberty.” And she was willing. And what a tour de force in her role. The traditional masks in the classical Greek drama of tragedy and comedy, the one very sad and the one very happy. I just thought she just evoked the whole range of emotions in between those two poles of from tragic to joyful comedy and just embodied the transformation that I hoped would be seen in the production. She was just key to bringing that about. I just can't say enough about what a wonderful, wonderful job. She just inhabited that role so beautifully.
Dan: Oh, she was great, she really was.
Rich Leahy, the First Activist, rallying support from the spectators (Photo by Rebecca George Photography, used with permission)
[15:55] Nancy: I also want to shout out Rich Leahy. Neither Isabelle nor I knew him. Jillian had met him at a postcard writing event or something. And she knew his personality was such that he probably had been involved before in some theater things. I was so glad to have him in that that a role of the first activist, because when he showed up to do our practice in the event space on the Mall, there was the first that I had met him, and as soon as I saw what he was able to do, I just said, yes, the universe has sent us this person who's going to be take over this key role. At first Isabelle kind of assigned me that role, and, you know me, kind of a shy person and like to be in the background of things, and… I was having to “screw my courage to the sticking place”, to quote Shakespeare, to take on that role, and was not really wanting to do it. But when he came and was just so willing and so capable, we said, “OK, he's the First Activist.” And then I just got to do that little part where he called on me, and I held up the tombstone, and he said, “Is this what we want?” And I was like, “NO!”... so that worked out real well.
[17:08] Dana Palmer, also a founding member of our Visibility Brigade group and is very active with us, had a Grim Reaper costume and volunteered out of the blue for the role. And when Isabelle told me that she had volunteered, at first, I was like, “Wait a minute, I didn't envision a villain role…how is this going to work? Is it going to work?” I wanted it to be dramatic, but I didn't want it to be melodramatic to the point where people would laugh and say, “Oh, this is just a silly little.” You know how it's so easy for a villain in a dramatic role, if they don't play it right, to land wrong. So I was hesitant, but then she met with us in the space and she showed how she would interact with Rich. And earlier, Isabelle and I also thought of a way that she could interact with Sage during the sad mourning procession; the Grim Reaper would lurk around, kind of stalking and bullying her. And again, I was a little worried it was going to be too melodramatic, but they both played it perfectly; it hit the right emotional tone.
[18:39] The last person I want to talk about is Emily. With about 10 days to go, we were getting to the point where we were like, “Oh, are we going to be able to pull this off in the time that we have?” And so Isabelle said “We've got to go to the Wonderground practice and see what songs they're planning and how they're going to do the songs. And we want John [Ed.—D’earth] to come too, because he's the musical director. And we've just got to try to pull some things together. And so we went out to the little church where Wonderground practices. We kind of sat in the background as their group gathered, and then when they were ready to begin, they said, “Y'all can't sit back there in the back, come on up here with us.” So they made room for us and for me and Isabelle. And at that point, we had involved Susan McCully already in the choreography. Susan came with us that night, and Rich showed up that night, so the four of us were kind of enfolded into their practice that night. And we all had a very productive exchange between John and the Wonderground folks. Craig as their leader, of course, and Cleo and most of the people there, there must have been 20 something people there, most of whom we didn't know, but we sat with them in a big circle and talked about it and practiced the songs, and the four of us sang along with them, and just had a wonderful exchange.
Wonderground Singers performing (Photo by Rebecca George Photography, used with permission)
[19:59] And then at some point, John said, “You know what? We need a parade leader.” I always love creative ideas, but then when I'm under the gun, I'm kind of like, “Oh no, another role that we need to try to incorporate here; How is this going to work? Is it going to work?” And so people were looking around the room, and several people said, “Hey, Emily, how about you?” And I didn't know who Emily was, but I looked at the person they were all looking at and talking to, and she was sitting there with this funny little smile on her face. And then she said, “Sure, why not? I'll do it.”
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Emily Little leading the parade during Act 1: Mourning (Photo by Rebecca George Photography, used with permission) |
Emily Little (far left) during Act 3: Join the Movement ((Photo by Rebecca George Photography, used with permission) |
And I still don't know what, if any background she has that she had brought to the role… because John was talking about, “You remember back in high school, where the high school band would play, and then you have the drum major out in front in the big, fancy outfit carrying the baton, to kind of keep the time of the music and keep everybody marching well.” So we kind of conceived it in that role, as a kind of a parade leader. And so we just decided, OK, we'll put her out in front. We need somebody to kind of pace the group anyway and make sure we get down the mall and back, you know, all together. And so she was willing to do that, and she showed up that day in her black outfit, black from head to foot, except those little red socks you can see peeking out at the bottom. And it was her job to carry the flag.
[21:22] Isabelle and I had decided we would wrap the flag in chains, because there was some talk about carrying the flag upside down and a debate, on the Signal Band chat about that; some people saying, “Yes, it's got to be upside down because we're in distress about this.” And then I was making the point that, “No, wait a minute, we don't want to alienate people.” I've carried the flag upside down many times, and I always carry it upside down in our Visibility [Ed.—Brigade] actions. But I did not want that to happen in this parade, because I knew the public would be on the Downtown Mall, and there might be people among us who were upset.
In fact, I will tell you there was a little incident. I can't remember whether I told the group about it in PP&R or not, but we had done an initial practice, just Rich and Isabelle and myself in that octagonal space near the Omni [Ed.—hotel], the Whiskey Jar [Ed.— restaurant], the CODE Building [Ed.— new office building]. And we had brought one of the tombstones that she had just randomly picked, the one that said “No vaccines” or something, and we were using it as we tried to think through how the action was going to take place in that space. At some point, a stranger walked by and read that tombstone, and from about 10 feet away, he started yelling at us, and he said, “My dad died of cancer about a month after he got that covid vaccine and F y'all” and then he turned and walked off And we all looked at each other like, “Uh-oh.”
[22:47] At the Dollar Tree, we had seen and had picked up the chains to wrap Lady Liberty in. So we got some little pieces of those chains and wrapped the flag in it for Emily to carry at the head of the parade. And that, I think, made a tremendous statement with her all in black, with her parade baton, being the big American flag wrapped in chains. It was, I thought, just genius in the way that developed. So she was great on the way down, in the mourning part. And then I did not even see her transformation after we had ripped the pieces of paper off the signs, and we all threw the signs into the coffin and took off our black clothes and threw that into the coffin while we were all singing and dancing to Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around. And so I was all involved in that, and enjoying it, but also trying to make sure that it was going to go off as planned…. And then suddenly I saw her just dancing out across the space in what appeared to be a combination of Dr. Seuss and Uncle Sam.
Dan: Wonder Woman!
[23:58] Nancy: Wonder Woman, yeah. She had “USA” pinned to her cape, and she had on that Dr. Seuss hat, and she was just cavorting, dancing all around the space. And then, of course, she and Sage, Lady Liberty, who had had her chains taken off by Rich at that point, and Dana, as the Grim Reaper, had been chained with the same chains and dragged off the stage to the side and was sitting in defeat on the sidelines. And so Emily and Lady Liberty and Rich were all just dancing around. And it was just magical, and I just could never have imagined when we first planned it, that that those key players would just inhabit their roles so beautifully and take on the idea of the going from the mourning to the call to action to the celebration, that feeling that you get when, when you do decide, I'm going to do something about this as an American, I'm going to speak out in the public space, or move in the public space to declare, you know, that this is what needs to happen in our society, in our in our country. And they were just such a wonderful part of having that happen.
[25:17] And there were many others too.
The part I took was one of my fellow tombstone carriers, and I did a great job, too.
Again, we didn't know exactly how we would pull it off.
We knew what our action would be, that we would walk slowly, appearing to mourn, holding up the tombstone showing what freedom of our country was being threatened, whether it was free speech or loss of benefits or whatever it was, and so I was carrying mine that said, “Rest in peace, Democracy.”
But as John began to play his dirge that he had adapted for the occasion, from something he had composed many years ago, it kind of took over the whole group of us.
We had it in the script that if the tombstone carriers felt like it, they could sing along or appear to mourn or cry out… and it was very powerful.
The music was kind of echoing there in that space, [off] the walls of the Mall as we were walking along, and we could see the solemn faces of the people, of course, holding up their cell phones to take pictures of it, and looking very thoughtful and kind of moved.
And the tombstone carriers started kind of singing along with the dirge, just wailing and crying out.
And I looked back briefly behind me to see how everybody was doing.
And some of them had out tissues and actually were crying as they marched.
So again, just the powerful group energy that was generated surprised me; not that it would happen, because I wanted it to happen, but the depth and intensity and power of it was just really beautiful.
So I want to shout out to our tombstone carriers too, because they really got into their role and added to the power of the performance.
Dan: And most of that wasn't really rehearsed. They had some general cues and just improvised it.
[27:14] Nancy: Yeah, Isabelle had had meetings, some of which I was involved in, with various participants. We let John handle the musicians. We didn't have meetings in advance with them, and he handled it beautifully. But we did have meetings with, as I said, Wonderground. We stayed in close touch with the Charlottesville Women's Choir, who also were presenting songs, to make sure that they were all good and understood what they were to do. I drew a map in advance of the space showing where everybody would march into what I call the Omni space, the octagonal space where they would stand and then where they would exit to on the way back. But we had never had an actual rehearsal with the whole group of people. We wanted to, but again, Isabelle said, I know we just don't have time for that, and so I'm going to arrange these smaller meetings with the different groups of participants. So we had met, met in advance with the pallbearers, had their own little meeting of what they were going to do. They did a great job. As I said, I think that the tombstone carriers had their separate meeting, but not an actual rehearsal, per se. The script suggested that they could mourn or cry out if they wanted to, and, boy, they got into it. Like I said, it all came together in an amazing way.
[28:37] Dan: It sure did. So how were you feeling the night before, the day of, the day after? Where were you during all this, emotionally?
Nancy: As the whole thing developed, you know, there were ups and downs, there were hiccups and you know, then somehow it would all get handled. We would get back to being confident again and carrying on again. For me, at least during the last two days before the whole thing, I was pretty calm. I felt like, again, hats off to Isabelle for all her advanced planning and her ability to think about the structure of everything that was involved organizationally, where people would need to be, how the props and costumes would be distributed on that day…. oh, the dance rehearsals. Susan McCulley, the choreographer, had prepared a video in advance with the movements that people were to make on the stage, and so that was distributed to the potential participants who were going to be the tombstone carriers, who would then transform into the dance of activism, I guess we would call it, during Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around – the movements that they would make. And then our next song would be This Little Light of Mine, where they had already transformed and had seen the vision of the positive future, and their part in it. We had the little tea lights; that was my idea, everybody had a little tea light in their packet that they got when they got their tombstone and their costume, and so they were able to pull those out. But again, none of that we had been able to practice in advance. So that all happened pretty seamlessly, I think, and pretty well.
[30:20] But as far as how I was feeling… the two days prior, I was like, “Okay, we got this.” We don't have everything ironed out. There are a couple of little things I'm not sure how they're going to go, but overall we were feeling pretty good. But I know we both had dreams the night before about it… had a little trouble sleeping…
Dan: I bet.
Nancy: My dream was that we had to have a Visibility Brigade banner in the parade. I remember in my sleep, I was running around saying to people, “Oh, we forgot to put the Visibility Brigade banner in the parade.” And they were looking at me puzzled, like, “We're not gonna do that. That's not what we're gonna do.” And I was like, “Yes, yes, we've got to do that.” But when I woke up, I was like, “OK, just calm down. Everything's going to be fine.”
[31:04] And then, of course, that day, even though we had prepared in advance and had all the props in the proper place and the little packages to pass out to the people, there were little hiccups. You know, certain people didn't show up, and then other people stepped in: “Sure, I'll put on a black outfit and carry a tombstone and do what y’all do. Okay, just tell me where to be and what to do.”
Dan: That was the day of, just last minute…
[31:29] Nancy: Last minute stuff, yeah, just trying to pass out the costumes and get everybody into the costumes. They had to put them on over their heads, and get them adjusted, and then put something on their heads; the men could put on hats, but the women had to wear mantillas that Catholics, especially Hispanic Catholics/Latino Catholics wear on their heads when they go to Mass. We had those and put on and get fixed, and then we had to hide the beads underneath. Everybody was told to wear colorful clothing underneath this costume that we would give them, and we wanted to add to that by giving them beads that they were supposed to tuck down under their costumes. So all these things were planned, and we were trying to carry them out.
[32:12] And of course, people were asking questions at the last minute we had a last minute practice. Susan gathered together all the people who had arrived early because they wanted a little last minute practice, and we were doing some last minute practice on the [Ed.—dance] moves that the people had looked at in the video. But there were still questions: “Wait a minute, what are we going to do when? What's happening there?” I realized a lot of people were still not understanding, even though we had tried real hard to explain, explain in advance, that a lot of people were still not understanding. So I was kind of like, “OK, we don't have a complete understanding here of what we're going to do, but we're just we gotta do it, so let's do it.” So that's what we did.
[32:51] Once it started, I knew it was all going well, as I said, because I could see the faces of the people who were watching, and I could feel the power of it in myself and in the other marchers and in the music. And so I knew it was going to just carry on, and it did.
So afterward, just a feeling of… just relief, we just pulled it off… and gratification that it did move people. It did have a powerful effect on people that we hoped it would, apparently, to an even greater degree than we had thought possible.
Dan: A huge success.
[33:25] Nancy: Beyond our wildest dreams, as they say. I think that's a Moody Blues quote, isn't it?
Dan: Yeah… that was [Ed.— hums “Dah Dah, Dah Dah]...I can't remember how it goes…
Nancy: “Thinking about our fortunes… that we’re really not to blame.”
Dan: In Search of the Lost Chord, I think.
[33:39] Nancy: Yeah, and I'm gonna get emotional! [Ed.— she chokes up] The Lost Chord, yeah, that's great, [Ed. — Dan was wrong, the song is The Story in Your Eyes], l love it:
“Listen to the tide slowly turning.
Push all our heartaches away.
We're part of the fire that is burning
From the ashes we will build another day.”
What could be greater than that?
Dan: Had you been thinking of that song?
[33:58] Nancy: I'd been thinking a lot [Ed.—about] the old songs from my earliest protest days. Buffalo Springfield, For What It's Worth, you know Stephen Still's song about…
Dan: Police riots in LA.
Nancy:
“There's something happening here.
What it is ain't exactly clear.”
[34:13] Because they brought in the National Guard at the University of Alabama, and we played it a lot, because, you know, “There's a man with a gun over there.” It was my junior year when Kent State, with those four people killed by the National Guard. And we had National Guard on our campus, so who knew what was going to happen? Luckily, there wasn't more carnage than that at the time. And anyway, I bring that up to say that many of the songs that were popular in those days came back to me as we were planning this.
Dan: Now that it's done, how are you feeling about it?
Nancy: Tired, I will say… Looking back on it for me, the whole process was a tremendous personal growth experience, doing something that I never dreamed that I would do, and doing it successfully, and seeing that I can work together with other people to make a difference in people's lives for the good. So it was a labor of love.
Dan: Well, clearly no regrets.
Nancy: Oh no, no regrets at all.
Dan: The first effort was a real “hit it out of the park”; win one for the good guys!
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