You know journo school is doing something right when its documentary film students are churning out videos like this one. My friend passed me this link, which features the brother of a buddy of his (follow that?). The specifics don’t matter, anyway – we’re all connected, and the subject of this film seems to know that, intuitively.
Stephen Gates survived a car accident with an injured brain and a body in pain. He retained his ability to play violin, and play he does – it’s all he wants to do. Stephen will seek meals at a soup kitchen so he can use his grocery money to maintain his instrument (barely, as the bridge is badly warped and the bow is held together with duct tape). He doesn’t care. He doesn’t want fame and fortune, he says. He wants only enough cash to live, and to practise the violin.
In the video, Stephen admires the people he’s met who work not for pay, but to make a difference. Clearly, this ideology resonates with him as well. “My life after [the accident],” he says, “because I had no job, my job was to be a nice person. It was to think about how to do nice things without money.”
You can’t beat a career path like that. Check out “The People’s Violinist,” here.
50 Good Deeds 