Showing posts with label Kansas City Live Music. Show all posts

Friday, August 21, 2026

FIELD NOTE//The Function of the Behavior | Mannequins for Friends, Cold Sweat Cabin & Reptile House at Soundbite Social

FIELD NOTE// THE FUNCTION OF THE BEHAVIOR

Mannequins for Friends, Cold Sweat Cabin and Reptile House at Soundbite Social
Warehouse on Broadway
Kansas City, Missouri
August 5, 2026

Written by: Alethea Mehdipour- Slightly Feral Media

Humans are forever building rooms and then filling them with things the walls were clearly not designed to contain.

Bass. Sweat. Grief. Joy. Somebody’s entire personality expressed through a guitar pedal.

She likes humans this way. Not polished. Not especially sensible. Gathered together in the dark making something temporary and loud and impossible to keep. The photographs are the data. The evidence something happened.

On this particular Wednesday, the raccoon arrived at Soundbite Social inside Warehouse on Broadway carrying a camera, several lenses, and the remains of a very long day.

The earlier professional habitat remains classified. The small human involved deserves privacy.

The only relevant field note is this: The raccoon had been thoroughly tested. The small human won.

By evening, the internal raccoon operating system was running several processes at once and at least one of them was making a noise nobody could identify.

Camera packed. Shoes on. The humans were gathering. The raccoon went.

This is another thing she has learned. Humans can be exhausting. Humans are also worth showing up for. Especially when they make things together.

The raccoon was wearing a shirt. It read:

It’s all fun and games until someone figures out the function of your behavior.

At the time, this had seemed funny. The universe had apparently been listening. The raccoon does not enjoy making claims without evidence. Unfortunately, the evidence kept getting weirder. The raccoon knows enough behavioral science to be suspicious of the obvious explanation.

What a behavior looks like is not necessarily why it happens.

A human moves toward the stage.Why?

A human leaves the room. Why?

A musician leans toward the crowd. Why?

A raccoon follows an increasingly ridiculous trail involving pyrotechnicians, an algorithm, and a mannequin with hard nipples. Definitely why.

The function is the reason for the behavior. What does it get? What does it change? What disappears? What becomes available?

Behavioral science commonly describes four broad functional categories.

Attention.

Access to items or activities, often called tangible.

Escape.

Automatic reinforcement, often described more casually as sensory.

The categories are useful. Humans, though, remain inconveniently resistant to behaving like diagrams. The same behavior can serve different functions in different contexts. Different behaviors can accomplish the same thing. Sometimes several variables are operating at once. The raccoon appreciates this. She has never trusted a creature that fits too neatly into a chart.

So the plan for the evening became: Observe. Photograph. Collect evidence. Do not diagnose strangers from across the room. Try not to become part of the experiment.

The last item would be a fail.

THE MANNEQUIN INCIDENT

Several days earlier, the raccoon had been in Frontenac, Kansas for fireworks. The crew went to The Pitt. There was a mannequin. The mannequin had hard nipples. This became important later.

Not scientifically important. Probably.

But humans are very good at taking one absurd little detail and carrying it with them until it becomes shared language. Someone notices. Someone laughs. Someone brings it up again twelve hours later. Soon an object that had absolutely nothing to do with anything becomes part of the mythology of the weekend.

The raccoon loves this about humans. They make tiny cultures everywhere they go. A joke becomes a reference. A reference becomes a story. Eventually somebody can say three words and an entire group of humans knows exactly what they mean. Humans collect stories the way raccoons collect shiny things. The raccoon understands.

She returned to Lawrence. The mannequin should have stayed in Frontenac.

It did not.

Suddenly, Mannequins for Friends began appearing in the raccoon’s digital habitat. Suggested posts. Event listings. Social media. Again. And again. And again. The raccoon knows recommendation systems are built from behavior. Clicks. Views. Interactions. Patterns. The raccoon also knows correlation does not equal causation. Still. The timing had become curious. So she looked up the band.

Mannequins for Friends. A three piece rock band from Lawrence, Kansas describing itself through sonic heaviness and head banging grooves. Their own classifications wander through sludge rock, alternative metal, groove rock, heavy psych and post hardcore. Hmmmmmm. The raccoon continued digging. There was a show at Soundbite Social inside Warehouse on Broadway. Home away from home.

Cold Sweat Cabin. Mannequins for Friends. Reptile House. Wednesday night. At some point, coincidence becomes a pattern. At some point after that, the raccoon stops arguing with it and packs the camera.

This is how raccoon destiny works.

FUNCTION ONE ESCAPE

The first band reached the raccoon before the door did.

Cold Sweat Cabin was already playing when she climbed out of Elvira. The sound came through the parking lot warm and thick. Deep maroon. Orange around the edges. The color of an August sunset after the sun itself has gone down but everything it touched is still radiating heat.

The raccoon stopped. Listened.

The building was leaking sunset.

She had not even gone inside yet.

Cold Sweat Cabin is a Kansas City psychedelic and alternative rock band.

Useful classification.

But taxonomy only gets the raccoon so far. The sound did not merely occupy the room. It escaped it. Crossed the parking lot. Found the raccoon. Changed the color of the evening before she ever reached the door.

The raccoon’s classification was simpler A sunset had learned how to use an amplifier. She moved toward it. Which makes escape a slightly ridiculous place to begin.

But behavior is like that sometimes.

Escape is the function when behavior gets something unpleasant to stop, become smaller, arrive later, or become avoidable. Humans do this constantly. Leave the loud room. Move away from the irritating human. Take the long route. Put in earplugs. Remember something suspiciously urgent in the car.

Different behavior. Potentially the same outcome. Make this less. Make this stop.

Not tonight, apparently. The raccoon noticed something under her shoe. A lump. She stopped. Looked down.

Fruit snacks. Of course.

Earlier that day, fruit snacks had been doing respectable work as reinforcers in the raccoon’s professional habitat. A group of them had apparently chosen a second career. By the time the raccoon discovered them, the specimen had collected gravel.

It was no longer particularly fruit snack shaped.

It had become geology.

Scrape. Inspect. Scrape again. Less lumpy. Acceptable.

The raccoon entered Soundbite Social.

Step.

Stick.

Step.

Stick.

Step.

Stick.

The fruit snack had opinions.

At one point the raccoon almost giggled out loud. There was something exquisitely silly about spending the day around reinforcement and then arriving at a Kansas City live music show with an actual reinforcer glued to the bottom of your shoe.

The literature does not prepare you for everything.

Field observation: Escape was available to the raccoon. Escape was apparently less available to the shoe. Going home remained an option. Quiet den. Shoes off. No humans. No amplifiers. No mysterious mannequin trail.

A perfectly respectable raccoon response.

Instead, Cold Sweat Cabin kept pouring maroon through the room.

The raccoon lifted the camera. Interesting light. Click.

Interesting human. Click.

Interesting shape. Move. Click. There.

And then the raccoon noticed the rig. Oh. Now this was interesting. The guitar. The amp. The microphone. The pedalboard. The cables.

Orange. Coily. Coordinated. Everything belonged together.

The raccoon hesitates to use the phrase aesthetically pleasing. There are only certain environments where the raccoon considers this acceptable language. This was one of them. The entire setup was extremely aesthetically pleasing to the raccoon. Suspiciously so. The evidence required closer inspection.

Initial classification: Equipment belonging to the guitarist.

Further observation weakened this hypothesis.

The orange coils were too magnificent.

The pedalboard knew things.

The guitar appeared entirely too comfortable with the arrangement. And the whole system sat there looking coordinated enough to suggest planning beyond ordinary human capability.

The raccoon reviewed the evidence. New hypothesis: The rig may be sentient.

More concerning: It appears to control the human.

In at least one photograph, the being appears to be attempting to lure the raccoon closer.

A classic strategy. Use beautiful colors. Create curiosity. Wait for the raccoon to approach voluntarily. The raccoon recognizes a trap. The raccoon is also forced to document an inconvenient fact. The colors are excellent. Obviously this is what the human uses to summon the guitar gods. There is no other reasonable explanation. Further research is recommended. Possibly from closer range. The raccoon accepts this risk for science.

Now we have another problem. If leaving would have produced escape, what was being produced by staying? The photograph, perhaps. The sound. Curiosity. The relief of letting somebody else make the noise for a while. A suspicious guitar system. Several things can be true at once. Humans do this. Raccoons too.

The raccoon stayed. The shoe occasionally stayed half a second longer.

Science continued.

FUNCTION TWO ATTENTION

By the time Mannequins for Friends took the stage, the fruit snack had been downgraded from reinforcer to environmental condition. The raccoon had more interesting organisms to watch.

Attention is one of those words humans have somehow managed to make embarrassing. Attention seeking. They say it like an accusation. The raccoon has never understood this. Humans are social creatures. They spend astonishing amounts of energy pretending they do not want to be seen and then write songs, form bands, dye their hair, build stages, post photographs, tell stories and stand under lights.

The raccoon finds this very endearing.

Attention is the function when the response of another human is what the behavior produces. At a concert, attention becomes almost architectural. A musician moves forward. The room changes orientation. A vocalist says something. A human near the front answers. Someone else answers louder. A guitarist shifts. Phones rise. The crowd gives something back. Nobody has announced a contingency. Nobody needs to. The room has already figured it out.

Then there were Mannequins for Friends. Three humans. Lawrence, Kansas. Sonic heaviness. Head banging grooves. Sludge rock. Heavy psych. Alternative metal. Useful classifications.

The raccoon had another one. 1990s. Not costume. Not retro branding. Not a careful reconstruction of grunge under LED lights. More like somebody opened a basement door from 1994 and these three came out still carrying the distortion. The raccoon was there in 1994, she knows what this looks like.

Heavy. Loose around the edges. A little sludge in the seams. The posture of humans who do not appear especially worried about whether the room cares.

They played. The room looked. Attention can be the consequence of behavior without necessarily being the reason for it. The raccoon knows this.

The raccoon also knows better than to stand fifteen feet away with a camera and announce the motivations of strangers. She is observant. She is not psychic. Still, the loop was visible. Band plays. Humans orient. Heads begin moving. Conversation thins. Camera rises. Click.

The raccoon became part of it. Something changed. Expression. Movement. A hand sliding into place. A body folding toward an instrument. The raccoon followed. Click. Click. Click. Attention had become visible through the viewfinder. And then something happened.

The mannequin stopped being the most interesting thing about Mannequins for Friends. The raccoon had invested considerably in that joke. This was unfortunate. But evidence is evidence.

Apparently there was an actual band hiding underneath the algorithm. A loud one. A heavy one. A suspiciously 1990s one.

Some decades do not disappear. They simply find new amplifiers.

FUNCTION THREE SENSORY

Then Reptile House arrived. And the room went green. Not pretty green. Not ugly green. Green without moral assignment.

The raccoon’s brain immediately began supplying visual references. Cartoon. Horror movie. Radioactive barrel. Basement creature. Heat lamp. Something that should probably not be fed after midnight even though that is technically a different franchise. The green kept shifting.

The raccoon knows this color. The daughter creature has maintained a long standing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles fandom. Years of field exposure have produced expertise. This was not moss. Not forest \Not emerald. Not quite neon. This was the green that turns turtles into mutants. Field identification complete. Reptile House had lived up to its name before the raccoon finished looking at them.

Then there was the sound. Reptile House is a Kansas City, Kansas band. Their own taxonomy is considerably more efficient. Blood and Guts Rock n Roll. The raccoon appreciates this. No flowchart. No dissertation.

Blood. Guts. Rock n Roll. Proceed accordingly.

Their catalog carries names like Age of the Lizard Man, Ultra Violence and Reptile House Live at Lansing Prison. The naming conventions provide additional supporting evidence.

Automatic reinforcement is the function when the behavior itself produces the reinforcing consequence. Nobody else has to deliver it. Live music makes this much easier to feel than explain. Bass enters the ribs. Light fills the eyes. A foot begins moving before the human has decided whether dancing is occurring. The body knows something before language catches up.

Reptile House was extremely useful for this research. The sound did not remain politely in the ears. It traveled. Sternum. Jaw. Floor. The raccoon’s remaining fruit snack infrastructure.

The humans moved. The raccoon will not claim to know why any individual human moved. A headbang is not automatically sensory maintained. A dance is not automatically sensory maintained. Topography is not function. What a behavior looks like is not the same thing as why it happens. The raccoon cannot climb inside another human’s nervous system and inspect the contingency. This would violate several professional and social boundaries.

But the environment itself was undeniable. The green. The volume. The movement. The weight.

Cold Sweat Cabin had painted the evening maroon and introduced potentially sentient musical equipment. Mannequins for Friends had pulled something distinctly 1990s through the room. Reptile House turned the whole habitat radioactive. Same floor. Same walls. Different world. Humans do this constantly in live music habitats. They build a room. Then musicians enter. The lights change. Sound begins. And suddenly everybody agrees they are somewhere else.

The raccoon loves this trick. Sometimes the riff is the reinforcer. Sometimes the vibration itself is enough.

Sometimes the nervous system simply answers. More.

FUNCTION FOUR TANGIBLE

Tangible is the easy one to underestimate. The more precise behavioral term is access. Behavior happens because it produces access to an item, an activity, an experience, or something else the organism wants. Humans do this all night at shows.

Approach merch table. Acquire shirt.

Move toward bar. Acquire drink.

Shift six feet left. Acquire unobstructed view.

The raccoon is no better. In fact, photographers may be among the easiest organisms to train. Interesting light appears. Raccoon moves. Interesting expression appears. Raccoon crouches.

Human begins doing something visually improbable. Raccoon nearly climbs into furniture. Click. Image acquired. The desired object did not exist a fraction of a second ago. Now it does. This is extremely effective reinforcement.

Give the raccoon a room full of interesting humans and occasionally produce one extraordinary frame. She will return indefinitely. This may explain Slightly Feral Media better than any business plan ever has. But the photograph is more than acquisition. Iis access to something humans are very bad at keeping. Moments. Humans make temporary things. A note disappears. A hand drops. A face changes. A room empties. The lights go dark. The band packs the equipment. Everyone returns to whatever life was waiting outside.

The raccoon photographs because sometimes she wants to keep one tiny piece from disappearing. She is very fond of these creatures. She does not trust their memories. Evidence helps. And perhaps that was the tangible thing the raccoon had been pursuing from the beginning.

Not Mannequins for Friends. Not exactly. Access to the question. What happens if I follow this strange little thread? Frontenac. Mannequin. Algorithm. Lawrence band. Warehouse on Broadway. Cold Sweat Cabin. Mannequins for Friends. Reptile House. A sticky shoe. A potentially sentient rig. A camera full of proof.

Scientifically, the mannequin caused none of this. Probably. The raccoon respects causal inference.

The raccoon also knows a good story when one wanders into the habitat.

FIELD CONCLUSION THE FUNCTION OF THE NOISE

By the end of the night, the raccoon had accidentally turned a three band Kansas City live music show into a lesson about the four functions of behavior. cThis is why the raccoon should not be given both a camera and a conceptual framework without supervision.

Escape. Attention. Sensory. cAccess. They were all available somewhere in the room.

But the raccoon kept returning to a different question. Why do humans keep making these rooms? Not venues. The other rooms. The ones that only exist for a few hours. A room where someone can be noticed. A room where someone can disappear. A room where the bass feels better than whatever they were thinking about before they walked in. A room where a stranger makes a sound and another stranger recognizes something inside it. A room where somebody can stand alone in a crowd without necessarily feeling alone.Attention. Escape. Sensory. Access. Perhaps several at once.

Perhaps none in the tidy way an instructional diagram suggests. Humans are like that. They resist clean categories. The raccoon is grateful.

Clean is optional. Evidence is required.

The shirt had said: It’s all fun and games until someone figures out the function of your behavior.

The raccoon did not figure out the function of everyone’s behavior that night. That was never the assignment. She learned something better. The same room can do different work for every human inside it. For one person, the noise pulls them closer. For another, it lets everything else disappear. For another, it is physical. For another, it is belonging.

And sometimes a tired raccoon walks into a room because a mannequin joke followed her home from Frontenac. The literature still does not recognize raccoon destiny as a fifth function. The raccoon has checked. Further research is recommended. The humans keep returning. So does the raccoon.

FURTHER FIELD RESEARCH

The field note is complete.

The evidence is not.

The full photographic record from Cold Sweat Cabin, Mannequins for Friends and Reptile House at Soundbite Social inside Warehouse on Broadway is available here.

The raccoon recommends further investigation. Listen to the bands. Follow the humans. Support the strange little ecosystems where live music continues to happen. Then go stand in one of the rooms. The function may vary.

FIELD NOTE COMPLETE

The room left evidence.

The raccoon collected it.

Slightly Feral.
Entirely Capable.

-Laverna the Rockin Raccoon

Photography and field documentation by Alethea Mehdipour

Slightly Feral Media

Published by My Midlife Crisis Creative Inc.

FIELD REFERENCES

BEHAVIOR SCIENCE
Behavior Analyst Certification Board

BAND RESEARCH

MANNEQUINS FOR FRIENDS

COLD SWEAT CABIN

REPTILE HOUSE

Bandcamp.

LinkTree

Thursday, July 30, 2026

Stage Dive KC Summer Showcase Builds a Human Tribe

The raccoon arrived at the Stage Dive KC Summer Showcase expecting seven local bands across two stages at Warehouse on Broadway and Soundbite Social in Kansas City. Instead, it found musicians, photographers, families, crew, and fans constructing a temporary community from noise, electricity, and shared purpose.

The assignment appeared manageable. Seven bands Two stages One camera Document the evidence The raccoon has accepted more unreasonable operating conditions.

Stage Dive KC’s Summer Showcase brought Beneath the Skin, Orion Falls, Easy Tiger, My Waking Dream, Steer Away, The Violent Delights, and Love Like War together at Warehouse on Broadway on July 17, 2026. The main room and Soundbite Social operated on staggered schedules, allowing the audience to move between performances without being forced to sacrifice one band for another. This was useful. The raccoon cannot be in two places at once. Several humans have suggested otherwise. The equipment remains unconvinced.

View the full photo gallery here:

https://mymidlifecrisiscreativeinc17.pixieset.com/stagedivekc/

The Raccoon Arrived Expecting Music

Raccoons do not build scenes. We occupy home ranges. We locate food, shelter, water, and a defensible route out of trouble. We may gather around a shared resource, but gathering is not the same as cooperation. Even among other raccoons, we remain independent operators navigating the same territory.

Humans have developed another system. They arrive separately. Bands carry their own instruments through the door. Photographers enter with individual assignments, camera bags, access questions, and batteries in various stages of emotional decline. Fans gather in small conversations. Crew members tend to cables, microphones, lights, doors, schedules, and all the load-bearing details people tend not to notice until one fails.

At first, everyone is an individual. Then the room changes. The musicians become a lineup. The workers become a production. The people near the stage become an audience. The two rooms become one functioning habitat. No one announces the transformation. It simply begins.

Seven Bands Enter the Ecosystem

This publication does not rank organisms inside a functioning ecosystem. That would be poor field practice. Each band carried a different piece of the night, and the showcase worked because the pieces did not need to resemble one another. They only needed to hold.

Beneath the Skin

Beneath the Skin played the main stage with Kansas City doom, sludge, and stoner metal rooted in heavy riffs and ordinary human damage.

The band has described its work as music about recovery, overthinking, social fracture, corruption, and the difficult process of seeing both ourselves and other humans clearly. It is heavy music with something underneath the weight.

Every temporary civilization needs bedrock.

Beneath the Skin brought its own.

Orion Falls

Orion Falls entered the lineup on short notice and opened its portion of the evening with the steadiness of experienced Kansas City musicians. Stage Dive KC has described the members as veterans of the local scene, and that familiarity showed in the way the band occupied the stage without needing to wrestle it into submission.

Some performers demand that a room recognize them.

Others understand how to enter a system already in motion and increase its momentum.

The raccoon noted the difference.

Easy Tiger

Easy Tiger brought Kansas City hard rock and metal into the main room, carrying material from its Engulfed by the EarthEP and a catalog built for the kind of riff that causes several humans to move their heads at the same time without prior negotiation.

This synchronized head movement appears socially acceptable within heavy-music habitats.

The raccoon continues to document it.

My Waking Dream

My Waking Dream closed the main-stage sequence with musicians drawn from established Kansas City bands and a project built around the freedom to move beyond narrow genre expectations.

By then, the room was no longer warming up.

It had memory.

Every previous set had left sound, movement, introductions, photographs, and new points of recognition behind.

My Waking Dream inherited that accumulated energy and carried the main room through the final stretch.

Closing a stage is not merely the last slot.

It is the responsibility of holding everything that arrived before it.

Steer Away

Across the building, Steer Away represented the youngest edge of the ecosystem. The band is a five-piece featuring Waylon Binkley, Charlie Corwin, Jackson Hunt, James Green, and Kaspar Foat.

Its lead singer would celebrate his sixteenth birthday only a few days later.

The raccoon was particularly interested in the young humans gathered in support of them. They arrived in full goth beauty.

Black clothing carefully assembled. Makeup precise. Expressions delightfully spooky. They stood together looking like the strange future had arrived early and had already learned how to apply eyeliner.

The raccoon is partial to young humans.

Especially the ones brave enough to become visibly themselves. It takes courage to be young. It takes additional courage to choose a counterculture and accept the social consequences of being the weird kid in black.

The legacy appears to be holding.

The Violent Delights

The Violent Delights brought Kansas City alternative, indie, and rock into Soundbite Social through original material and a band structure built by Dustin Gerber, Gary Little Eagle, and Yuri Nixon.

Soundbite never behaved like a secondary stage.

It functioned as another district inside the same temporary city. People entered, listened, spoke to strangers, moved back toward the main room, and returned again. The music did not divide the audience.

It circulated it.

Love Like War

Central Kansas five-piece Love Like War carried metal and rock into the final Soundbite stretch, bringing a regional voice into a showcase centered on local connection.

By that point, the distinction between separate fan groups had become less useful. People who arrived knowing one band had encountered six others. Some would leave with new names to follow. That is how scenes expand. Not through declarations. Through contact.

The Photographers Refused to Guard the Good Angles

The raccoon has observed photographers in multiple habitats. Some cooperate. Some compete. Some appear convinced that another person’s successful image will somehow remove pixels from their own memory card. At this showcase, the territorial behavior was unusually limited.

Photographers helped one another locate useful positions. They invited each other behind the barricade. They stepped aside. They shared names and information. Experienced photographers encouraged newer ones instead of treating access like inherited property. After the show, the cooperation continued online. Photographers shared one another’s work and poured compliments into the public record.

A healthy scene does not merely create art. It creates more people capable of documenting the art. Gatekeeping may protect one person’s position for a night. Mentorship protects the archive.

Every Generation Was Present

Small children moved through the venue wearing sound-canceling headphones. Grandparents stood nearby supporting the people and legacies that had brought them into the room. Young fans danced beside more experienced showgoers. Musicians, families, photographers, and audience members crossed age groups without the room dividing itself into separate territories. Everyone was proud of their people. That pride moved outward. Conversations began without formal introduction. Fans flowed between Warehouse on Broadway and Soundbite Social. Familiar people found one another. Strangers stopped being strangers long enough to exchange a name, a photograph, a recommendation, or a place near the stage.

The energy was not remarkable because everyone behaved identically. It was remarkable because they did not have to. Different generations. Different genres. Different experience levels.

One shared operating system for the evening.

A Solitary Raccoon Studies a Human Tribe

My kind meets because we must. Yours meets because you decide to. A raccoon survives by becoming an independent opportunist. Find food. Find shelter. Avoid danger. Raise the kits. Move on.

Humans repeatedly choose something more complicated. You build teams with people you met that morning. You pass heavy objects to strangers and trust that the next set of hands will hold. You share barricades. You teach the newer photographer where to stand. You bring children into loud rooms with their hearing protected. You show up for your grandchildren. You dance beside someone whose name you may never learn.

One determined and uncommon human can accomplish a great deal. A group of determined and uncommon humans can combine skills until the weaknesses begin to disappear. Where one person is still learning, another has experience. Where one person loses the route, another knows the turn.

The skills do not merely add together. They compound. The potholes become smaller. The road becomes passable. Humans have built invisible structures from shared language, repeated behavior, trust, and culture. Those structures allow unrelated strangers to function as one system.

Your greatest strength and your greatest danger may come from the same ability: You can become many. A crowd can panic. A group can exclude. A culture can harden around a gate. But it can also build a concert.

At the Stage Dive KC Summer Showcase, it built a place where teenage musicians shared stages with scene veterans. It built room for families. It built cooperation among photographers. It allowed multiple fan bases to move freely through two rooms without demanding that one community erase another.

Then the final set ended. The amplifiers went quiet. The lights returned to their ordinary purpose. The crowd dissolved. Everyone returned to separate lives. The temporary civilization disappeared. Mostly. The photographs remain. The connections remain. The newly discovered bands remain. Some young human went home knowing the weird kid in black has a place in the story. That is not nothing.

Humans do not merely attend communities. Every weekend, in rooms like this one, they build them again.

Full photo coverage from the Stage Dive KC Summer Showcase at Warehouse on Broadway and Soundbite Social is available here:

https://mymidlifecrisiscreativeinc17.pixieset.com/stagedivekc/

Continue Your Field Research

🦝 Every habitat has more evidence than one raccoon can collect alone.

If tonight's field notes introduced you to a new band, don't stop here. Visit their pages. Listen to their music. Go to a local show. Support the venues that open their doors. Support the crews who build the stage. Support the artists who leave the evidence behind. Field research is always encouraged.

The raccoon has documented one evening. The story is still being written. Go collect some evidence of your own.

Field note complete.

The room left evidence.
The raccoon collected it.

Slightly feral.
Entirely capable.

— Laverna the Rockin’ Raccoon 🦝🖤
Slightly Feral Media
Published by My Midlife Crisis Creative Inc.

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Friday, August 21, 2026