The Huffington Post
Labor Day has come and gone again with all its incongruities. It is a day when we celebrate laborers and the work ethic… by taking a day off. It’s a national day of leisure where we heap well-deserved praise on workers, many of them working all around us, many of them right there working to help us enjoy this very national holiday.
Despite extensive television and print advertising showing the ecstatic faces of school children of all ages preparing for the new academic year by purchasing shoes and electronics, kids of all ages were depressed yesterday. I was always depressed on Labor Day and, come on, almost everyone else was too. Summer is over. Labor begins. Teachers are even more depressed. I know, I come from a teaching family. It has been this way for the more than 100 years since Labor Day began.
While many have a holiday, Labor Day is a work day for the arts. Dancers dance. Musicians make music. Performances and festivals, and nightclub acts, and arts centers, are generally all open for business. And the artists and arts administrators needed for the magic are right there to make the magic happen as they are every day.
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