Let me introduce you to Ashley Bayne. Ashley is a homeschool mom. And she’s leading a double life.
I wouldn’t come to find out about this double life until Ashley gifted me, along with the other tutors in our homeschool community, free tickets to a show she was producing. I love free things, so I said yes.
The event was the featured concert at the yearly Hutchmoot conference. If that word means nothing to you, that’s okay. But in these parts, it’s a pretty big deal.
The night of the show, my husband, daughter and I arrived, found our seats. From there, I proceeded to have my mind blown by the creative intentionality undergirding the whole production. Ashley produced it, arranged it, corralled and organized the artists into a cohesive, glorious, oneness. She did that. The woman I’d only known as a homeschool mom.
I love uncovering a person’s alter ego, like unmasking Clark Kent. Except Ashley wasn’t hiding. She wasn’t undercover. She was simply living a totally different aspect of her life from the one in which I’m used to seeing her.
Homeschool Mom Ashley is simultaneously Producer of Kickass Events Ashley. I’d just never seen her wear her superhero cape before.
It was in the hallway of the Schermerhorn Symphony Center where Ashley first approached me about writing for an event she’d been kicking around for a couple years.
It was, she said, an event about Eve. Exploring what it might have been like to have been Eve, to experience all the things Eve experienced as the first woman on earth.
Ashley pitched it, originally, as a way to redeem all the terrible Mother’s Day banquets we’ve been to, first as children, then as mothers ourselves. The kind of banquet where we mothers decorate the church sanctuary, cook the food, bake the desserts, rush home to get changed, rush back to the church so our kids can hand us the roses we bought earlier that day, all the while pretending to enjoy the banquet we just threw for ourselves.
Imagine instead, Ashley said, an event you actually want to attend. An event where you could grab some friends, eat some food, have a drink, then sit down to see a show curated for women, by women, about how wild, weird and wonderful it is to be a woman. I was hooked.
In my wildest dreams for the event, I couldn’t possibly have envisioned what Ashley was dreaming up.
You see, I am not called to be a Producer of Kickass Events like Ashley.
In my fanciest imaginings, I saw a handful of homeschool moms, still, inexplicably, in a church basement. I saw a chili potluck, or maybe, if I was really dreaming big, trays of Stouffer’s lasagna. For dessert, cellophaned packages of cookies.
Turns out, nope.
Ashley’s vision for the event included a sleek venue, writers, songwriters, drinks, high-top tables, and microphones. Not a cellophane package of cookies in sight. I watched in awe as the event snowballed, grew, gained exquisite artwork, a date, a location, and a ticket link.
Anyway, all this to say, Ashley is living two identities. Homeschool mom and producer.
And she’s more, so much more. As am I. As is every woman I know. If you watch, if you pay attention, you can catch a glimpse of our capes, flashing and snapping behind us as we fly, all of us creating and dreaming and building, just as we were meant to do.
Interested in coming to see what Ashley has curated? Here’s the link.
Um, this sounds awesome. Was last year's Friday night event the one she produced? What I saw of it was so good! (key words: what I saw, because my brain and body are always so dead by evening... 😅)
Dang it…all the good events are all in Nashville, I guess! One of these days I’m hoping I can make it to a Hutchmoot…and one of these, if it becomes a yearly event!