The 54th GRAMMY Awards and The City Around Them

If you follow me on twitter (@stevenmwhite), it’s no surprise to you after this weekend that I’m a fan of the GRAMMYs. For both personal and professional reasons, I have followed and enjoyed the GRAMMY awards telecast for a long time. If you’re a recent acquaintance or twitter follower, you may not know that this website used to be a lighting portfolio, rather than a blog. I am intensely interested in show production and spent years as a lighting designer and programmer. My current dream is to operate a performance venue or theatre because it combines my loves of show production and civic space. All that to say, one of the reasons I started this blog was not just to write about development and transit, but live events and shows. That part of the blog has been somewhat neglected, but the GRAMMYs are bringing it back.

Personally, I got involved in The Recording Academy’s “GRAMMY U” program while in college and got the opportunity to attend rehearsals for The GRAMMY Awards and a related charity show, the MusiCares Person of the Year Tribute. Within a year, I found myself working on the MusiCares Person of the Year as the producer’s assistant. I’ve been back in other capacities every year since and now work full-time for the show’s production company (please note that the opinions here are not those of my company, but only myself). We also design and produce the Red Carpet and Media Center for the GRAMMY Awards, so I had a very busy weekend working on the two events this year.

Two years ago, I had the opportunity to attend the GRAMMY Awards — and take a date. That first date became my girlfriend, and we just spent our two-year anniversary watching Paul McCartney, Rihanna, Coldplay, and the Foo Fighters rehearse for this year’s show.

Read more of this post