Music in the Valley
Main Arm Public School | Fri 2 Nov | 4pm | FREE
Main Arm Public School’s Music in the Valley is celebrating its fifth birthday with an impressive lineup for 2018.
Headlining the event on 2 November is Emily Lubitz, lead singer of Melbourne indie band TinPan Orange. Emily is most famous for singing the Dumb Ways to Die song for an advertising campaign that went viral; Emily will delight students by including this in her set.
Poppy Galactic and The Beat – an electronic, dance music duo – will also create super fun music to entertain kids big and small. Tiffany Richmond and Terepai Richmond Rodriguez mix beat heavy rhythms with galactic, electronic hooks that will get the place jumping.
Main Arm students are sure to impress when they showcase their musical talent including school choirs and the fabulous school band, Beetles. Local musos can join in the fun by performing on the Main Arm busking stage and Mullumbimby High School’s band Ratmongers will keep us entertained later in the night.
With free entry, the event will kick off at 4pm with the Teddy Bears Singalong hosted by PlayTune. There will also be craft activities, sideshow alley, pony rides, inflatable obstacle course, bouncing castle, a petting zoo, Spaghetti Circus, and delicious food as well as a licensed bar on offer.
This is the school’s biggest fundraiser with money being used to fund sporting and arts programs for all students.
Lenny’s Book of Everything by Karen Foxlee
The Book Room, 27 Fletcher St, Byron Bay | Thurs 1 Nov | 6pm
Hot off the press today is author Karen Foxlee’s Lenny’s Book of Everything. Publisher Anna McFarlane calls it one of the most agonisingly beautiful and deeply affecting books she has ever read.
When she was writing Lenny, Foxlee was thinking about loss and grief, about ill-health, about caring for someone who was dying because she had experienced all of those things in recent years – she cared for her dying mother for many months. She was also thinking about love in all its forms: sibling love, motherly love, neighbourly love, the love between friends. She wanted to explore what it means to love someone who is different, how that feels, and the emotions that go along with that love. But mostly, through it all, she was trying to shine a light on what a miracle it is to be alive and how everywhere, even in darkest hours, there’s always hope.
The team behind Lenny’s Book of Everything are the same people behind Markus Zusak’s phenomenally successful The Book Thief, and who helped turn it into the classic novel it is today: Anna McFarlane, Karen’s publisher, was Markus Zusak’s editor and publisher at Pan Macmillan Australia from 2000 until 2008. She signed up The Book Thief in 2002; Catherine Drayton is Karen Foxlee’s literary agent and Markus Zusak’s literary agent in the US. Catherine is an agent with Inkwell Management, a prestigious US literary agency, and divides her time between Sydney and New York; and Erin Clarke is a NY-based executive editor at Knopf (PRH) and the US editor of The Book Thief. She believes that Lenny’s Book of Everything has the same potential as another book she edited, Wonder.
Foxlee will be in Byron Bay on Thursday 1 November from 6pm for an in-conversation with Jane Stanton-Gillan at The Book Room.
Healing Parody
BSA, Mullum | Fri 26 Oct | Byron School of Art | 6pm
It is one thing to hold a belief but quite another to take a belief someone holds and find ways to extract money from them.
Internationally infamous uber-healing guru Angelica Leight (Lyden Stone) and her director of PR and marketing, Runceley Chaser (Robert Quinlan) – the notorious psychic and chakra replacement specialist, will be making light of those exploitive capitalists who target new-age naivety for a quick buck this Friday 26 October at the Byron School of Art from 6 till 8pm.
Runceley will be performing ad hoc intuitive healings and Angelica will be offering quantum entanglement for couples via supervised consumption of cookies sprayed with quantumly entangled photons using Sacred Gaia Healing’s™ argon ion laser and beta barium borate crystals.
Don’t miss the fun or the the intriguing art works of Angelica and her fellow artists Allira Cornell and Rhiannon Power.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
