Bill Bynum & Co. Sunday night at the Old Town Tavern. Left to right: Mary Seelhorst on fiddle, Chuck Anderson on bass, Dave Keeney on guitar, Bill Bynum on guitar and vocals. (Photos by the writer.)

They’d come specifically to hear Bill Bynum & Co. play the Old Town Tavern – a neighborhood bar offering free live music every Sunday night. Yes, the Johnstons are fans – they buy a CD every time they see Bill play, says Jim, so they’ll have one to give away to another friend as an introduction to Bynum’s songs.

What kind of songs are those? Bynum announced his Old Town set by saying, “Howdy, folks, we’re here to play some hillbilly music!” And that’s what they did for two 45-minute sets, with a break in between.

The Chronicle didn’t have to drive nearly an hour to get to the Old Town like the Johnstons did – the Old Town is right down the street from us.

But we were there to see Bynum, too, because we wanted to check out one of the acts playing BreakFest 2010 at The Ark on Feb. 26. That’s when Bynum will be joined by Bonnie Rideout, Rev. Robert Jones, Sr. and Duck Baker in a benefit concert at The Ark for The Breakfast at St. Andrew’s, a nonprofit that provides a hot breakfast every day of the year to anyone who shows up at the doorstep of St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church on North Division.

Why Not Golf?

Jim Cain, who’s producing the BreakFest fundraiser, told The Chronicle that the idea of organizing a concert as a fundraiser was his attempt “to save Ann Arbor from yet another charity golf outing.”

Cain serves as a member of the board of The Breakfast at St. Andrew’s and works as a volunteer at the breakfast itself – washing dishes. The work of organizing the fundraiser, Cain said, didn’t really seem like work. Recruiting the artists was a combination of cold calling and connections – helped by Cain’s own musical background.

Cain played bass in the Saline High School orchestra with fiddler Bonnie Rideout and took piano lessons from her mom. But when he first tried to contact her, she was in Scotland recording a CD and couldn’t be reached. After finally tracking her down, she was instantly on board.

Cain didn’t have a previous connection to fingerstyle guitarist Duck Baker, so he cold-emailed him asking him to play the benefit. In his email, Cain included the fact that he was learning some Irish fiddle tunes arranged for fingerstyle guitar – using teaching materials created by Baker. Baker said yes, and Cain has helped arrange some shows in Kalamazoo and Lansing to make the trip from New York England worth Baker’s while.

But the first artist to agree to perform for BreakFest was Bynum – on a handshake deal. How did Cain get to know Bynum? Start with Bynum & Co.’s fiddle player, Mary Seelhorst. Her husband is an editor at Car and Driver magazine, which is based in Ann Arbor, and she herself is a photographer who on occasion shoots automobiles. Cain met them at the Rolling Sculpture Car Show in downtown Ann Arbor and got to know the band that way.

The Funding Challenge

Part of the impetus behind the need to ramp up fundraising efforts for The Breakfast at St. Andrew’s program was the end of support from the city of Ann Arbor. When human services allocations were made this current year, a new evaluation metric was implemented, along with a requirement that audited financial statements be provided.

The Breakfast was not able to provide audited statements for this year’s application cycle, so was not allocated any funding. As the city of Ann Arbor faces a challenging budget year – with all programs on the table – it’s not clear if any human services programs will receive funding in the coming year.

All of the $30 ticket price for the show at The Ark goes directly to support The Breakfast. To make a donation directly, call 734-663-0518  or make an online donation to the St. Andrew’s breakfast program.

Bynum at the Old Town: Photos

Meanwhile, here are some photos to document the rest of the evening at the Old Town Tavern.

In the first booth were Jim and Connie Johnston, who'd driven from near Jackson, Mich. to hear Bill Bynum & Co. play Ann Arbor's Old Town Tavern.

Bill Bynum

Dave Keeney

Chuck Anderson (on bass) and Dave Keeney

Bill Bynum

The pitcher is passed.

Emma Silverman executed a 1,000-pound leg press. Well, okay ... she was the 50 pounds that completed the 1,000-pound total.

“Can we do it again?” asked Emma Silverman after her dad, Ken, had just completed a 1,000-pound leg press at the One on One Athletic Club on Thursday evening. The “it” was a ride on the leg press sled.

And her dad didn’t say no. He gave her a few more repetitions on the sled – but not before removing some of the 20 45-pound plates hanging off the 50-pound bar. The plates and the bar totaled 950 pounds.

Emma weighs exactly 50 pounds based on the pre-event weigh-in at the club, and it was her “live weight” that brought the total to 1,000 pounds.

It’s not a common father-daughter activity, not least because 1,000 pounds – as Silverman’s trainer, Roger Bowman, put it – “That’s a lot of weight.” Bowman, who’s worked at One on One for four years, confirmed that it’s not common to see that kind of poundage go up and down the leg press sled at the club.

So what motivated Silverman to begin training five months ago in December 2008 for his half-ton effort? It was to raise money for Ann Arbor Active Against ALS. Silverman recalled how he’d come up with the idea over dinner at Carlyle Grill before seeing the new James Bond movie at the Quality 16. A lot of his friends had just run the Big House Big Heart 5K to raise money for A2A3, he said, and he wanted to come up with a way to contribute as well – the A2A3 fundraising theme is to raise money by doing something active.

Silverman’s initial concept was to try to find 100 people to pledge a penny-a-pound for the 1,000-pound attempt, for a total of $1,000. He was able to double that, but didn’t insist on the penny-a-pound approach. One example of a variant was a co-worker who offered $100, but wanted to see video evidence of the lift. Here’s the $100 video footage.

Ken Silverman on the sled. At right is trainer Roger Bowman. The guy in the yellow shirt with the camera is Burns Park race director Joel Dalton.

Silverman’s training regime at the club leading up to Thursday’s lift  depended somewhat on whether it was a session supervised by Bowman, or done solo. With Bowman there, he could physically help Silverman through a couple of extra repetitions – forced reps – that he couldn’t have done otherwise. Plus there’s the psychological boost. We asked Bowman for examples of the kind of encouragement he gave during a session. He ticked through some plain vanilla phrases, “Come on,” “Keep going,” “You can do it,” before offering: “Don’t tell me no!”

The same “Don’t tell me no!” sentiment was reflected in a conversation about fundraising after the lift. Silverman, Bob Schoeni (whose ALS diagnosis led to the founding of A2A3) and  Joel Dalton (who’s director of the Burns Park Run coming up Sunday, May 3, 2009) talked with The Chronicle about how you ask people for money: “You don’t say no to a guy who can lift 1,000 pounds!”

Dalton said that pitching pledges for a finite weight was in some ways easier than the strategy his own family was using to support A3A2, a “pennies for pushups” program. If you know that the weight is going to be 1,000 pounds, you can calibrate your donation accordingly. With pushups, you don’t know exactly how many Joel, Cammie and Kenzie will do. We asked Joel point blank: Are you doing real pushups, backs straight and everything? Joel contended they were, and the photograph on the website suggests that the Dalton kids’ pushups are every bit as real as Ken Silverman’s 1,000-pound leg press.

Preparing for the lift.

The lift itself.

Toweling off after the 1,000-pound lift was done.

Jessica Rauch and Eli Savit receiving $10,000 check from IdeaBlob for the charitiable startup, The Generation Project.

The concept for The Generation Project is this: If you’ve got a passion in life, The Generation Project wants to make it easier for you to give a gift of that passion to somebody else. Say you grew up in Ann Arbor, like Eli did, and attended Tappan Middle School, like Eli did, and worked on the school newspaper (the Tappan Tabloid) with faculty sponsor Marlene Erannon … like Eli did. You might have a passion for journalism and an interest in seeing middle school students in less privileged communities than Ann Arbor have the experience of putting together their own middle school newspaper.

The Generation Project doesn’t think you should have to toss your donation into a giant pot, hoping that some of it winds up supporting a middle school newspaper somewhere. The Generation Project aims to provide a way for people to give that specific gift of a school newspaper.

The concept of giving back at the core of The Generation Project is entirely consistent with Rauch’s work in the Bronx, New York, teaching for two years with Teach for America, then joining its staff to work on recruitment. She has just left Teach for America this year to launch The Generation Project.

The prize money awarded to Rauch and her charitable startup was won in an online voting contest sponsored by IdeaBlob. Handing over the prize on behalf of IdeaBlob was Will Robinson (yes, people do sometimes make that joke), who had flown in from Philadelphia to make the presentation of a giant $10,000 check. The check was presumably symbolic – Jessica told The Chronicle they were planning to hang the foam-core backed piece on their living room wall.

Kristen Winter, past finalist on IdeaBlob, now working on RateMyStudentRental.com

IdeaBlob gives away $10,000 each month to the top vote-getter among finalists which are determined through a series of “heats.” Robinson said that in August The Generation Project had received 50 percent more votes than any of the other candidates, and he attributed it to the support it had received from the University of Michigan community. Of the 2,200 votes that were tallied for The Generation Project, 800-900 came from the umich.edu domain name. The connection? Savit is a second-year student at the UM law school.

A fair number of those nearly 1,000 umich.edu voters turned up on the Dominick’s balcony to celebrate the check presentation. The Chronicle speculated with Robinson that there had to be more than a hundred people crammed into the space. We wondered if we were near capacity – whatever it might be.

Then a Dominick’s server approached: “You’re over your thousand,” he said to Robinson. No way. There were a lot of people but not a thousand. Plus, if there were a thousand people on the balcony, the server surely would have exclaimed … “Danger, Will Robinson!” Robinson explained that the dollar amount he had set for the open bar and free food was $1,000. The law can be dry sometimes, and people who study it can get thirsty.

But not everyone there was affiliated with the UM law school. The Chronicle bumped into Kristen Winter, whose RockDTown was a past finalist on IdeaBlob, and who’s paused that idea and moved to Ann Arbor from Flint, to work on a different startup: RateMyStudentRental.com.

Why the move? Because, Winter said, Ann Arbor has a great environment for tech start-ups. Pressed for a specific example of something Ann Arbor’s got that Flint doesn’t have, Winter didn’t hesitate: SPARK. She said she found the events hosted by SPARK useful as the marketer for RateMyStudentRental, because it was easy to get to know who’s who.

Premier of "Slacker Uprising" at the Michigan Theater in downtown Ann Arbor.

Heading back to The Chronicle offices, we passed another example of something Ann Arbor’s got that Flint used to have but doesn’t anymore – for one day anyway: Michael Moore. People were still standing in front of the Michigan Theater on Liberty Street, waiting to get into “Slacker Uprising.”