Remembering Brad Graham (1968-2010)…
It's taken me the better part of 3 weeks to write something, anything, about the death of my dear friend Brad Graham. I looked forward to seeing him each spring at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival. He will not be there this March which feels to me like the entire month has been ripped from the calendar.
I had known Brad for nearly a decade. We met in the fall of 2001 in San Francisco when was new in town, largely going nowhere, trying to find community and a place to fit in. I came to an event I'd heard of but known little about, something called Fray Day, where strangers told true stories in front of a live audience.
I was good at that sort of thing. This Brad person seemed to know everyone there and apparently wrote some very funny stuff on a website a lot of his admirers at the event read.
I told a story, which went over fine, then retreated to a corner. A few minutes later, I ran into this Brad person on my way to the bathroom, who remarked that he had liked my story and that he and his friends at the event were going to brunch the next morning. Would I come?
I did. I'm still friends with many of the attendees at that brunch. Others I did business with or were collaborators and advisers on future creative projects. At at one time all have given me advice, job leads, set me up on dates, invited me to speak somewhere or simply inspired me to try something that before then had scared me half to death.
I trace the beginnings of both my professional life and life in San Francisco to that brunch. It would have never happened without Brad Graham and what made him so special.
To Brad, everyone counted. There were no A-groups and B-groups no "invitation onlys" or VIP lounges. There was "you make the party fun for others" or you don't. "You don't" meant you couldn't come. Everyone else was in. To Brad, the things he loved–the theater, gatherings, the internet–but a means to create a welcome place for everyone. A community.
Break Bread with Brad, the get-together he hosted on SXSWi's opening night marked
its unofficial yet spiritual opening, much in the way the Olympic torch
lightening signified the games are open rather than the host country's
president saying so. My own smaller, private event on the festival's last night ( Create Kookies with Kevin)
was stolen outright from Brad with his blessing. My goal was to create
the same warm, open environment in a more intimate setting as Brad had
done in a large jovial one. His constant presence at my event is the
best evidence I have that I succeeded.
Technology conferences do not usually attract extroverts and game show hosts. But the number of self-described geeks who made lifelong friends thanks to a simple "hello" and "quit standing out here in the rain" from Brad is too numerous to count. I count at least three who met their spouses this way.
I have no objection if your primary relationship with technology is
your cell phone plan or mad coding skills. I just think that's
limiting, like saying food is about metabolism. As Brad showed me,
technology can be about so much more. Brad was a journalist by training
(as am I) but saw social media as a method of connecting people, with
each other, with culture, with these they love and things they do not
yet know they love. Yes, he coined the term "blogosphere" but that
matters to me about as much as why Brad passed away so young. Which is not at all. What mattered to me was the power he saw in technology for us all to lead richer lives.
There are plans at SXSW this year for an honorary Break Bread For Brad. The hat is being passed for the Repertory Theatre of St. Louis where Brad worked as Public Relations Manager worked for so many years. Fray Cafe (the version of Fray Day that happens in Austin during SXSW) will go on as planned, with me hosting, and the event dedicated to Brad. My dinner this year will have an empty chair, right next to Kevin Lawver, where Brad always sat and made a lot of trouble.
It's all wonderful, moving and real. But it will never be enough. Maybe if I didn't write about this pain, I could lie to myself and say that Brad is not gone, that spring will come and with it Austin, old friends and another layer of memories. But then we quit lying because we are not children anymore and we cannot bring back last year any more than we can grow younger.
It is the morning after. Or three weeks after. Then we know that that there will be no more Bread Bread With Brads with Brad, that I will never again hear his laugh, which sounded like a football thrown into a copper barrel. That he will never again be my loudest dinner guest. That he will never both make me uncomfortable and crack me up with his broad come-ons. That I will never get share my newfound love of theater with an expertise like his. That he will never again serve as friend, mentor and inspiration to the hundreds of us who learned from him both how to be good and how to be better. And that he will never know my wife, who is coming to SXSWi for the first time this year, eager to share this vital part of my life with me and to meet everyone who makes it special.
I want this confusion, this sadness, this anger to go somewhere, anywhere but here. I want, sometime, some crazy way to turn it into something beautiful. To be as Brad always was…
"To be fabulous, to be unafraid, to be fearless, to hit that note"
We will try, Brad. You taught us how.
