Jim Lucas, a board member from 2003-2008, is the founder of Lucavia Consulting focused on helping small businesses grow and become sustainable, and his advice and insight has been a real help to Golden Thread’s steady growth over the last decade. He and his wife Josephine are always at the heart of every Golden Thread celebration, and he is quite the handy man, having helped load in and strike many a complicated set at our theatres.
What was your first experience with Golden Thread and when? In the same way Coca-Cola is soda and Apple is innovation, in my head, Golden Thread = Middle East. Since 2003 when my wife and I were invited to the ReOrient Festival of Short Plays, Golden Thread has been my guide and filter for understanding a diverse people with a rich and varied culture. At times completely foreign and yet familiar.
Why do you need Golden Thread? The people of Golden Thread are my friends, and as a gringo who hasn’t been to the Middle East, Torange makes the stories immediate and real for me. Our relationship is how I make sense of the avalanche of bad news in the mass media and my filter for how I process it. I need Golden Thread as a welcome reminder we are all human, we want to love and be loved, our values are more similar than different, and we’re all in this together. Our opportunity is enabling Golden Thread to touch 100X in the next 20 years and build a critical mass who know, and think, before they assume, judge, and react.
What was your strangest, oddest, funniest Golden Thread experience? The strangest thing happens when a hundred people gather in an intimate theatre open to the unexpected. I’ve seen it many times; the effort to make sense of what just happened, what it meant, what it was supposed to mean, and how completely transported we were for a few minutes—or maybe longer—by a story. I never expected to laugh at a Kalashnikov and I never expected to see someone just like me in characters I wouldn’t have recognized until Golden Thread introduced us.
**Describe Golden Thread in 20 words (no cheating). ** Golden Thread is the Middle East. Trust that more than anything you see on TV or read in the paper.
Read the rest of our “20 Champions for 20 Years” blog series!