It didn’t make sense when I first heard it.Tangent life?
As in TangentLife.com, a website written by Deb Madonna, Beth Stewart and Brian West and created by Brian and his Plymouth-based conceptfactory.com public relations and branding firm.
It just sounded so weird.
TangentLife.
Beth assured me that Brian was a math major and could explain it in mathematical terms.Fortunately, he didn’t do that. Instead, he told me the story of how local arts people had attended a gathering of arts and culture mavens from around the state and learned that promotion and branding of the arts and art institutions pretty much ended at Dearborn, with a bit of satellite activity in Ann Arbor.
Detroit is the hub, in other words, and the burbs aren’t even last.They’re kind of off on a tangent.But as we all know there’s life in them thar burbs.
Life on the tangent. Tangent life.
TangentLife.com had its beginnings more than a decade ago, in the mid-1990s when the Internet was not so well-known and Deb Madonna was trying to parse out the social lives of her kids.There were all these students at the (then two, now three) Plymouth-Canton high schools, but nobody, most of all parents, seemed to know what was happening when and where.
So Deb started what amounted to a newsletter about happenings in the high schools.That modest effort has evolved into the website, TangentLife.com designed by Brian. Deb and Beth are what we newspaper people (well, I’m a former newspaper guy) call editors. They choose what press releases will appear. They decide what events and issues will see the light of pixels.
They call it an online cultural and arts website, but their eyes are on just about everything happening in Plymouth, Canton and Northville that involves schools, arts, business, service organizations and the future of the three communities.Look at the site right now and you’ll see a listing of scholarships in the public schools, an ad for a private school, a calendar of events and hey, what’s this? My own mug and a note saying I’ll be contributing to TangentLife.com.
I walked into a meeting with Deb, Beth and Brian at a table in the back of the Book Cellar, the cozy downtown bookstore that is Plymouth’s answer to the big box book emporiums. Doggone that Brian, he had the sig (newspaperese for the little cutoff photo beside a personal columnist’s byline) from my old Free Press column cleverly pasted onto the TangentLife.com home page.
Now how could I resist?
Answer: I didn’t. Actually, I planned all along to do something with this team. I’d heard about TangentLife over breakfast months ago with Jennifer Philpot-Munson, executive director of the Plymouth Symphony Orchestra.
Deb and Beth were doing a community calendar, Jennifer said. Wow. I’d been thinking of creating a website to perpetuate my erstwhile Free Press columns, but the one thing I didn’t want to do was put together a calendar. Pain in the butt, far as I’m concerned. If people were already doing that online, I wanted a part of it.
In fact, there was a second thing I didn’t want to do: Sell ads. But we’ll see.
More on that later.Meantime, what I learned in the Book Cellar is that these three people have a progressive vision for the future of this area that I like. I plan to send them one of my columns each week. Actually, they’re free to pick whichever one they like, though the choice at times may be between one column and nothing.We’ll see.Joelontheroad.com will link to TangentLife.com and vice versa and we’ll be part of the same community picture.
“The main idea,” Brian told me, “Is to help arts and cultural organizations to get the word out that we’re under-served by news institutions.
“TangentLife.Well, my life seems off on a tangent.So, tangent life.
I think I get it.Contact Joel Thurtell at joelthurtell(at)gmail.com
