I am supposed to give a presentation at an academic conference on utopia. I was curious to participate when I read the the thrust of the other presentations and realized they indicate we are far from utopia and if this or that wasn’t happening then everything would be so much more utopianistic. They asked for pitches. I sent in a proposal to speak about open stages and how they are a utopianistic experience. What I actually want to communicate is that there is an inner world and an outer world and good luck to whoever believes they can change the outer world. At the open stage anyone can play and so there are both boring and exciting, capable and incompetent, confident and stage frightened but the thing is, like everything else, you can choose yourself, whether to find something worth your time or not.