This week, I attended the Death Cab for Cutie concert at the Showbox theatre. They were there for a short, but magical, three nights. It was the first time that the band had played there in  7 years. It was a starting off place and very special place of growth for them as artists and musicians. The first time they played at the Showbox was in 2000. Over twenty years ago. Death Cab started off in the small town of Bellingham, WA, an hour and a half north from the city of Seattle. It’s amazing to know that this band has been going strong for over  20 years ~ or informing sound that I’ve heard on the radio and beyond for the majority of my life (20 out of 25 years!). Whenever I feel like I’m tired of what’s being played, I feel like I can always rely on a death cab song for some music therapy. I remember hearing them on the radio when I was a teenager, and listening to them echo in the hollow walls of my bedroom growing up. They’ve always been a favorite of mine. At the beginning of the show, Ben Gibbard got up on stage in the smoke and lights and talked about saving the showbox – saving his cathedral.

Almost a year ago to date, the yoga workshop in Boulder, CO, closed its doors. It had been open for over three decades, since the 1970s, when it was opened by a man named Richard Freeman who would then become a yoga legend. Richard opened it with his wife and partner, Mary Taylor. It was the place to go for a grounded and thorough understanding, and experience, of Ashtanga yoga – the lineage of yoga that almost all modern, westernized, and highly profited off of yoga is based off of. It is the direct basis for modern day vinyasa yoga, and you can see vinyasa’s roots after taking a quick glance at an Ashtanga sequence. It’s difficult to find a certified Ashtanga teacher, most people don’t know where to find a good one – because the process is challenging and requires a trip to India. Ashtanga’s the real deal. It’s a rare gem to find a good studio and good teacher, yet oddly the enough, the town of Boulder which is obsessed with yoga (franchised, corporate, make your ass-ana look better, spiritual), did nothing to save the Yoga Workshop, or the beautiful building that the yoga workshop was in.

To give you a better picture, the yoga workshop is bright yellow on the outside, and on the inside it was simple: beautiful, polished wood floors, one room. Yoga relics, some books. A gong. It was modest and inspiring in the way that it was refined. Definitely the most aesthetically pleasing yoga studio that I’ve been in. Corepower still operates less than 3 miles down the street. In a town where yoga is SO highly sought after, marketed, hyped up, and supposedly valued, this beautiful relic, this true place of learning in the yoga community was shut down without a sound.

The worst part is, the studio was closed on very short notice. The director of the studio, Ty (who the workshop had been handed down to), was given, maybe two weeks notice. And the way that he found out about the building’s sale was by accident – he called the owner of it to chat about some maintenance that needed to be done, when he was informed that he and the rest of the workshop would have to be out by the end of the month. The yoga workshop had been there for over thirty years. This displaced a community. This also, wasn’t simply a yoga studio – it was a world reknowned place to study Ashtanga yoga. A type of movement art that has been said to heal the body, soul, and mind ~ anything from eating disorders to arthritis. A type of movement that defines the heart and soul of yoga.

And this place was gutted on the inside to, make way for what? Office spaces? Linoleum floors and flourescent lighting? Spreadsheets? A keurig?

See how well your Keurig heals you when your dog dies and your boyfriend breaks up with you and you find out that the world is ending in the same week.

When I lived in Boulder, I practiced at the yoga workshop for nearly two years. It was a sanctuary to me and a place of healing for me. It was a safe space. I was trying to get away from the trauma of my late teen years when I moved to Boulder, hoping for some solace in the mountains and within a small community. I was away when it’s doors officially closed, but I still remember the feeling of driving through the mountains and knowing that the place that I had loved so dearly – would now be gone for good. I sobbed. I cried. I held myself. I knew that Boulder would never be the same – things would not be the same to me. I would walk past the doors and my sanctuary and cathedral – and a cathedral for so many others, would be gone. I lost my cathedral.

This was not the first time that things like this had happened in my life. When I was 16, and entering my junior year of high school, the house that I grew up in was put up for sale. My parents were going through a separation, which would lead to a divorce (unsurprising to me), and my mom put the house that she was living in, the home that I grew up in, for sale. I was living down the street, across from the railroad tracks, in a one bedroom apartment with my father. He was sleeping on an air mattress in the living room, I had the small, moldy smelling bedroom. The train would go by every hour and shake the apartment. Down the street, my mom still had her tiny, modest, and cozy house. It was the place where my brother and I grew up. It had been painted light yellow on the outside, and my bedroom was yellow and lavender on the inside. The front room had the wood floors that my brother and I rolled around in as children – 13 years apart, the kitchen was the kitchen where I struggled with my body image and laid on the floor at 2 in the morning after being rejected by one of my first loves. The bedroom I slept in was the bedroom that I played Death Cab for Cutie cds in from a silver boombox, pounding loudly through the screen of my window and serenading the driveway, so loudly that I’d only do it when my parents weren’t home. The house with the garden where my first cat’s bones were buried. I still remember the way the walls were, how everything seemed simpler when music was played there. Clean. Easier.

The house was knocked down before I turned 18. The sale was relatively quick, as was to be expected. We lived in a neighborhood whose market was “great”, and some family with millions of dollars was eager to knock down our perfectly fine built in the early 1900s home to make way for a multi million dollar McMansion to be built. My piano was moved out – though the piano I had originally learned to play on had been sold when I was 11 because it was considered “too old”. I sat in my room before it was sold, on the wood floor, and painted a picture of myself on the white wall in purple. Long hair, bones showing, spine present on skinny frame. I didn’t know when the last time I would feel at home would be.

I recently passed the house where we used to live. Or the lot, I should say. It was/is/became a gigantic looming monstrosity that would fit better in a horror movie than real life. A monstrosity three stories high, filling the lot, of brick and lumbar. There wasn’t a garden, like my mom had. There were some bushes though. Built on top of my dead cat’s bones. May Susie haunt you forever, mother fuckers.

This was close to seven years ago. When the house was sold, it hit me harder than my brother, because he was 13 years older and had been able to live through the nineties. I was born on that cusp of ‘95, between the boom of the 1990s, and the era where children were borned with a cell phone instead of a silver spoon. He had also been long gone from the house and started his own life. But it hit me, hard. Just like, I’m sure, losing the yoga workshop hit Ty. Gentri-fuck-ation, well, it sucks.

So, hearing about the Showbox theatre, and the fight to keep it. It hits home. I can only imagine how the thousands of musicians who have played there would feel if it got shut down. Ben Gibbard, during the show, called it “his cathedral”. And it is a cathedral. A cathedral of rock n’ roll, of music, of life. How much history is in those walls? Wouldn’t it be a tragedy to have some forty four foot tall apartment building built on top of it to supposedly “help” the housing crisis in Seattle. I’m sorry, but I don’t know one low income or homeless person who would be able to afford rent in a forty four foot tall tower. How short sighted in our tiny human minds.

And just think, how many iconic and great musicians have graced its stage? How many small bands have started out there and gotten big there? How much hope and faith does it give artists living in the city to think that one day, they too, could play at the showbox? How many audience members have shook those floors with their dance and enthusiasm? How many people in this city of Seattle has it employed? I know what it felt like when my cathedral got shut down, and I feel the loss still to this day. I’ve driven past the lot where our home was and I’ve put my hands on the bright yellow exterior of the the yoga workshop and I’ve felt the silent past slipping through my palms in foggy memory and I have cried. It would be an injustice to close this theatre and have it make way for something as useless and mundane as apartment buildings, or offices. There’s a billion empty lots in Seattle that I’m sure you could build a monstrosity on without effecting the lives of people who love and breathe and care. You can keep your change. I like the Showbox just the way it is.

So Save the Showbox. And save the people with it.