Here’s a thing I haven’t said yet.
This Substack is kinda my little rock ’n’ roll dive bar. The songs on the dive bar setlist are these essays. If the songs can’t do great here, how can they be great in Wembley Stadium?
Well, the Wembley Stadium setlist is a project I call “the Denise book.”
Until I’m ready for that stage, I’m gonna keep on luggin’ my gear in this dive bar that I love. I love it, because while it’s not a house, it’s certainly a home. And while I’m here I’m gonna keep playing sets that start way too late and end way too early.
Chasing something loud.
Chasing the sound.
Thursday, May 23, 2013—ten years ago today—I finally got to interview Denise DeMarchis on camera. First and only time ever. And we had to trick her into it!
The shoot was actually set up as an interview with Denise and her husband, David, about the foundation they had started—the Mighty Acorn Foundation—which had funded a school and residential hall for children born into the Kipswongo slum outside Kitale, Kenya. Mighty Acorn was imminently launching a new initiative where individuals in the States could sponsor a student. We were making a video to help announce this opportunity.
We worked on the plan ahead of time with David, and at a certain point, after we’d finished talking about Mighty Acorn Foundation, he just kinda drifted over to other commitments. Denise and I naturally transitioned into what we’d done hundreds of times before, our natural state—we had a conversation over coffee.
The only difference was that this time, our co-conspirator John Burkett (Red Tide Productions) still had two cameras set up.
And they were both still recording.
The next morning—Friday, May 24, 2013, about a month before Charley was born—I took my kids Henry and Ruby to Headwaters Park for one more photoshoot before their new sibling arrived.
Lydia Steury took the photos.
Ruby was wearing a dress and a tank from Matilda Jane Clothing, the company Denise had founded. And Henry was wearing a shirt and a t-shirt from The Good Ones Clothing, the company we started with Denise.
We sat on the Denise interview for a couple years, before putting together the short video below for the viewing before Denise’s funeral in June 2015.
And I forgot all about these photos of my kids. We never printed any of these photos, never had ’em bound in a book, never posted them on social media.
A couple weeks ago I was writing a poem about how I missed seeing the light in Ruby’s eyes, and stumbled upon the photos, filed poorly in a desktop folder on my laptop. In the photos, Henry had just turned nine. Ruby was a month away from eight.
A decade.
My God, a decade.
May 23, 2013
May 24, 2013
Archive Dive
Here’s a post I wrote on Sunday, May 31, 2015, a couple years after the interview above. It was published on One Lucky Guitar’s blog, The Dial.
I wrote it over a helpless weekend, desperate to do or say something that could help. Rereading it this week, I think I can still hear a youthful disbelief in my voice.
There is no why.
Denise lived with an abundant, “spread the love” spirit. With that in mind, we put this out in the world. It was my open letter to the best one.
A Few Words about The Best One
I first met Denise DeMarchis in 2004. It’s a true story that we shared a hairstylist, and that stylist—Amy Vanover—gave my phone number to Denise.
She called.
At the time of her call, I was working at my desk in the kitchen on the second-floor of half of a duplex at 936 1/2 Columbia Avenue.
It was 11AM.
I had just woke up, and was in my sleep shorts and t-shirt, water for macaroni & cheese boiling on the stove, listening to Teenage Fanclub.
It was sweltering hot outside; with all of my windows open, I could hear the songbirds.
There was a chihuahua (Jackson) at my bare feet, barking as I answered the phone. When the woman on the other end said she owned a clothing company and was calling to ask about “branding”—it quickly dawned on me that she thought she was calling a real ad agency.
Enough with the freelance—this was going to be a real client, and the kind of real client all designers and art directors dream of: a clothing company!
I threw the Jack’s squeaky ball down the hallway to distract him, and dove into bathroom, lightly closing the door behind me in a desperate attempt to find quiet.
I tried to sound serious; I tried to sound like I was in an office.
Later, when Denise and I finally confessed to each other that One Lucky Guitar was just me, and Matilda Jane Clothing was just her—two one-person companies—Denise admitted that she had actually been in the same spot as me during that first call.
When I answered the phone, she snuck into the mud room of her home on the south side of Fort Wayne, seeking a moment of quiet away the cooing sounds of baby Joe DeMarchis, and anxiously tried to sound like a real clothing company, nervous and worried she was calling a real ad agency.
Over the next decade or so, we helped make each other real—over and over again.
The first time we met in person, I went to see her at Daffodil Hill, the boutique store she owned. In addition to the shop, she was hand-painting furniture (and rooms and corridors in homes) at the time under the name La•Ti•Da, and had just started this little clothing project as a fun idea on the side.
When we met, well, it’s kinda like Bruce Springsteen sang: “Sparks flew on E Street.”
As our companies grew, we never stopped getting together—whether we had a project or not—for a conversation over coffee.
We wouldn’t dare call it such, but what we’d formed was a two-person business owner support group, swapping stories and sharing insecurities and trading so many books and both breathlessly admitting that neither of us ever really thought we’d ever lead anyone other than ourselves, and how the hell were we supposed to know what to do or how to do it?
We were carrying lamps in the darkness, with no idea where the paths we were following might lead. It turned out, we found, that two lanterns were brighter than one.
We loved the books we were trading so much that we decided we should write one together.
You see, in our lives we’d each been in work and team environments that sucked, company cultures that lacked values or purpose or any kind of reason to be beyond gross profit (gross), and then we somehow built successful companies by doing things a different way, the opposite way, against the grain, and for no great reason other than it felt good to do good.
We took cues from each other all the while.
We were just about to start on the book when it occurred to us that we could write an even better book if we first started a company together. If we started a company together and went through all of the ups and downs and ups and collaboration and ups and grueling work and ups and sleepless nights and ups and memory-making and ups and curveballs and ups and travel and ups and long hours and ups and being away from your loved ones and ups and I-wouldn’t-trade-any-of-this-for-the-world-ness that starting a company entails.
(When you start a company with Denise, there are a lot of ups.)
So a couple years ago we started The Good Ones Clothing, with Sam McDonald and the incredible team at One Lucky Guitar.
At this point we have enough material for several books.
You know, in the early days of OLG, I sometimes thought that I was driven, and that I woke up in the morning with my sleeves already rolled up—and then I met Denise.
On my better days, I sometimes thought I was giving, and generous, and selfless, and that I could maybe make a difference in people’s lives—and then I met Denise.
I even sometimes (not all the time) thought I was pretty smart and had some good ideas—and then I met…well, let me say that Denise changed my life forever, time and again and time and again and time and again.
Our earliest work for Matilda Jane gave One Lucky Guitar legitimacy and respect in our community and around the country, and Denise proceeded to continually challenge us with bigger and greater and bolder and genuinely AYFKM? projects—projects that we had no choice but to rise to the challenge to accept, to go all in, and to succeed, sometimes simply because she believed we could. And she was never wrong.
A hundred mathematicians can’t calculate the number of people who have their own version of this story, whose lives have been touched and changed and made a bazillion times better by Denise.
And there she was, bringing OLG new, challenging, brilliant ideas just last week, a glimmer in her eye.
We’re certain there’ll be more next week, and the week after that.
The neverending new, the challenge, the brilliance—the chance to bask in that glimmer, even for a moment, is why we come to work every day. Why it’s a gift.
Oh, and one last promise: our book is gonna be fuckin’ great.
— Matt Kelley
I hope you do write the book: I’ve wished many times that I could have known Denise, and getting to read that book would be the next best thing.
Love it all, Matt -- the reflection, the interview, the photos. Great stuff here. I too hope you'll write the book. But I'm certainly enjoying the musings and writings you're posting on here for now. Thanks for sharing with us.