Sara Bareilles at the Kennedy Center

A Reason To Smile

Dan Rather and Team Steady Mar 2

Credit: Getty Images

We came across this beautiful video and thought, what better way to demonstrate and even celebrate what the Kennedy Center has meant to American artists.

For those who have had the privilege of witnessing a performance inside the iconic building on the Potomac River in Washington, it makes you proud of what this nation has meant to the performing arts.

Most everyone is familiar with the Kennedy Center Honors, an annual celebration of artists who have made a significant contribution to American culture. But the Center does so much more, with performances year-round from a wide spectrum of artists.

The Kennedy Center has been host to almost every genre of performing arts, from opera and jazz to ballet and musical theater. “NEXT at the Kennedy Center” is a concert series broadcast on PBS and “showcasing artists who are at the forefront of their disciplines and serve as culture bearers of the 21st Century,” according to the Center’s website.

Last September, award-winning singer-songwriter Sara Bareilles performed a career-spanning concert as part of the series. A highlight of the show was Bareilles’s cover of Elton John’s “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.” Bareilles has a phenomenal voice that we hope will give you a reason to smile.

We chose this song because Bareilles’s voice elevates this delicate and beautiful ballad. We chose this version at this venue as a nod to the Kennedy Center and what it has offered performers and audiences for more than half a century.

President Lyndon Johnson broke ground on the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in 1964. The national cultural center opened its doors five years later. It contains eight performance spaces, including theaters, concert halls, and an opera house. It is funded through ticket sales and charitable donations and receives federal dollars for building maintenance and operations.

Sadly, the arts are not immune to Donald Trump. For more than 50 years, the Kennedy Center has been run by a bipartisan board of directors. No longer. In February, Trump fired the board’s chairman and the Center’s president and installed himself as chairman, citing objections to the Center’s LGBTQ+ programming. And vowing to be the one who will decide what is allowed to be performed.

In the wake of the takeover, several celebrated artists have resigned their positions at the institution, including soprano Renee Fleming, and TV producer Shonda Rhimes. “If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him,” Rhimes wrote on Instagram.

We hope artists like Bareilles will continue to be invited to perform at the Kennedy Center.

I encourage you to watch the entire concert. It will bring you a lot of smiles.

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Stay Steady,

Dan