So I was doing a little research. On previous incarnations of Red Room Salon.
I had a previous blog of the same name at another site, from ages ago, and last updated it back in November. I was trying to find it a special voice, a special niche, but it meandered. In its last incarnation, I had been writing poetry, with the thought of a poem a day, inspired by a playwright who had written a play a day for a year, and had then had them performed throughout the country, one a day. So, poem a day, I thought, not a demanding task for a writer, but since that particular year came with losing a job and other upsets, along with the technical challenges of travelling for three months of the year and finding electricity and wi-fi to access the blog, the additional personal caveat I put on of writing a positive poem a day became harder to adhere to, so I just stopped rather than spew negativity. Poems were written, trust me, but not made public. And definitely not every day. I would write in spurts, when the poetry muses struck me. Calliope, Euterpe, Thalia or Erato, take your pick.
So I wanted to see what popped up, now that I have switched to this site, and have done no massive advertising of it. I have been keeping it quiet, to make sure it launched successfully and stayed aloft before saying much about it to anyone else. Three months later, I figure, it is perhaps aloft.
Used to be, you typed in Red Room Salon into Google, and all my posts popped up. That made it easy when I told people about my site, I could actually say “Look it up on Google!” rather than writing it out for anyone. (I always got the address wrong anyway, because you didn’t type in the www. or the http:// or something like that.) And there was a slight bit of confusion, because there was a writing sanctuary up in San Francisco with a similar name, called the Red Room Writer’s Society.
And looking now, there is a beauty salon using eco-friendly, vegan products up north in Grass Valley called, you guessed it, Red Room Salon. (I love the fact that the local newspaper article doesn’t bother giving the area code, since, obviously, everyone reading the article would know what it is! Hello, welcome to the borderless digital world! (The area code is 530, by the way.)) Another hair salon by the name The Red Room Salon exists in Sea Isle City, NJ, while another of the same name is in Spring Hill, Florida. A Red Room Hair Salon is located on Howe Street up in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, and another in Chalmette, Louisiana.
I also found a social networking website all about writing and reading and such, called Red Room – Where the Writers Are, only to poke around the site and discover it is an outgrowth of that San Francisco writing place and society I had stumbled upon years before.
So what’s with the popularity of this name? Did I start a trend? Why did I pick the name I did?
I picked the name I did because I was in a class at the time, and one of the things it encouraged was holding salons, in the traditional sense, gatherings of people to discuss a particular topic in a friendly, social setting, while eating and drinking and generally enjoying one another’s company, and have it be an intellectually challenging but encouraging environment. People could discuss and disagree, but respectfully. And hopefully, the participants would learn something they hadn’t previously known about the subject, or at least come to see other viewpoints than their own, in addition to getting to know one another. I also had a wall in my living room that I painted bright red, and was hoping to hold such social meetings on a monthly basis. That’s where I started.
The Original Red Room Salon
I still hope to do such a thing, once my apartment is clean. Monthly salons. Maybe screen movies as a topic of discussion, maybe have an art exhibit featuring artist friends, maybe some music played by musician friends. Or maybe just getting together and talking, really talking, and listening, really listening to one another. I have picked out some paints to paint my new living room wall, this time with low VOCs, and hope to have this blog be the mouthpiece of topics of discussion, generating interest to come to the salons.
In the meantime, I am happy that the Red Room Salons out in the real world, especially the one in Grass Valley, and the Red Room Writers Society up in San Francisco, reflect my own personal interests and desires to leave a happier, self-expressed and less toxic footprint on this earth. For a name chosen completely at random, I could not have chosen better!
Red Room Salon 