At the very un-rock & roll hour of 10 a.m. last Friday, a blurry-eyed New Eagles converged in the parking lot of Cypress Creek High School with gear in hand. They weren’t being sent to some sort of weird remedial education class; they were there to rock. The library.
Cypress Creek High, over the last year, has hosted perhaps the most unique and exclusive weekly concert series in town, Live at Lunch. The brainchild of school media specialist and musician Jeffry Oswald, the premise is simple: Band shows up, plugs in and plays an intimate concert during the lunch-hour on a Friday to whatever students wish to show up and check it out. (Library riff!)
Oswald, himself a gigging musician on the Orlando scene since the 1990s on the more punk and indie side of things and now librarian at Cypress Creek, wrote a grant proposal for this program and was approved to purchase an entire PA system. Next thing you know, he’s reaching out to peers and contacts to play this concert series he had dreamed up. And so it is that Live at Lunch is a near-weekly event that features both student bands and folks from the larger Orlando scene.
“I started inviting these people that we’ve met, we’ve played shows with and all that: ‘Come to the school and and do your thing,'” explains Oswald. “Most of these kids have never been to a concert before because they’re not old enough. So their experience with the concert is like a school concert, where you have to sit quietly and everything and they’re really not sure how to deal with it at first. But as soon as whoever is playing is done, they’re rushing up to them. ‘How did you learn how to play? What did that song mean?’ And they want to take pictures. They want their autograph. So the artists, even though they’re not being paid, love coming to do the Live at Lunch.”
“After each of the two sets, several students stuck around for photos and autographs with the band,” says New Eagles drummer Michael Lothrop of the unconventional gig. “The experience of being able to interact with live artists from Orlando’s vibrant music scene elevates the importance of the arts in both schools and our community at large.”
“I have a lot of regulars that come in, like, there’s Live at Lunch, they’re there, and then there’s kids that stick their head in the door and they like what they hear so they come in. They start, of course, because they’re kids, posting on TikTok or texting people, and soon other kids will come in,” explains Oswald. “We’ve got a group of kids that will sketch the band, they do a really good job. And then they get the bands to sign the sketches, and they want autographs.”
Live at Lunch will continue through the rest of this school year., You owe it to yourself to follow Live at Lunch on Instagram.
