People We Love 2024: Eleven people making Orlando a better place to be

People We Love: Terri Binion

Few figures are as emblematic of Orlando music as Terri Binion. A product of our scene who now works to cultivate its next generations, she carries our history, our present and our future all at once. Through her decades of gorgeous music and gripping live performances, Binion is almost universally regarded as the area's doyenne of Americana.

She launched her recording career here with 1996's Leavin' This Town, a debut album that featured star players like Billy Joel drummer Liberty DeVitto and immediately put Binion on the map. She went on to tour widely, including a run with the Indigo Girls, and followed up with 2002 album Fool that even featured Lucinda Williams. In 2016, Binion reemerged with the excellent The Day After the Night Before album and has been a steady scene presence ever since, regularly performing headlining concerts at venues like Will's Pub and Blue Bamboo Center for the Arts.

Beyond her own shows, though, Binion has in recent years broadened her reach to spotlight younger local talent in well-curated showcases like her Duets series.

"When I came upon the idea to create the Duets format, circa 2018, I had become aware that there were a number of young songwriters in Orlando that had come up listening to my music," says Binion. "This was really surprising to me so I wanted to step in and support them ... and the format that Jordan Foley and I came up with called for collaboration with musicians and songwriters outside of one's regular band members."

Foley himself says, "Terri Binion isn't a part of the masterclass in Orlando's music scene, she is the masterclass. Beyond her tremendous creativity and beautiful songwriting, Terri holds your heart close and tight if you find yourself in her orbit. I'm very fortunate to have been mentored by Terri over the years, and I am grateful for every lesson she's taught me in music and in life. She taught me how to be authentic, mean every word in the lyrics, utilize all the spaces in the song, and live a life of abundance as an artist."

In fact, Binion's own music is but a sliver of her focus lately. Nowadays, she's often operating behind the curtain to enrich the local scene, like working alongside Beth McKee and the Swamp Sistas recently in an eight-week mentorship for LGBTQ+ youth support organization Zebra Youth.

"Terri is a precious resource, and you can hear a little bit of her in almost all of us," says Swamp Sistas founder and longtime Binion collaborator Beth McKee. "She's also very generous with her time and energy: mentoring and supporting local songwriters, volunteering for Orlando Rock Girls Camp, and playing a vital role in the Swamp Sistas movement ... Terri with a clipboard and a Sharpie is a beautiful thing to behold, and nobody works harder to make things better. We are so lucky to have her as our musical backbone."

Binion's recent help with Orlando Girls Rock Camp as a guru for girls and nonbinary youth is perhaps her most formative work yet. After her first volunteer stint there in 2022, Binion says, "When it was over I spent the entire next year thinking about the next summer." From that experience, it seems Binion has found her latest cause.

"I am also thrilled with and inspired by the women that lead and coordinate the OGRC," she says. "I am committed to them and feel that I have finally come upon the way to give back to my community in the way that hits closest to my heart and nearest to my own life experience, and I feel these young musicians are going to carry on the gift of music in others as creatives and leaders and make a difference in people's lives." Hopefully, just like the one Binion has already made in ours.

People We Love: Jen Cousins

Jen Cousins, a local mom of four, may not have been born an activist, but she's had the heart of one since she was a kid. Growing up in a small rural town in New Jersey, Cousins spent a lot of time with her siblings at home while her mom worked three jobs to support the family. "I was just, like, obsessed with watching CNN back then," she tells Orlando Weekly. Young Cousins became anti-war through watching the beginnings of the United States' eight-year war with Iraq unfold. And, as she got older, that fire within Cousins only grew. A self-described "weird" kid, she found acceptance in the LGBTQ+ community as a teenager and later in college. "They were my friends in school, they were the community that accepted me," she says. "Watching friends die of AIDS, you know, I've experienced a lot of hurt ... watching them be beat up because of who they are. It's always been one of my main passions, to help protect this community."

And today it's even more personal. Two of Cousins' children are queer — one gay, one nonbinary. Her nonbinary child came out to her just a few years ago, and when her child bravely decided to share their story with the media, designated hate group Moms for Liberty pounced and organized a hateful campaign online, smearing Cousins as a "groomer." She's since heard that descriptor (and worse) as a prominent Florida parent in the fight both locally and at the state level to protect and strengthen LGBTQ+ rights. Locally, she's spoken up against book bans in Orange County Public Schools, and has inspired other parents to fight back, too. (Their mission became slightly harder when Moms for Liberty-endorsed candidate Alicia Farrant was elected to the school board in 2022.) The same year that Farrant was elected as she advocated to remove "inappropriate" books from schools, Cousins co-founded the Florida Freedom to Read Project.

Florida Freedom to Read tracks the books being removed from Florida schools and advocates in favor of protecting children's free access to books at school, defending everything from John Milton's classic Paradise Lost to dystopian-yet-realistic novel The Handmaid's Tale. Many of the books removed have race-related or LGBTQ themes. "Books like this are lifelines to kids who are struggling, to kids who don't have support at home," says Cousins. She sees books not just as affirming resources for kids, but also as literal suicide prevention tools, pointing to the grim suicide statistics for queer youth.

Cousins has organized with other parents locally, and has traveled up to Tallahassee with groups like Equality Florida to lobby against recent legislative attacks on LGBTQ+ rights, including a ban on gender-affirming care for trans youth (which has also restricted access for adults) and a bill that would prevent trans people from getting ID cards that match their gender identity — even if that person has already transitioned. She and some others are also organizing a Central Florida chapter of GLSEN, the Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network. (A soft launch for that is planned at Orlando Congressman Maxwell Frost's MadSoul Fest in March.)

What gives Cousins hope, even when things seem dark, is the younger generations rising up to meet the occasion. She's seen students who speak out at school board meetings, regarding censorship policies, change the minds of their elected leaders in ways that parents just can't. "When I see the kids try to take the power back for themselves, that definitely gives me hope."

People We Love: John Paonessa and Mike Rogier

John Paonessa and Mike Rogier never planned on opening Orlando's drag haven and restaurant Hamburger Mary's nearly 16 years ago. They also never imagined they'd be challenging the state of Florida all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The partners in life and business didn't know each other when they separately moved to Orlando in 1986 — Paonessa was from New York, working in the car rental business; Rogier from Indiana, selling insurance.

They met in 1988, fell in love, and haven't looked back since. Work took them out of Florida, but eventually they returned to the Sunshine State, opening their own insurance agency in Fort Lauderdale. As serendipity would have it, their office was right by that city's outpost of the San Francisco-based Hamburger Mary's chain.

"We were familiar with the Mary's brand," remembers Paonessa. "The one in Fort Lauderdale at the time was their biggest store, and our agency was right around the corner from there." It was, as Paonessa says cheekily, "temporary insanity" that led the two to sell their agency, move back to Orlando, and open the beloved Church Street restaurant in 2008.

At the time, it was the only location the couple could find that was open to hosting a restaurant that featured drag performances. The first night of their soft opening, Paonessa says, they were steamrolled by the demands of running a restaurant. "I went home that night, and I held my dog and I cried, and I'm like, 'We made a terrible mistake. What did we do?'"

But 16 years later, Hamburger Mary's doors remain open. And now, perhaps in the same daring state of mind that led to the two opening Hamburger Mary's, Paonessa and Rogier are defending our fundamental freedoms — and winning. Less than a week after failed presidential candidate and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the state's drag ban, in May 2023 Hamburger Mary's filed a federal lawsuit challenging the state.

The lawsuit contends the law is a violation of the business' First Amendment rights. Not long after, the court issued an injunction on the statewide law, halting implementation. The state appealed that decision to the United States Supreme Court, which upheld the injunction.

The legal battle continues, and despite the injunction, the hateful rhetoric and state-sanctioned censorship has harmed the restaurant's business. Meanwhile, the Republican-gerrymandered legislature has forced forward a slew of bills targeting queer people's freedoms in the arenas of employment, education and healthcare. But Paonessa and Rogier remain determined.

"The lawsuit has affected revenues at Hamburger Mary's," affirms Paonessa, but "we are thrilled to be able to have taken the stand against the state and files the lawsuit. It was the right thing to do, and given the opportunity we'd do it again and again."

Paonessa and Rogier are not only people we love but after more than three decades together, the two remain very much in love with each other. "I wouldn't want to go through life with anyone else," says Paonessa. "[Mike's] been the rock for me, and me for him, through this whole thing. What doesn't kill us makes us stronger, and that's what it's done for us. And we're just thankful we have the love from the community."

Paonessa adds one last, crucial point: "We have no doubt we're going to win. Love wins every time."

People We Love: Justin Luper

If beloved sitcom Parks and Recreation had been set in Casselberry, Florida, rather than Pawnee, Indiana, parks department director Leslie Knope would have been spending her time on the arts, instead of catching possums and filling hummingbird feeders. To draw that dream out further, Knope's subordinate Tom Haverford, instead of being a swag-addled goldbricker, might be a little like Justin Luper, Casselberry's hard-working arts and marketing supervisor.

Pawnee and Haverford are fictional, but Casselberry and Luper are not — luckily for Orlando. (Although we'd watch that show.) Before overseeing the surprising awakening of the arts in that small Orlando-adjacent city, Justin Luper wasn't sure what he wanted to do — draw, write, design skateboard graphics — and like a lot of people, cycled through several different college majors, ranging from business to creative writing. After graduating from the University of Central Florida in 2008, Luper spent time playing in local bands, creating visual art, and working as an art installer at the Orlando Museum of Art, the Mennello Museum of American Art, and Rollins College's Cornell Fine Arts Museum. He created a downtown mural with fellow artist Adam Lavigne for 2017's Art in Odd Places, wrote and illustrated zines, started a vintage clothing company with his fiancée, worked with her on producing pop-up markets.

In 2020, he recommitted to his visual practice. "I was going full force 'I'm gonna be an artist.' I got my website up and running, I booked my biggest show so far, a solo exhibition at Mills Gallery, I got to a stopping point with the body of work, the paintings that I was doing for the solo exhibition and yeah, so ... COVID happened," Luper recalls. "COVID hit, everything shut down, and I was kind of just like, 'Well, what do I do now?'"

The loss of that solo show, and the sense of "what now, and why not something new?" that infected most of us in the pandemic, eventually led Luper to apply for a job with the City of Casselberry. The position, in, yes, the Parks Department, would oversee Casselberry's existing Arts House programming, reconceptualize its then-new Sculpture House, and be the guiding light leading the Arts Center when construction was finally finished.

Unlike the average curator's job, however (if there is such a thing), this role in a lean and mean city government required someone willing to wear many hats — not simply booking art shows but maintaining existing relationships with local arts groups, doing community outreach, writing and designing marketing collateral, working with budgets and more. In other words, a job that required a lot of disparate skills — a perfect fit for someone with experience in a lot of disparate fields.

Almost three years after Luper took on the arts position in Casselberry, it's clear that this was an auspicious hire. Casselberry's profile in the visual arts punches way above its weight as a bedroom community of 30,000, with a multi-facility arts complex to rival any in Central Florida. Luper has maintained the charming Arts House, which traditionally hosts shows from various local artists groups; implemented an updated vision at the Sculpture House, modernizing the mission by enlarging "sculpture" to include any three-dimensional art, including installation, audiovisual and temporal works; and inaugurated the shiny new Arts Center with an exhibition of national artists more rigorous than anyone would have expected. His hands-on knowledge of installing and displaying art has proven a boon for both the city and the artists trusting their work to the facilities; and his experience "on the other side," so to speak, has proven beneficial to communicating with those artists. Not to mention, his own artistic practice and the varied acquaintances he's made spending 17 years in the different pockets of Orlando's art scene(s) are catnip to younger, edgier artists who might not be drawn to exhibit in a small city gallery.

Luper fits all the pieces together gracefully, and we look forward to seeing his local career grow. We can think of at least one museum in this town that could take lessons on how to make a splash without sinking the boat.

People We Love: N.Y. Nathiri

Developers are revving the bulldozers, and we complain about it like the weather while we sprawl on our sofas waiting for DoorDash. Whether it's yesterday's genteel gentrification or today's naked capitalism of displacement, we act helpless, having outsourced our outrage. Not so N.Y. Nathiri, who has outwitted the bulldozers not once, not twice, but three times. And she's good for another, which is coming at Eatonville hard and fast.

If you've heard of Eatonville, the South's first incorporated all-Black city and the hometown of foundational Black writer Zora Neale Hurston, it's probably due to Nathiri's 35 years running the Association to Preserve the Eatonville Community. While Hurston is probably the best known — thanks in no small part to the Zora Neale Hurston Festival that PEC produces each year — she's far from the only Eatonville cause célèbre. The ongoing scandal of the Hungerford School land trust and the developers circling that property like sharks underpins Nathiri's preservation efforts.

The Association to Preserve Eatonville Community has attracted (and continues to pursue) various sustainability grants to shift the town's tourism into high gear. Visiting tourists look for the place where town founder Joe Clark's store used to be, and they walk the Zora trail, searching out the footsteps of one of the most vivid storytellers of the last century, who brought Eatonville alive through her books.

But even with this year's Zora Festival mostly in her rearview mirror, Nathiri's not resting. "People are now talking about an Eatonville Renaissance," she says, referring to the Harlem Renaissance when Hurston hung out with Langston Hughes at the Apollo. Building this renaissance could be the wellspring to revitalizing the town.

"We're once again calling on our leaders to see the real potential of Eatonville, the potential for cultural heritage tourism," Nathiri says. We love Nathiri because while she's focused on the big picture, but she doesn't short the details, whether that's linking Hurston to the current vogue for Afrofuturism or creating a family day in the park with R&B greats every year. Nathiri has brought writers like Alice Walker (The Color Purple) and Toni Morrison (Beloved) to the Zora Festival. She has brought artists like Bayete Ross Smith and Faith Ringgold to the Zora Neale Hurston National Museum of Fine Arts. Besides running the Association to Preserve Eatonville Community and the Zora Neale Hurston National Museum of Fine Arts, she maintains a podcast, she wrote Zora: A Woman and her Community, and she's a mother and a wife. How does she do it?

Nathiri is rigorously disciplined, having achieved first chair violin in her youth. "I was classically trained, and wanted to be a concert violinist," she confides. "But at Ithaca College I went on to study the classics, and I enjoyed a side career as a debater." You would think perhaps she doesn't have time for community engagement. But her early life — her own mother knew Zora, which gives her an unusual connection to the town — gave her the foundation to do what she does.

"We have to do this," Nathiri says in a voice that disallows argument. "What has preserved this town are the stories, and these will carry us forward." It isn't just Zora's stories; it's Nathiri's stories too that are fascinating, and Clark's and Hungerford's and many others yet to be written. They make up the philosophy of community for Eatonville, and the dean of that philosophy is N.Y. Nathiri.

People We Love: Harryson Thevenin

For years, we observed the maxim that if you saw Harryson Thevenin when you went out, then you picked the right event to attend.

Rap shows, skateboarding events, noise nights, art and fashion parties — Thevenin might be found at one (or more) on any night. That same wide-ranging sense of curiosity and adventure has informed his SR50 brand since its inception in 2017, when it started as a music blog documenting shows, became a means to connect seemingly disparate subcultures. The name came to him quickly. "State Road 50 goes from one end of the state all the way to the other end. And I figured that, starting a brand I could go across different genres that can be tied together in the same way that road crosses different parts of the state."

Thevenin's use of the word "brand" is instructive, because since its bloggy beginnings, SR50 has become, well, anything Thevenin and his collaborators want it to be: website, long- running zine, concert promoter, clothing line (including sportswear, sandals and tactical wear), film company. "I didn't see anyone [locally] doing the things we wanted to do. So I just thought, 'We might as well do whatever we want,'" says Thevenin, understatedly.

Crucial early inspirations for his work with SR50 include exposure to Orlando music touchstones like Wet Nurse and Total Bummer Fest, as well as designers Virgil Abloh and Balenciaga. In the last year or so alone, SR50 has released a line of tennis attire ("I wanted to start a fitness revolution," jokes Thevenin [maybe]), organized a rave, and hosted a Sept. 11 hardcore show at Uncle Lou's. This isn't about money or clout, this is pushing the multimedia freedom inherent in DIY.

That includes a willingness to walk away from ideas, particularly an ambitious plan to stage an SR50-sponsored 5K road race around the time of the recent Olympic trials. More successful was a recent collaborative skateboarding event and market at The Warehouse on Orange Blossom Trail. "It was cool to see the hip-hop community and the skate community come together on something mutual and everyone shakes hands about it at the end of the day."

The next SR50 actions are as eclectic as ever. They're planning a hardcore show at The S.P.O.T. that's also going to be the setting for a film: "It's all improvised dialogue. I introduce characters in previous scenes. And then the show brings them all together to this one location." And after that: a Formula One racing jacket, complete with satirical promo campaign featuring an electric go-kart. "Formula One's hot right now, it's really expensive," says Thevenin. "It's just funny to dip your toes in an industry that you have no business in."

Keeping up this level of prolific activity and motivation is no mean feat for a DIY enterprise, and the keys with SR50 are rooted in enthusiasm and collaboration.

"It's around the clock, honestly. I'm always working on something or learning about something and I'm like, 'All right, we can expand on it.' And I have a lot of people who help out. My friend Alex does all the graphics and flyers and logos. That's a big help," says Thevenin. "I'm just always hyped."

People We Love: Johnny and Jimmy Tung

James Beard-nominated restaurateurs Johnny and Jimmy Tung oversee a sprawling empire of 35 restaurants, but do so in the most low-key way possible. In fact, we recently saw Johnny, the younger of the brotherly duo, serving bowls of udon and then busing tables at their new Mills 50 noodle joint, Zaru. The Tungs are as gracious as they are down to earth, and restaurant life helped shape their unassuming approach in running and developing their business.

"My brother and I grew up in restaurants," says Johnny. "I still remember sitting in the kitchen watching my daddy cook. I was just 4 years old, Jimmy was 8, but we eventually ended up doing everything from prepping and cooking to serving and tending to the buffet." That sort of grounding experience disposed the duo to shirk the spotlight and instead divert attention to the talented chefs they've come to nurture, support and invest in over the years — chefs like Domu's Sonny Nguyen, Kadence's Mark and Jen Berdin, Kaya's Lordfer Lalicon, The Foreigner's Bruno Fonseca, Camille's Tung Phan, Norigami's David Tsan, Doshi's Gene Kim and so many others.

"That's the way we were brought up," says Johnny. "Our parents immigrated from Taiwan. My dad told me that because we were minorities here, we had to learn to protect ourselves, work hard behind the scenes and fly under the radar to become successful. We were never brought up with that sort of 'me' mentality."

Indeed, in an industry dominated by attention-seekers, the Tungs are anything but. Their strategy is to partner with chefs and help realize their dreams — "assist them in the areas they felt they were weak at," as Johnny puts it. For some, that meant finding an appropriate location, negotiating a lease or proving financial credibility; for others it meant marketing their concept, instituting payroll systems or navigating through the legal aspects of the business. "I remember when we helped Sonny negotiate the lease for Domu at East End Market. I still have the photo of us shaking hands with [East End Market owner] John Rife."

And by being advocates and backers of Orlando's gifted culinarians, the brothers have reshaped the city's restaurant landscape in a way they couldn't have possibly predicted when they opened Bento Asian Kitchen + Sushi (then Bento Cafe) in Gainesville back in 2002. Six years later, the first Bento outside Gainesville opened in the Chase Plaza downtown. Now there are 21 locations across the state. But there came a point when the two had to decide what bearing, and complexion, their burgeoning restaurant empire would take — further ensconce Orlando as a chain-heavy metropolis, or steer it in a completely different direction? "Once we had kids, we asked ourselves, what do we want to be remembered for? Do we want to open more Bentos, which of course is great, or do we want to make an impact on the community? We knew we wanted Orlando to be the city where we put our roots in and raise a family in, so a focus on chef-driven and legacy-driven restaurants was an easy decision."

In the past decade, no one has done more to establish a new culinary rep for this city than the Tung brothers. Their reach is far and the long list of independent restaurants that have opened under their guiding hands is impressive — Kadence, Kaya, Camille, Zaru, Doshi, The Foreigner, Domu, Tori Tori, Norigami, Light on the Sugar, Danilo's Pasta Bar, not to mention the high-concept Sorekara by chef William Shen slated to open next month in Baldwin Park and Mills Market, a new food-and-retail hub that will supplant Tien Hung Market in the heart of Mills 50.

"Orlando is such a great city, and it's so underrated," says Johnny. "James and Julie Petrakis, Jason and Sue Chin, Norman Van Aken — they all paved the way for us to continue forging Orlando's new food identity, and Jimmy and I just want to make the sort of impact that Orlando will be proud of."

Mission accomplished.

People We Love: Heather Wilkie

Heather Wilkie, executive director of Zebra Youth, didn't grow up in Florida, but she's called it home now for 20 years. Originally from Bible Belt West Virginia, Wilkie was raised Southern Baptist in a household that didn't really question the status quo (that is, heterosexuality and a gender binary as the norm). But in her adolescence and young adulthood, she and her friends ("kind of a rowdy group in many ways," she admits with a laugh) challenged some of the deeply ingrained beliefs they'd grown up with about who a person can love, what that can look like, and their own broader identities. Today, she lives in Orlando with her 9-year-old son and her partner — who's nonbinary and a teacher in the public school system. Wilkie's work serving LGBTQ+ youth is deeply personal, both as a parent and as a partner.

Wilkie grew up loving musical theater (some of her favorites are Rent, Hamilton and the more recent Hadestown) and originally went to college in Asheville, North Carolina, to study the arts. But as she came out to herself and others in college as a lesbian, she went through her own internal journey of self-acceptance and exploration (with the help of therapy), and realized she wanted to be able to help others navigate what can be an emotionally trying process. "I've also always had sort of a philanthropic brain, you know, and that was sort of embedded in me actually through religion, growing up."

She first began working with marginalized children through youth shelters in Asheville, before finding work in Central Florida. She only meant to stay in Florida for a year, but career-wise, it worked out for her to stay longer. After working for Harbor House, a domestic violence shelter, for over a decade, Wilkie joined Zebra Youth as executive director in 2015. The organization was rather small and not very well-known at that time, she says. It didn't really reach the spotlight until the Pulse Nightclub shooting in 2016 that killed 49 people, most of whom were LGBTQ+ and people of color. The tragedy occurred less than a year after Wilkie joined Zebra Youth. At that point, they had a greater responsibility to step up and to be there for the community, particularly the impacted families, in their time of need. "I had no idea what I was getting into," she admits.

Zebra Youth has sheltered hundreds of homeless LGBTQ+ youth over the years through their bridge housing and rapid rehousing programs, and offers free mental health counseling for LGBTQ+ youth. While Zebra Youth's primary service population at the time of its formation was young gay boys, today they largely serve transgender and nonbinary teens, who have (through no fault of their own) become collateral damage in Republicans' culture wars. She used to go into schools and help guide staff on how to foster an inclusive and welcoming environment for LGBTQ+ students, especially those who don't get that kind of acceptance at home. But now, following the passage of Florida's "Don't Say Gay" law, which prohibits teachers from discussing or teaching anything on gender or sexuality in K-12 schools, that's no longer possible. "We haven't been able to reach as many young people and ... it's hard to swallow," says Wilkie. Social media is another place where young people find mental health resources, but state lawmakers are now considering limiting children's access to that, too.

What gives Wilkie hope is the level of support in the Orlando-area community, and the strength of those who fight back against laws restricting LGBTQ rights. "I tell youth all the time, you know, you may hear this negativity in the news, but you have an army behind you," she says. When Pride-themed murals outside Zebra Youth's drop-in center on Mills Avenue were defaced by neo-Nazis last year, it took just one call for help on social media to bring a crowd of community members, including city commissioner Patty Sheehan, together to paint over the hateful graffiti the very next day. Wilkie came from a family of strong women herself, and that comes in handy when she has her "activist" hat on. "It's just not in me to sit quietly," she says.

People We Love: Syd Zed

"Will's, Lou's, Grumpy's, it's just one fucking road," marvels Syd Zed. "And I'm here every night. But I'm never bored."

If you happen to be at certain Mills 50 venues on certain nights — OK, hell, any night — you're no doubt at least visually familiar with the outré Orlando rock institution that is Syd Zed: long golden hair and perpetual all-black attire, rocker vibes to spare, thick Brummie accent; the quintessential English musical eccentric. At shows, Syd Zed has an ever-present PBR in one hand and a smartphone in the other. No big deal, right? It's what comes next that's so fascinating — at just the "right" moment, Zed will take a video of the band playing. But these are performance clips à la Jean-Luc Godard, if Godard made 3-D movies in the 1950s. Zed lunges the camera in and out haphazardly, watching the musicians instead of his phone screen, conducting the action with his free hand. The next day, he edits them down and posts to Instagram.

Zed has been doing this every night for years. Entire generations of Orlando bands and musicians, whole scenes, have had their musical lives captured on his Instagram and Facebook accounts. (Once there was a crowdfunding campaign to get him a new phone and it met the goal immediately.)

Zed is immersed in the eternal musical Now, across genre. "I'm here every night. I see all the bands," says Zed with a shake of his head. "I can't believe it meself."

"Syd's presence at a show serves as a rare waypoint of authenticity and continuity throughout all the changing styles," offers friend and arts curator Moriah Russo. "He's proof that a life can be styled entirely around live performance appreciation." Out on Mills Avenue, everyone knows him. Standing beside him on a random weeknight is like being in a royal receiving line: a steady stream of hugs, handshakes and nods. "Young folks recognize him as something special," says Will Walker, owner of Will's Pub. "An OG, if you will. I heard my daughter and her band talking about how cool it was that Syd was coming to their show. I stopped and made sure i understood which Syd and what they meant. They knew who he was from Instagram."

Before there was Syd Zed there was David Sydney, born in Nuneaton (near Birmingham) on Christmas Day. In 1965, The Beatles, The Who and The Kinks started a 13-year-old Zed down the path he now treads on Mills Avenue. Soon enough he formed his own band(s), culminating in a move to the United States and a marriage to longtime partner and musical collaborator Magdalena. They played music together all around the country, living in Portland for a time before settling in Orlando. Their entree to the local music scene was the Peacock Room and Austin's Coffee, where they'd both play and attend shows.

"The thing about Syd is that he's always there," says fellow Orlando musician and U.K. expat Nadeem Khan (who should know, because he is also always there). "Many don't know that he has recorded vast amounts of strange yet accessible music." Indeed, Zed's songs are wonderfully weird and catchy in the way that Felt and Television Personalities were. "His shows were quite terrific back in the day. His dear lady Lena was a fun and quirky character as well. His CD Digital False Teeth should have had a wider release," says friend and musical confederate Johnny Wells. The album did reach No. 1 on the WPRK local chart, and single "Made in Taiwan" is still a Top 25 song for at least one Orlando Weekly editor.

These days Zed is happier in the audience than on the stage. And time is still on his side.

"I can believe that I'm still alive," mutters Zed. "But I stopped smoking a year ago. It's going to be a long time before I go." With that, he takes a final sip of PBR and heads into Will's. Shine on.