Hello World, you’re tuned into the Daughter of Godcast, and I am Dan Kelly, water rabbit, spiritual vagabond, energy artist, wilds man. Lit below by the flickering light of mild revelation, an uncanny visage passing on the oral history of the making of an aspiring cult classic, Daughter of God. This is episode 007, Treasure.

Daughter of God like most endeavors in the arts has three major enabling components – gumption, gear and gas. I’ve talked about two so far. First, there’s gumption. A vision, a yearning to create. In episode 001 I had my “I can do that” moment at Palm Springs Shorts Festival, which was really just an acknowledgment of, I want to do that. And how. Then in 006, I gave a whiskered recollection of pre-digital media and how earnest desire called forth affordable gear for movie making. Finally I needed gas. What keeps human metabolism roaring, vehicles rolling, lights shining and batteries charged? Money.

If you’re worn out from that gear geek out in Episode 006 and you’d prefer the executive summary of my innovative funding technique, then here’s the only two words you need. First the T word. Trust. And now the F word. Fund. See you next week. You may now switch off your podcasting device.

Ah, you’re still listening? You must be down with nuance.

Horatio Alger had nothing on my dad. Starting from not much, he bootstrapped himself and his little family into upper/middle class lower/upper class strata by getting a couple of degrees and then steadily climbing the ladder at a conglomerate. He was intelligent, ambitious and… white. He put my three older brothers through college. When I was 13, we moved to a house in New Canaan, CT with two staircases and a pool. We had been summering at a lake front cottage in Northern Michigan, eventually this became several cottages to handle the grand kids and extended family. Stock portfolios, real estate investments. Opportunity.

I don’t know whether my brothers aspired to repeat or eclipse our father’s success, but the traditional booster rockets were at the ready if *I* wanted to try. I too had a treasure chest of funds for college, but ONLY for college.

I didn’t fuck up all that much in high school, aside from barely squeaking by grade wise ’cause I was just so damned bored. I stayed out of jail, only drove wasted when I absolutely had to, didn’t get anyone pregnant and was generally pretty easy going and gregarious.

I had dreams, but they didn’t involve another 4 years of institutional education. I planned to backpack across Europe. I was 18 in 1981, and had been raking in the bucks running a house painting business in ritzy Fairfield County with 3 pals, Dirk, Dave and Brad. But at the end of my senior year, as all my friends prepared to go off to college, I got scared. My father revealed his laughable master plan for me – to get a degree in Petroleum Engineering “so you can retire when your 30.” Theoretically at Marietta College in Ohio, the only college that had accepted me, likely because I had flippantly checked the Native American box on the application. My grandmother often kidded that we had Cherokee blood, but that’s a pretty ubiquitous myth among the European invaders.

I caved. I blew my budget for plane tickets and Eurail pass on a stereo, which is how recorded music was heard back in the early eighties. That meant a tuner/amplifier, tape deck, turn table and speakers. The analog media of the day was vinyl, 33 rpm records with actual grooves that a needle followed and bounced up and down on, creating an electrical signal that was boosted by the amplifier and sent to the speakers. I bought a stack of those too, with music by artists like Steely Dan, The Tubes and Holst. I hauled it all to dismal Marietta, Ohio, on the border of the state with the highest unsolved murde