Spend ten minutes reading the corkboard inside the front door of the Lake Wales Latte Lounge in the Rhodesbilt Arcade and the entire creative geometry of the city becomes legible. Stapled to the cork on a given afternoon you will find a Lake Wales Little Theatre audition notice next to a Polk County Creatives gallery flyer, a hand-lettered ad for pottery classes at a downtown studio, a poster for the Main Street scavenger hunt, a 5x7 card advertising a bluegrass duo looking for a fiddle player, and a notice for the next first-Wednesday open mic at Market Plaza three blocks away. Three creative communities, sharing one corkboard, and historically — until quite recently — not sharing much else. That separation is not a Lake Wales problem. Almost every American small city carries the same three-scene structure, and almost no small city ever connects them. The most defensible thing this site can do, beyond the running directory and the events calendar, is to be the connective tissue between the three.
The first community is the theatre community, anchored by Lake Wales Little Theatre at 411 North Third Street and reachable at 863-676-1266. Little Theatre runs a steady season of mainstage productions, a teen ensemble, an adult talent show, and the Summer Spotlight workshop that has been the on-ramp for several generations of local performers. Around the theatre, and largely through it, exists a working pipeline of actors, vocalists, parents who design sets, retired schoolteachers who run wardrobe, and a wide volunteer base that turns out for every opening night. Anything that gets in front of the Little Theatre crowd is in front of a real audience within a week, and almost any cross-pollination between the theatre crowd and the rest of the city's creative life starts with putting it on the bulletin board in the lobby.
The second community is the music community, the loose network anchored by Market Plaza Open Mic, by the Logans, and by the floating cast of downtown performers who appear and reappear across the monthly first-Wednesday slot. The third community is the makers and visual-artist scene — Reba's Art Co., Quanta La Gusta Pottery, Polk County Creatives, the Henson Family Farm growers' aesthetic, the Margist Market, Rooted by Design, Carolyn Owens, Amanda Santiago, Panda Media, Evolve Entertainment, Lake Wales Massage Therapy. These three communities share geography, they share the corkboard, they share many of the same residents in different rooms, and they share almost no infrastructure that introduces them to each other on purpose. The Hubs page on this site is the first attempt at that infrastructure: a tiered map of the anchor rooms and the people who already gather them, the producers and makers who build the rooms, and the smaller community amplifiers whose audiences do not overlap with the anchors. Pulling those three communities into the same conversation, even once a month, is the most useful thing a city guide can do, and it is what this site is trying to become.