ACT 8: City of Dreams

You can build a company. You can even build a movement. But can you build a dream big enough to hold other people’s hope?

Start at ACT 1 to begin the journey.

St. Louis, Missouri — City Museum

The building is a creature. Its bones are spiral staircases, cavernous tunnels, and suspended school buses that dangle over the street. A whale skeleton watches from above as if judging the experiment unfolding below.

After ACT 7’s meeting—which might’ve just changed the music industry (and maybe more, though forgive the dramatics)—Emerson spent the car ride over filling me in. . Said Wyoming was once the golden child of a middle-class empire, turned orphan of wealth, turned myth.

Lost his wife, Cheyenne, and their children in a tragedy he never talks about. Vanished from the grid after selling off their family business, and when he re-emerged, it was with a guitar case in one hand and a tea thermos in the other, talking about village fires and emotional wealth.

Emerson said Wyoming was the kind of man who could be laughing in Portuguese in the morning and giving a silent sermon in the Ozarks by dusk.

So when I saw him at the museum gates, I felt like I’d stumbled into a story I wasn’t supposed to know yet. He leaned there like a punctuation mark at the edge of a chapter: cowboy boots dusty, linen blazer wrinkled, matte black sunglasses pressed to his face like armor. In one hand, a thermos of green tea. In the other, a tattered notebook.

They called him The Director, but no one quite knew what he directed. Just that people seemed to follow. He'd once vanished from the tech world with a fortune and reappeared in the ashrams of Nepal and the villages of Brazil.

His journey—what they simply referred to as "the travels"—had become legend. I’d heard the stories at dinner parties: a man who’d once run a billion-dollar business, then ran from it. A man who could sell a company on Tuesday and serenade a village fire by Thursday.

Wyoming was a myth, a whisper wrapped in denim, and yet here he was in the flesh. Real, but unreadable. The master chess player of the movement.

He didn’t speak when he arrived. He didn’t need to. Years ago, he’d funded the City Museum’s surrealist sound wing—an entire floor of interactive musical sculptures modeled after the first Songa experiment in his backyard. It was his tribute to "chaos that sings." When he called, they didn’t ask questions. They asked: "Lights on or off?"

Tonight, they’re dimmed to twilight.

Emerson, Erin, Sage, and Wyoming drift through the museum's belly, passing crushed velvet booths, chandeliers made of rusted trumpet bells, and mosaics of broken glass. As they walk, Erin keeps glancing at Wyoming out of the corner of her eye. Finally, when the others step ahead, she edges closer to him, her voice half-whisper, half-awe.

"So you're the man my husband bet our life savings on."

Wyoming doesn’t turn, just sips from his thermos, letting the moment hang. Then, so softly Erin nearly misses it, he replies:

"And you’re the woman who made him brave enough to do it." The space thrums with energy—alive, but fractured. Like the people inside it.

May Dove and Mohammad arrive in matching cream coats, one-buttoned and pressed. They look out of place against the grit and whimsy of the building, like finance execs at a puppet show. Emerson greets them with a rehearsed warmth, but his eyes are already doing math—calculating their body language, gauging their willingness.

They sit around a rusted piano bolted to the floor, just beneath a metal dragon that coils into the ceiling. Sage places her guitar on her lap, then pauses.

"Before I play," she says, looking at Mo and May Dove, "I want you to know why this song matters to me. I used to gig seventeen days a month just to stay afloat. And I was barely doing that. Touring from Denver to Miami, Bali to Ibiza—just so I could play the songs on my heart. But all I really wanted... was a few local gigs and a life. A family. A living room to call my own."

She opens her guitar case and lifts out the instrument like it’s something sacred.

"Songa changed that. Instead of gigging for strangers every night, I get to bring joy into people’s homes. We gather again. We remember what it feels like to create something meaningful together. We remember how to belong."

She strums the first few notes, then looks up.

"This song’s called '17 Gigs a Month.' Emerson helped me write it. Turns out, struggling entrepreneurs and working artists aren’t all that different."

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She begins to play.

The melody is simple. A slow, circular rhythm that grows into something raw. Her voice trembles at first, then steadies as she sings:

“17 gigs a month, I try to get by, don't understand why, I'm struggling to make life's ends…”

Her eyes close on the line, “my music is my struggle, yet my closest friend.”

A hush falls over the room. The museum feels suddenly intimate, like a forgotten chapel reawakened by a hymn.

She lets the chorus breathe: “But I know this is what I gotta do each day… I’ll never give in, or give up on this dream.”

As she nears the final refrain, “So every time I feel the doubt, I know I get to play it out,” her voice catches—and she leans into the song, letting it carry her the rest of the way.

I, yeah I, can never give up on this dream.”

When it ends, Mo is blinking quickly. May Dove dabs beneath her eye. But when the final chord fades, they don’t clap.

Mo speaks first. “It’s... deeply moving. And you’re right about the numbers. About the artists. But this—” she gestures around, “—this isn’t something I can explain to my board. Or to my friends at the Conservancy. It looks... messy. Chaotic. Unpredictable.”

May Dove nods. “We believe in the mission. But the risk to our reputation—”

Wyoming finally speaks. “You mean the risk to your appearance.”

They don’t respond.

Erin, who’s been silent until now, leans forward.

"Mo. May. You know what this is. You’ve seen the impact it’s having on your own kids. You’ve told me yourselves how different they are after just a weekend at Songa."

Mo. looks down.

"Yes," Erin presses. "And you want to walk away because it looks messy? Because your board or your friends might not understand? Isn’t that exactly what we’re trying to change?"

Emerson steps in, his voice low but tight with urgency.

"This isn’t just about art. It’s about connection. About families trying to talk again. About building something that matters—not just to us, but to the next generation."

He glances at Erin beside him—not pleading, but present. Grounded. "I’ve put everything I have into this. Not just capital. But belief. Faith that maybe there’s a different way. A better way."

He turns to Mo and May Dove. "I know how this looks. I do. But sometimes the fire doesn’t burn because it’s polished. Sometimes it burns because it’s real."

"We’re not trying to build an empire. We’re trying to build a village. And the only way to build a village is to gather around the fire. To talk. To create. To risk a little chaos."

Wyoming, still leaned back against the piano bench, swirls his thermos with one hand. Then, as if speaking to the room, or to no one at all, he murmurs:

"You know why I asked to meet here?"

He looks up, sunglasses still on. "Because museums are where we put the past. And this place… it’s always resisted that. This building is alive. Made of imagination. Of reinvention. It doesn’t want to be looked at. It wants to be played with. It wants people to get lost inside and come out changed. That’s why we’re here. Because what we’re building… it shouldn’t hang in a frame. It should move.""

Wyoming, until now silent, sips from his thermos and speaks like a whisper curling through smoke.

"There’s an old saying," he murmurs, "that the fire doesn’t die when the logs burn out. It dies when people stop showing up to sit beside it."

Mo meets his gaze, unsure whether he’s giving advice or issuing a warning. With Wyoming, it’s always both."

They hesitate. Long enough for the silence to swallow everything that came before.

“It’s beautiful,” Mo says finally. “But we can’t.”

May Dove closes her coat. “We’re sorry.”

They rise, thank everyone, and walk out into the shadow of the metal dragon, their heels echoing against the mosaic floor like punctuation marks to a conversation unfinished.

The group sits in the silence they left behind.

I glance across the space, past the rusted piano and the dragon coils above, watching the shadows swallow Mo and May Dove as they exit. Wyoming doesn’t move. Just sips from his thermos like he’s counting moves no one else can see.

Erin speaks, finally. "You know what hurts? They know we’re right. But they’re still leaving."

No one disagrees.

Then Wyoming rises, slow and deliberate, and turns toward the darker end of the museum where the lights are still off.

"Let’s give them something to regret," Emerson mutters, watching Wyoming melt into the shadows.

For a few seconds, no one breathes. Then Erin exhales.

“You know what hurts?” she says quietly. “They know we’re right. But they’re still leaving.”

I look after them, feeling the dark close in again. Not disappointment. Not quite. Something sharper. Something like knowing.

And in that knowing, I realize we’re not building a case anymore.

We’re building the fire.

---

Before continuing to ACT 9…

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