Someone 
whispers to you backstage in the school auditorium, reminding you not to forget your lines. You nervously look at your third grade teacher and straighten the costume your mom sewed last week.
This is it — your big debut.
Look out world. Look out mothers with flashing digital cameras. Look out classmates. This is your chance to shine brighter than all those spotlights while you nail the lines you’ve practiced for weeks.
But then you feel the heat of the spotlight, and your teacher taps her foot impatiently somewhere backstage, and you forget. Now, you’re left staring out at the faces in the auditorium, and instead of your lines, you try to utter something — anything.
The joke you heard at recess is the only thing on the tip of your tongue, but that’s not what your audience came to hear. Desperate, you shrug your shoulders and step into the limelight. You can feel your teacher hold her breath as you deliver that joke with all of the gusto and theatrical finesse you can manage.
And miraculously, the audience bursts into laughter. Relieved, you prance offstage with your head held high, and now you know why people always say, “The show must go on.” They laughed, they were entertained, and it didn’t even go as planned.
Entertainment has never been about perfection. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and whatever ends up in the spotlight doesn’t have to be perfect—whatever “perfect” is, anyways.
In Houston, the entertainment scene is a mosaic of diversely rich tastes in music, art, theater and film. It’s a city where you can meet a local metal band after its free concert and attend a top-tier ballet performance on the same day. Intricate graffiti murals grace walls in the same neighborhoods where art museums offer visitors a chance to gaze at a Van Gogh.
A-list actors and chart-topping artists didn’t start out performing perfectly in their early years. They worked their way to the top through talent and diligence.
With the powerhouse entertainment industry that Houston offers, it’s easy to assume that artists like Beyoncé were born with microphones in their hands. But even Queen B found her love for performing in her humble, Houston beginnings.
Houston is a platform for the growth, reinvention and cultivation of the entertainment industry. While you flip through these pages, I hope you realize that perfection is nothing more than an ideal. Whether you’re rocking out at the Day for Night music festival or taking in a play at the Alley Theater, this issue of Cooglife is here to remind you that entertainment is always evolving.
The spotlight is on Houston, and I guarantee you won’t want to miss it.
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