Montclair Helps promises a neighbor in crisis a one-time grant of $200 to $2,000 within 12 to 48 hours. It has paid out nearly $300,000 so far. On Saturday, October 24, it will raise more with an afternoon built for this town: a full room, real star power and a little hip-hop history.
Clean-Life Living in Montclair runs from 3:30 to 6:30 p.m. at Union Congregational Church, and Darryl “DMC” McDaniels of Run-DMC headlines. The King of Rock is coming to Cooper Avenue.
What is the Event About?
Clean-Life Living is an afternoon of talks about living well by taking things away. The tagline says it in three words: Unplug. Reset. Integrate. Organizers say the event is less about what you eat or which products you buy than about clearing out whatever gets in the way of feeling well, then making room for the practices that last.
Five speakers will tackle how people nourish, move, heal, sleep, think, create, connect and care for the world around them. Craig Baldo, a Montclair comedian whose credits include “Late Night With Conan O’Brien” and Comedy Central, will host. The lineup spans music, books, community building, philosophy and food.
Who is speaking at Clean-Life Living?
- Darryl “DMC” McDaniels will talk about finding your voice and your purpose through honest self-expression, connection and giving back. He has spoken openly about mental health and champions children in foster care. In 2006 he co-founded the Felix Organization, a nonprofit that gives foster children new experiences. He is also no stranger to town. He told the Pod in an earlier interview that he lives in Boonton but comes to Montclair daily to work at Sound on Sound Studios.
- Warren Zanes, will explore creativity, generational trauma and how widening the stories we tell about ourselves can lead to a more integrated life. He played guitar in the rock band the Del Fuegos and wrote “Petty: The Biography” and “Deliver Me From Nowhere,” his account of Bruce Springsteen’s “Nebraska” album, which inspired the Springsteen feature film.
- Anjali Dalal will argue that curiosity and conversation build belonging, and that caring for your connections is part of caring for yourself. A Yale Law School graduate and former attorney, she founded Salonette, a community that grew out of gatherings in her own living room.
- Barbara Solowey will turn Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Self-Reliance” into everyday habits: trust your own judgment, question conformity and live more authentically. A longtime New York City public and private school educator, she has spent a career teaching Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman, writers tied to American transcendentalism, the 19th-century movement that prized individual conscience over convention.
- Brian Clement’s “Food as Medicine” rests on more than five decades of promoting plant-based nutrition and raw foods. He is co-director of Hippocrates Wellness in West Palm Beach. Clement’s term for the step beyond raw is living foods: plant foods that stay raw or are warmed only to about 115 degrees. Cooking, he argues, destroys much of what makes plants healthful.
Here is how to be there.
- Date: Saturday, Oct. 24
- Time: 3:30 to 6:30 p.m.
- Place: Union Congregational Church, 176 Cooper Ave., Montclair
- Cost: $45 ($55 at the door)
