My cousin Minda is an exquisite human being, the type who is effortlessly memorable, accidentally beautiful, unabashedly poetic, and never annoying about any of it. She’s the wild child hipsters so furiously attempt to emulate, completely unaware of her own stylistic power. She’s like Cuba, a land without the pressures and expectations of advertisement, oblivious to its rare and self-confident purity.

(Not to say Minda ia a tropical island under communist dictatorship – though, she is often very tan, and loves the ocean. Not sure about her stance on cigars.)

Here she is barefoot, walking a kitten – as you do.

As kids, Minda and I would spend summers together building elaborate fantasies in which if we didn’t carefully prepare a protection potion and distribute it by smearing mud-paste on every tree trunk in the orchard, zombies would rise up from their sunken city and eat everyone’s brains. We used to play Quake (yes, the video game) by putting on multiple pairs of sunglasses and hopping over the roof of my dad’s workshed and yelling. We had an elaborate, 2-minute secret handshake. We once discovered callouses, decided they were basically a superpower, and spent a good four hours furiously digging holes until we were both exhausted and disillusioned about the effort required to get forward in life.

FYI – the non-Minda human in those pictures is not me. 🙂

Minda is a tree-climber and lizard-catcher extraordinaire who wears shoes as little as possible. She has long natural blonde hair, enormous green eyes, and long alien fingers perfect for playing the guitar or being a hand model. She’s worn her mom’s clothes, or her younger sister’s clothes, (or my clothes), or just clothes that were sort of around, her whole life, pants often held up by rope or string or vines. She has a large, close-knit group of friends who love her, and I’ve never heard anyone say anything bad about her, friend, family, or otherwise. She’s a light, impossible to contain or anticipate.

She’s been playing the guitar and writing poems for years, but always seemed shy to sing at our yearly New Year’s Eve parties. Then I left to Germany for five minutes, came back, and she’s the lead singer of her own band, all original songs by Minda Lacy called Bitches in the Beehive, and she’s got FANS. The kind who modern dance bare foot in front of the stage and shout out her own lyrics back at her like crazed, impromptu backup singers.

She’s just come out with her first album, a beautiful collection of seven songs full of her fun, poetic, unique view of the world – and her stunning singing voice, sort of husky and playful and clear. It is well-worth a listen, a share, a featured blog post, anything you can do to spread the word about this bombdiggity record.

It’s called Owl Faces. Find the full album on Outfield Records and YouTube, or check out some songs from the Bitches in the Beehive days on Soundcloud.

Her kitten-wooing powers is something of a theme, it seems.

Good luck Minda! May this be the first article of many.