Before You Pass You Need To...

MUSAY Update And…

MUSAY is making great strides here in Nashville! You’ll soon hear about an exciting new museum partnership and about the universities we’re collaborating with to get Gen-Z embedded in our marketing, data science, social media and beta re-launch efforts.

If you enjoy reading the brilliant work of Darius Coleman, you’re in for a treat today!

And starting next week, you’ll be able to turn this weekly newsletter into a monthly one — kind of like binge-watching Netflix!

As always — thank you for your support.

Enjoy!
Laura

In Middle School, I went on the worst trip of my entire life.

It was a 19-hour drive from my school in Memphis all the way to our nation’s beautiful capital. It was a coach bus with 50 of the most annoying middle schoolers and a couple of teachers who were severely underpaid. All of us underestimated how tired and frustrated we’d quickly get. 

And we went to a lot of different places: a couple of good museums that I would also throw on this list of great times, and some other places that I felt like I had no reason to go to. By the last day of the trip, I hadn’t slept more than five hours in two days and was maybe 20 minutes away from screaming some colorful words at my chaperone before we finally arrived at the Smithsonian. 

This is one of those times when I will tell you something from the bottom of my heart that I mean with full intention and purpose. And it’s not because of me being employed by MUSAY or because this piece is about museums. It’s because I actually believe this. 

Before you pass, you NEED to go to the Smithsonian once. 

And I mean each and every single one. Not even just the National Air and Space Museum, which is where this story begins.

What makes the Smithsonian so special to me is the amount of interactive exhibits within the museum for you to do and touch and learn from. Many museums don’t have many tangible things for you to figure out, especially museums about air and space. 

There are so many consoles (that I would say are similar to the arcade consoles you’d find in the back of a CiCis Pizza or something) that were interactable all throughout the museum.

Being able to walk and stand beside an airplane or helicopter was one of the most interesting things I've ever experienced. Especially because at that time, I had never flown in an airplane before. In fact, the highest I’d ever been was really high on a roller coaster at Six Flags (side note, do you know how terrifying it was to be so high that I could see a cornfield I’d never seen before? I thought my life was all over). 

My experience that day at the Air and Space Museum gave me the same feeling that I had when I was inthat planetarium at the Pink Palace but with even more respect. How insane is it that humans can be thousands of feet in the air — and safe? It was a continuation of that feeling of life being bigger than me. Hundreds of people come together every day to just fly ONE plane that’s three hours to a place that’s 19 hours via car. The amount of manpower and hours required to get someone across the country was even more impressive. Thousands of people are moving with one goal: to get you to your sister's wedding. 

So now I think you know why I am a writer under the MUSAY umbrella — it’s because they have been here for people like me. The ones who care about learning new things and appreciating the things we do have. It’s a joy to not only be able to experience these things under MUSAY, but to find ways to support museums as we enter new generations of museum-goers, dreamers, and artists. MUSAY, in a way, represents everything I want for museums in the future.

This was my MUSAY Moment.

About Darius Coleman

Darius doesn’t just see the world. He feels it — deeply. He takes it in so it can surprise him, challenge him, and ultimately inspire him to dream, to write, to create. Whether it’s prose or poetry, sports or culture, Darius’s voice is one you must hear. A 2025 Magna Cum Laude graduate of Tennessee State University’s School of Mass Communications, Darius is only getting started and MUSAY is overjoyed he’s starting here.

About MUSAY

MUSAY is an app that transforms phones from isolation devices into discovery tools to  connect people with cultural experiences they never knew they needed — creating community around shared moments of awe while helping cultural institutions thrive.

MUSAY believes people, especially Gen Z, deserve more than endless scrolling through other people's lives and has engaged them in its design process.  The result is an App that gets people off their sofa and off their screen by helping them find things to do that fit their vibe; with all the things to do being at museums.  

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