Wishlist Foundation is happy to welcome wife & husband team Liz Whelan-Summers & Matt Summers, to our Preparty Staff team!
Liz and Matt didn’t exist for each other back in 1992 when Pearl Jam came onto the scene. But separately, they each discovered the band that would eventually be part of the glue that brought them together.
In the early days Liz remembers listening to Jeremy over and over in her best friend’s bedroom, watching the videos for Alive and Jeremy on MTV (when they actually played mostly music videos!), and being the proud owner of a grainy bootleg VHS tape of the April ’92 Limelight show in NYC that her dad had bought for her. Matt remembers a friend introducing him to Pearl Jam around the time of VS., but the band’s music didn’t click or resonate right away for him. It wasn’t until sometime after No Code came out that it all started to make more sense. By the time Yield was released he was hooked!
Matt first got to see the band in Camden for the 2000 tour . Then in 2003, he saw 5 shows overall and started seeing them more and more frequently as the years went on. Though Liz was a fan in those early years, she soon discovered other bands and sort of fell away from Pearl Jam for a little while – never seeing them live until MSG N2, 2008. On 12/31/2009, the last show at the Spectrum, Liz and Matt had their first “official” date (awwwwww…..). Since then, they’ve seen the band at least once per year.
Matt and Liz are happiest when they can combine their hobbies. They love to explore, travel the world, and search for the best beer, and their love of live music goes hand in hand with this endeavor – they’ve seen Pearl Jam in 4 countries on 3 continents, as well as other bands in a few other countries. They love to love on their two fur babies, Frisco their adopted orange and white tomcat, and Ansel, their adopted chocolate lab-hound dog mutt. They also really like being a part of a community and want to find ways in which they can make the world around them a better place.
One of the things that Matt and Liz have both really loved about Pearl Jam through the years is the many different ways in which the band gives back to the community through their charities and personal endeavors. Finding an organization like Wishlist has been a great way for them to tap into the same kind of “giving back” to the community. Since becoming involved with Wishlist, they have enjoyed donating to, organizing, attending, and volunteering at various preparties. They have especially enjoyed being around so many like-minded people, and have found it very rewarding to be able to say to a beneficiary, “A check for $X is in the mail!!”
Matt and Liz have witnessed the growth of Wishlist Foundation – not only within the organization itself, but especially the growth within the Pearl Jam fan community. It’s exciting that more and more people are finding out about Wishlist and participating and donating and showing up to preparties in support of a variety of beneficiaries. Matt and Liz are very much looking forward to being a part of the future of Wishlist Foundation – helping it to grow even more.
