Keokuk, Iowa, Driving to See an Internet Friend Play a Real Stage

Some trips are about the place. This one was about a person, driving a couple hours up the Mississippi to finally watch a friend, who until then mostly lived inside a Twitch stream, stand on a real stage and play.

The friend behind the screen

I met Nalani Proctor online, through Twitch. She’s an independent singer-songwriter and a genuine multi-instrumentalist, guitar, ukulele, piano, flute, even kazoo and otamatone, who writes original songs about, in her own words, “life, love, Taco Bell, and video games,” and streams interactive, request-driven shows. Before the pandemic she toured the country relentlessly, the play-anywhere kind of musician, restaurants, bars, breweries, living rooms. So when a live show came within driving range, there was no question. We were going.

I found her during the pandemic, sometime around 2020 or 2021, back when her Twitch handle was UnfocusedinIA (“unfocused in Iowa”). I attached myself to her almost instantly, because I thought then, and still think to this day, that she’s a fantastically creative, wonderful musician. She’d run these online shows, taking song requests, being funny and original and completely herself, and I was hooked. These days she performs under her professional stage name, Nalani Proctor, but to me she’s been a real friend since those early Unfocused in Iowa nights.

A 1920s stage in the corner of Iowa

The show was at the Grand Theatre in Keokuk, Iowa, and what a place to see it. Keokuk sits right at the southeastern tip of Iowa, on the Mississippi, at the corner where Iowa, Illinois, and Missouri all meet. The Grand itself is a survivor: its roots go back to an 1880 opera house, it burned down in 1923, and it was rebuilt in art-deco style and reopened in 1925, a grand old room with a double balcony and chandeliers, once bragged to have the largest stage west of the Mississippi. (It just celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2025.) There’s something perfect about an internet-age friendship resolving in a hundred-year-old theater in a little river town.

We stayed at the Hampton Inn in town and made a tidy overnight of it, up on the 21st, the show, and back the next day. Keokuk’s the kind of place known for its Lock & Dam No. 19 on the Mississippi and the bald eagles that gather there in winter; we caught it in mid-October, the river towns going gold.

Seeing it live

There’s a particular joy in watching someone you’ve only ever heard through a stream fill a real room with sound, the same voice and songs you knew from a laptop, suddenly in the air, in a beautiful old theater, with you actually there. That was the whole trip, and it was worth every mile of the drive.

We drove up from St. Louis, only a couple of hours, and I brought Nicholas along; it was his introduction to this corner of my life. That night she played a full set of her originals, including some of my very favorite songs of hers, and afterward we got to take photos together. We were already close friends by then, but standing in that beautiful old room cheering her on pulled us closer still, and we’ve only grown closer since, as I’ve kept tuning into her streams. I’d never been to Iowa as an adult, and there was something deeply satisfying about the entire reason for the trip being, simply, to show up and support my friend.

The takeaway

It was a small trip, two days, a short drive, a single show, but it’s one of my favorites in spirit, because it’s proof of something I believe: the people you meet online are real people, and sometimes the best thing you can do is get in the car and go stand in the room while they do the thing they love. The Grand Theatre had stood for almost a century waiting for nights like that one.