An update on Tipper Gore: Advocating, drumming and taking pictures

Tipper Gore lives mostly in Virginia these days, spends time traveling to New York and California to visit four grandchildren, continues to take photographs, advocates for those less fortunate than she and still plays drums although it’s with family members now and not on stage.

So reports Georgiana Vines in an update on the former wife of former Vice President Al Gore Jr., who  granted an interview – on condition that politics not be discussed — after giving the keynote speech at a Nashville fundraiser for Tennessee Voices for Children, a statewide organization that she founded in 1990 when services for those with mental health issues were not as available as they are today.

“I’m enjoying where I am and particularly that I’m a grandmother,” Gore said in a rare interview.

…Rikki Harris, CEO of Tennessee Voices, said a goal of $100,000 was reached (at the fundraiser). She said Gore was excitedly responsive when asked to speak.

“She wouldn’t take a dime. She paid her own expenses and bought her own table,” Harris said.

The organization serves 50,000 children, youth, families and child-serving providers. While Gore said she’s “very touched and very proud” of what Voices for Children does, 49 percent of kids and families with needs still aren’t getting services.

… The (couple’s four) children bring Tipper and Al Gore together on family occasions, sometimes to Carthage. Each has been reported by the national media as dating others.

Tipper Gore has a second home in the Santa Barbara area, where she does volunteer work on behalf of the homeless and LGBT community. She said when she visits daughter Sarah Maiani, her husband, Patrick, a musician, and their two-year-old, that she practices the drums.

“She has a full drum set. I play when I’m visiting her and her husband,” Gore said, adding. “A couple of years back, I played with Mickey Hart in Washington.” That was during an appearance of The Grateful Dead in April 2009.

She is co-chair of the advisory board of the Diana Basehart Foundation in Santa Barbara, which assists homeless and low-income people with animal care. In 2014, she had a photography exhibit at the Wall Space Gallery to support the Pacific Pride Foundation that provides services to the HIV/AIDS and LGBT communities of Santa Barbara.

With the only reference to politics in the interview, Gore said that she had been asked to do photography leading up to the last election.

“I turned down the offer. I won’t say for whom. I do (photographs) for causes,” she said.