HUMANS OF HEARTS: Lauren Wayne
“My two worlds have collided in my favorite city.”
Humans of Hearts is a series about members of the Hearts community shaping life in Maine. These voices offer a glimpse into the lives that inspire and connect us across this state we call home.
Photograph: Lauryn Hottinger
On November 9, 2025, Portland’s historic State Theatre opened its doors to host a party it was never designed for.
The stage is dark. The floor is open. Drums and horns rise from the pit instead of the stage, and a soccer match plays on a screen usually reserved for touring bands. Fifteen hundred people stand shoulder to shoulder, chanting and singing the way they would if their favorite band was performing. Instead, they’re here to watch Hearts of Pine compete in the League One Semifinal on the opposite side of the country.
Toward the back of the venue, Lauren Wayne stands with her arms crossed, watching the crowd more than the screen.
When the last penalty kick of the match is saved, Hearts of Pine’s inaugural season comes to an end, and the watch party comes to a heartbreaking conclusion. But the crowd lingers. Chants continue to ring out and voices tired from 120+ minutes still rise in song. Slowly, the energy fades, fans share in embraces, and gratitude becomes the topic of each parting conversation. Lauren recognizes this time, it’s the same thing that comes after a great encore.
“This is my favorite part,” Lauren says. “Watching what people do when the thing they came for is over.”
Photograph: Lauryn Hottinger
For the better part of two decades, Lauren has found herself at the center of Maine’s loudest venues. The State Theatre packed wall to wall. The crowd at Thompson’s Point buzzing on a summer night. The steady rhythm of The Heartbeat echoing through Fitzpatrick Stadium. Wherever people in Portland gather to sing, to dance, to feel something, odds are that Lauren has played a part in making it possible.
“This was never the plan,” she says. “I didn’t move here thinking that I was going to build places for people to gather.”
Lauren arrived in Maine in 2001 after living the life of a rolling stone. She had spent time in Virginia, Georgia, Minnesota, and Arizona. None of them grew moss. When she and a group of friends landed briefly at a parent’s house in New Hampshire, she assumed it was another stop along the way.
“One night we drove east just to see it,” she says. Their first stop was J’s Oyster. It was dim and unchanged from years gone by, unapologetically so.
“I remember thinking, this place rules,” she says. “Not because it was fancy. It just felt real. Like you could learn the town by sitting there.”
Within a week, Lauren had signed a lease in Portland.
“I could feel it that first year,” she says. “I made a very conscious decision to stay. To me, Maine is vibrant. Authentic. Unassuming. Fearless. It’s 24-years-later and I’m still here.”
In those two and a half decades, she’s learned how to read a room, a venue, a market. Before all that, she learned how to read a field.
Lauren grew up playing sports. There were no girls’ teams in her town outside Atlanta, but soccer was the sport that stuck. She joined the boys’ team and played there for three years. When she moved to Minnesota she made the varsity team, eventually playing in the state championship at the Metrodome.
College pulled her away from playing, but not from the game. To this day, Lauren and her wife travel for U.S. women’s national team matches, she watches the NWSL obsessively, and admits to yelling at the television on occasion.
Photograph: Lauryn Hottinger
“I feel the same way at a soccer game as I do at a concert,” she says. “It’s joy. It’s release. It’s community. You give yourself over to it.”
That connection feels obvious now, but describing her start in the music business, the journey was “unplanned and unromantic.”
After moving to Maine, Wayne was brought on by the Don Law Company under the guidance of promoter (and eventually her mentor) Jim Ahearne, launching her marketing career while also booking shows at the Big Easy, the 200-capacity cornerstone of Portland’s nightlife.
“I didn’t know where any of it led. I just knew I liked it, I liked being in it.”
She booked what she loved: Animal Collective, The Decembrists, Rachel Yamagata, Ray LaMontagne, long before the rooms filled.
“No one was coming,” she says, laughing. To others in the industry, Portland wasn’t seen as a viable market. Lauren didn’t buy it.
“The people were here,” she says. “They just didn’t have a place.”
In 2010, that place started to take shape. Wayne crossed paths with Alex Crothers, a Vermont-based promoter who shared her belief in Portland’s potential. When Crothers signed the lease on the long-shuttered State Theatre, Lauren was his first call.
“He asked me to run the company and renovate the theatre,” she says.
The building was old. Expensive. Full of unanswered questions.
“There was no guarantee,” she says. “If it failed, it would fail very publicly.”
Photograph: Lauryn Hottinger
She spent three months renovating at full speed, juggling permits, bookings, and a calendar that did not move just because the work was unfinished.
“I cried all the time,” she says. “I called it stress crying.”
Opening night was My Morning Jacket. Tickets sold, and the doors opened in October 2010 because they had to.
“It was terrifying,” she says. “But you don’t open a room like that halfway. You either do it or you don’t.”
A thousand shows later, the State Theatre and Thompson’s Point have established themselves as institutions.
“Starting in a market that had zero shows and seeing it now is pretty incredible… I find that Maine audiences get really into the show and are not afraid to show how happy they are. This is what we’re doing it for.”
Photograph: Lauryn Hottinger
Music found a place in Portland and so did Lauren.
“That’s why I’m still here. After 20 years, I’ve lived here longer than I’ve lived anywhere by 14 years. It’s crazy. It’s the community that I found here.”
When Lauren thinks back on all that time and all those shows, it’s the big nights along the way that help her keep track. That opening night where it was all on the line, the first time a band outgrew the room because Portland helped them do it, the nights when the audience carried the show, and nights when the show carried the room.
“And then there was that Sunday night in November,” she says.
For five years, people had waited for this team to exist, and Lauren was one of them. She’d believed in Portland and Maine as a live music market before anyone else did. When it came to soccer, her belief was no different. She was in the early town halls, she was a sounding board for Hearts staff in the throes of their own “stress crying” sprint to the Home Opener, and she’s been a Forest City Original from the jump.
And in 2025, alongside her wife, son, and thousands of other early adopters, Lauren shouted, sang, and celebrated till her voice was as hoarse as after any show at The State.
In hindsight, it seems only right that the inaugural season culminated in a crescendo of emotion at that historic theatre.
“That night is in my top five,” she says, reflecting on the Semifinal watchparty. “Top five nights in fifteen years.”
“Music and soccer go hand in hand. It’s about joy and coming together to celebrate and be proud of your city and your community. My two worlds have collided in my favorite city in the world.”
“I’m not a very emotional person, but that night felt like a release. I don’t often cry,” she said laughing, “But I’m pretty sure I cried.”
When that last match ended and nobody left, she stayed with them, riding the wave of emotion that only sport and music can create.
“That’s how you know there’s something special about it,” she says. “When people don’t want to leave.”
Photograph: Lauryn Hottinger
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