We won the Takoma Park Folk Festival, which I have to admit I am still giddy about. The win was really secondary to how good I felt based on the response of the people at the festival. We sold a bunch of CDs, and it seemed that every person walking up to us expressed genuinely their desire that we should win. And I felt like we were really on top of our game. We turned what might have been disaster into a strength. I broke TWO strings simealtaneously on the tail end of the first song, LooseN, but used the strong bass in the guitar to “drum” through to the end of the song. When that finished, one of our competitors, Audrey’s new bass player, Mark, tuned up his Taylor and handed it to me to play. The guitar sounded and felt so beautiful, like playing satin. And Rowan playing percussion behind us drove me a little more. I was a little more active than usual. And we really played so nicely. People were really into it, and that would have been enough for me, really. I think, if we had not won, I was sort of routing for Bill, our lawyer friend we met so long ago at Just Plain Folks. When we met him, he’d just picked up his guitar again after not playing for 20 years. Now he’s playing all the time, has a new CD and a band. I can not imagine how amazing that would have been for him to win. It would have been a win that would really have delighted me. It was quite the compliment that Bill felt pretty much the same way about us: If I’m not going to win, then I really want these guys to win. When they announced us as the winner, I have to admit my mouth did the thing that people who’ve won the grammy and aren’t expecting it do – the sort of “whaaaaat?” mixed with “really?!?!?” What’s also cool is that we won it playing what we wanted to play, which furthers my growing theory about the openmindedness of the folk community. We were different. We were us, but we still can find a home for ourselves under that umbrella that is folk. A strong performance can move people, even if the genre is not a precise fit. At least these are the lessons of NewSong and Takoma Park Folk Festival. I got to admit, even with all the recent success, rob and I are both a little down. The storms are coming, along with the bills, and small things like guitar strings have never seemed so costly. In a last wave of good news, even as collection agencies are hounding us about medical bills from the accident, our lawyer assures us all will be taken care of in 30 days. Then I get to look for a replacement for the Saturn that carried us for 9 months and protected us in the womb during that rough birth into the real world of shattered glass and twisted metal more than four months ago.
