This made us worry about what happens in that Vault basement band room.
I’ve been quiet because I’ve been panicked. And when I get to freaking out, I feel like I’m not going to say much of anything productive or fun for anyone to read. But today I am okay. I will make the bills this month, and the car settlement is about to finally come through.
It’s been almost nine months … it will be nine by the time we see any money. I will scrape out just enough to get an equivalent sort of car back. This makes me ecstatic. I have been dying to have a place of my own (even if it’s kinda like a very small house trailer on 18″ wheels), and to feel more independent. Having to borrow a car and living with my parents … I don’t even think I need to explain how that can feel.
We had a very excellent couple of days. In addition to the news about the settlement, I was able to snag a couple more paying and feeding North Carolina gigs, some media attention, and even a last-minute local gig to send us off with a little pocket money.
The gig: Java Mamma’s in Reisterstown, MD, is the kind of coffee shop that the area has been begging for. It’s about two miles away from my parents’ house, in an area where nothing is open past about 9 p.m., unless you hit the diner that’s open 24 hours on the weekend. In high school, we all used to frequent the coffee shop that was part of the Kinko’s in the Pepto bis-MALL (a pink shopping center). Because Kinko’s was open late, the coffee shop stayed open till 2 a.m. There was art on the walls, but the place was still this weird hybrid of artsy coffee shop and flurescent copy center. Still, it was ours and we loved it, and all our friends worked there, and it was right across the street from the movie theatre. We went there after school plays, we went there after movies, we went there when there was nowhere else we wanted to go or we were just too young to go anywhere else. It was the site of big announcements. It was the first place I saw what a freshly stiched wrist looked liked after it had been slit, where I resolved with a runaway friend, where I pretended not to have a crush on the coffee guy because my best friend did too, where I first heard the names Burroughs and Ginsberg, and where I took new boyfriends for approval.
A lot of people from smallish towns have similar stories with insert-Denny’s-in-place-of-the-word-coffee-shop-here because it was the thing open late.
Anyway, like a little art-ectomy, the coffee shop part closed a little before the Kinko’s moved to another location and became all and only sterile copy center.
And that was about it in our town. Most of us didn’t go into Baltimore City much. Working for The Sun and gigging with ilyAIMY were the things that led me into the city. There weren’t other coffee shops, and NOTHING was open late.
So tonight was lovely. It was full of high school kids and college students still home on break. And it reminded me of my old kinko’s coffee shop.
So congratulations and the best of luck to this place. We’ll be back February 26.
