We don’t do it much, maybe about once a year, but there comes a moment every couple of tours where Heather and I turn to one another and think “you know, we COOOOOOULD take the night off”. And sometimes we even decide we want to spring on the luxury of a hotel. Not that THIS hotel is particularly luxurious in any way. The Motel 8 in Waterbury, CT has half-working light fixtures and cracks and cigarette holes in the bedsheets, but it’s a room just for us, where we control the remote, the shower is hot and pounding and we don’t have to use our own towels. We watch a “Mythbusters” marathon till around 2am and then I fall FAST asleep, dreaming (unfortunately) about being in prison till Heather shakes me out of it the next morning. I would’ve slept right through my alarm.
The choice of sleeping arrangements last night has more to do with needing a personal break than anything else. It’s not like the tour’s been rough, it’s not like the drives have been hard… the crowds have been great, the open mic we hit last night to fill in an empty night was pretty awesome, and the people we’ve been staying with have all been fun. I think last night we just looked at our calendar and realized that we didn’t have a full day off built in to our schedule until next week Friday, and that we hadn’t HAD one since the 13th. Though the open mic at the Hessian Lion had been something I’d been kind of wanting to check out, hanging out at a bar for a couple of hours waiting for it to start (we came to this decision at around 7 in the evening, we’d been killing time since 5 and the open mic still didn’t start till 9) just sounded like too much work.
Retreat has treated us well. Heather’s puttering as I type and I’m typing to avoid shoving stuff in the car. We’re supposed to have Lovely weather, but the traffic outside has a suspicion of swoosh to it that implies that it might’ve rained. I’m not ready to pull back the curtain and look.
I overheard Heather and Danielle Miraglia talking about hotels, about how sometimes (especially touring as a solo attractive female) (okay, okay, touring as a solo really dazzlingly beautiful female) both of them would much rather drop the money on the hotel than take their chances with staying with people they don’t know so well. I think it’s been in my head ever since.
“Hotel”. It’s not an inherently hot word, but I bet if I called one of my Russian friends and asked them to whisper it to me I’d suffer some stirrin’s. In practice, there’s absolutely NOTHING hot about the hotel room. It’s completely rundown without seeming seedy. Something about it speaks of tired salesmen and truckers looking for a night off from their sleeper cabs. And rockstars. I can imagine bands staying here.
In any case – what have we been up to? Monday night we won the Lizard Lounge open mic challenge! Tuesday night we went to the Rhode Island Songwriters Association (RISA) Open Mic at a little grille on the dock appropriately named the On The Dock Grille. It was particularly Lovely – just such a fantastic atmosphere! Bikers and boaters with singer/songwriters in the middle. The New English accents contrasted nicely with the bartender’s thick Irish brogue and there were a couple of tricky conversational implosions as the two accents clashed. A good mix of singer/songwriters and cover artists and all-in-all it was just a great night. Had some stuffies! We don’t have stuffies back home.
Sigh.
Stuffies.
