When you play a happy hour hosted by an IT company, you don’t expect to play quite such a beautiful venue. Until that IT company mentions you’ll be playing at their offices at BEST you might be expecting some sort of hotel rental hall, someplace with harsh fluorescent lights and bored-looking caterers. Then once they mention that it’s going to be at their place of business and you start visualizing cubicles and conference rooms and kind of dread what’s about to happen to you… at best I was visualizing some kind of odd office party.
So we were kind of stunned when we were ushered into Chesapeake Systems’ offices in a deconsecrated church in the Hampden area of Baltimore. A little over a hundred years old and beautifully restored, there were no cubicles in sight. Gorgeous wood floors, old iron fixtures and a re-imagined, pixilated version of the Chesapeake Bay worked in stained glass combined to make it an incredibly unique space with amazing acoustics.
They even sell Macs there and were doing little seminars about Adobe CS 6 products – sort of the perfect setting for us. We had a great time and played to the local community of digital artists and webizens in between conversations about InDesign’snew features and the amazing comeback that Quark has made (?!). It was SUCH a wonderful space that now we’re looking at renting the hall for some sort of Baltimore show in a totally us-controlled venue where we don’t have some venue complaining about who we’ve booked or changing the times at the last second…
The night was capped off by a violent thunderstorm ripping through Charm City, flashbulbing the stained glass clerestory windows and making load-out a bit touch and go, but driving through my city with torrential downpours making the town smell like wet dog was made more than bearable knowing that Heather and I were destined to meet up with our friend Brennan at the Double T for some much-needed social bonding.
Cold and wet but with the promise of warm company and hot food – it was kind of a perfect night.
Cletus Kennelly and Lori Kelley performing at their fantabulous collective of duo acts – Duo-licious. It was a pretty great night, building from the decidedly chipper Veronneau to the pretty chipper Cletus and Lori, picking up a little bit of angst and darkness with Naked Blue and then… you know… us. French and English duo Veronneau kick off Duo-licious with their joyous folk-jazz! Naked Blue performing at Duo-licious at Jammin Java in Vienna, VA.
Setting up in the beautiful “offices” of Chesapeake Systems in Baltimore, MD. Heather and I enjoying the Hell out of the monthly happy hour at Chesapeake Systems in Baltimore, MD. Yeah, not only have they rebuilt the church, but they’ve refurbished the pipe organ, you know, just in case you need to jam on the pipe organ. The organ was originally built in 1914 by MP Moller and apparently his pipe organ business was one of the building blocks that helped make Hagerstown a “viable business center in Western Maryland”. Huh… who knew?!
