This has been a beautiful trip. My only lament would be that it’s too short and that the first and last drives are both painful. The drive up was about 8 hours of driving, with at least two hours of it sitting in awful, awful rush hour Connecticutian traffic, and the drive home – which we’ll start tonight and probably wrap up tomorrow – will be just generic highway with a deadline at the end. At least the deadline is one of those shows where we just show up and plug in and rock out…. There’s nothing crazy and very little set up. Baltimore Book Festival, here we come!
But the interim has been delicious. We’ve split our time betwixt dear friends (though with our last stay, with Ethan Baird of Pesky J. Nixon in Massachusetts, we only saw him for about 15 minutes at around 1am) and really enjoyed all the shows. We’ve had the full gamut from mostly-folk to mostly-play-whatever-we-want to 2 song open mic introduction to 3 hour balls-to-the-wall rock out bar gig – and all the venues have been wonderful. Even the doesn’t-look-like-much-from-the-outside Athens Pizza was filled with familiar friends and fans and had some of the best pizza I’ve ever had.
Today we’ve spent a couple of hours on the beach on Plum Island, photographing waves and birds and dogs and rocks, dancing with said waves, chasing said birds, greeting said dogs and climbing on said rocks. Sleepy but satisfied, we’ve knocked the sand off our feet and piled back into the Saturn to make our way down to the Lizard Lounge for the big COMPETITION.
I can’t really think of it that way though. The 13th Semi-Annual Big Event is the finals tier of Tom Bianchi’s Lizard Lounge Open Mic Shootout competition. We won one of the every-Monday-night competitions and tonight we get to play one song, and another randomly selected competitor gets to play one song – and one of us gets knocked out and one of us gets to advance. I frankly hate things like this when I think about them too much, but if I just relax and think of it as a spectacular lineup that we get to play a song or so at, I can be alright with it. It’s all too easy to overthink it. If we don’t get knocked out in the first tier, all fine and good, but if we do it’s very easy to run the “what-ifs” in your head till your brain explodes. I’ll endeavour to avoid that.
The winner gets $500 and perhaps more importantly, to play 3 or 4 songs over the course of the night in front of one of the most select collections of musicians on the East Coast. Knowing some of the other competitors it’s a total toss up even on our BEST night.
Sunlight is beating down rather unrelentingly and this laptop does nothing to alleviate the heat, so I think I’ll leave you there. Wish us luck!
