Happy New Year! It’s 2016! At my last open mic of 2015 I asked the audience if there was ANYONE for whom “2016” DIDN’T sound FUTURISTIC and no-one raised their hands. Now, it’s perfectly legit to point out that no one really pays attention to me and my blathering at my open mics in any case, but I still see this as a genuine answer.
We have computers more powerful than Multivac in our pants, there are self-driving cars and I’ve seen Star Wars VII – surely a sign that the future is nigh.
We’re not on tour, merely out for the night to perpetrate a gig with Kristen’s electric string quartet Anthem – but I had that beautiful slow morning moment that rarely happens anywhere but “on the road”: eating at an IHOP, surrounded by people I don’t know, swirling the last of my coffee and thinking about highways. Getting my brain up to speed thinking about where I am and how many miles I’ve got to cover, doing the math of time-to-destination and what state lines I’ll cross before dinner. It’s a grey day, not much in blue poking through, but it’s the way I Love to start my day – contemplating movement.
Last night I did camera work and recording for Anthem at their annual First Night Winchester, VA show. The format is three repetitions interspersed with another act – which I’m not describing well – i.e. 6pm Anthem, 7pm act B (last year it was Mad Mary, an insanely fast banjo goddess that would’ve made Dave [you know who you are] lose all control), 8pm Anthem, 9pm act B (yeah, she was kind of awesome), 10pm Anthem and at 11pm the speediest of all breakdowns in an effort to be out of the way before Act B hits the stage one last time so we don’t have to wait around to the end of their act to get our stuff and leave.
This year Act B was Johnny O the Magician and he was a lot of fun. Charming and clownish, over-acted and well-rehearsed, he did a lot of tricks that I recognized and theoretically have some working knowledge of how to perpetrate – and the fact that I knew where to look made the act even MORE impressive. Yeah, he was probably a wizard. Or a necromancer. Probably the latter, actually – judging from how spectacularly he pulled off his show’s closing number which was basically a puppet act with a fox. The dance act is kind of marvelous.
Talking to Johnny backstage it turns out he’d spend years working in a hardware store until …
“Till things started to disappear? You can use that!”
No, till he took a gamble on doing the magic thing full-time. 35 years now and never looking back. Admirable.
I like running the cameras and having a sense of purpose even when I’m not on stage. It gives me an excuse to stare at my girlfriend, watch all the nuances of her performance in a way that I can’t do when we’re playing together. They debuted (to me at least) Kristen’s string quartet arrangement of the Eurythmics “Sweet Dreams” which is actually kind of amazing. I didn’t really know she could DO stuff like that. We’re headed into our eighth year together and she still surprises me.
We went back to the aforementioned hotel room and watched the Balls Drop across the world until One Direction threatened to come on stage (insert ball drop joke) and then it was Aqua Teen Hunger Force and a slow fade to black…
And the next morning we went to open the door, forgot to unlatch the not-chain-lock thingie and scratched up the door.
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