rob Day started much as any other, especially if you’re counting from midnight. Last night we’d gone out to see Brass Against at the 8×10 – an amazing show – so glad most of the band was able to come out with us… Rowan hadn’t been able to make it last time and I really Loved watching him Love them.
A great dinner of tacos at the market across the street, wandering in the cold rain to get hot cookies, going to the show and standing with a bunch of old hippies who’d been guested into the show and had NO idea what they were in for… talking about protest songs, about how this is the protest music of MY generation being reawakened and given new vibrancy by the next…
It was a good night.
But yeah, like most days that begin at midnight, we came home and threw on a movie and chilled with the cat for a bit while I thought about what the next day would bring.
In this case it was Cinderella and Prince has yet to learn that he’s unlikely to catch the animals on the screen – even animated ones – and Cinderella specifically, filled with meeces mices and the occasional bird, filled him with hope.
I opened birthday presents from Susan (a dragon) and my brother (those “see in colour” sunglasses – this made me get all teary-eyed even though as yet they have done nothing for my colour perception – the thought counts a lot!) – wrote a bit of setlist and went to bed.
Friday was my 45th birthday and I spent most of it prepping for the show down at New Deal Cafe. Set list, gear check, restring my guitar, etc. Setting up leisurely (thank you NDC for having a closed bar in the late afternoon, it makes it all SO MUCH EASIER!!!) and putting everything in it’s place.
On stage as we rocked out I was thinking to myself, for as much as “the job” has been hard recently, how many people, when asked what they’d like to do for their birthday can answer “I want to go do my JOB, 110% – and I want to nix the support staff and do all the little pieces myself!!!”?
I Love running sound. I Love setting everything up (tear down less-so – thank you Ross Martin for leaping into play at the end of the night) and I Love making things GO. I’d like to think I’m pretty good at it too, at least with my own well-known components.
The show itself was awesome – lots of dancers were missing (Dancin’ Bill, who appears in the foreground of lots of our NDC videos, has moved to the west coast, and there was a party… asterisk on the party) but this was made up for with the dancing of Melissa, our youngest fan. I feel like we were exceptionally tight, there was food and cake and joy and some friends who hadn’t been around for a while…
And a great compliment : “rob, if I died tomorrow, you’re one of the people I wouldn’t be unhappy to have known”.
Yeah, you’ve got to know her to understand that that’s a pretty big deal.
A great night with friends made even moreso by the fact that a lot of the “filler” people weren’t there for the night…
Ever since New Deal installed the bar in this room, they’ve certainly had great beverages and more attentive service, but they’ve also attracted a pseudo-late-night (late night for Historic Greenbelt) cloud of barflies and regulars that are so… fucking… loud… who kind of take up camp in the back third of the room and slowly increase in volume both in space and in sound seriously undermining our ability to do anything than play fast and loud for the latter part of the night.
They weren’t there!
wtf?!
It was awesome!
Apparently there’s a regular first-Friday party in Greenbelt that draws that crowd away and first-Fridays are a known dead spot on the calendar. The management was happily surprised at how that wasn’t the case for us… and I must admit I’ve now changed our entire booking strategy around New Deal to focus on first-Fridays going forward.
I digress.
It was an amazing birthday party. My mom had been getting cards signed by people at all sorts of places for the last several weeks, Robin made me fudge, Kristen drove, we played Bulldozer and Counting. Good times were had?
GREAT times were had!
