Good morning world. This week was SUPPOSED to be exceptionally intense, but thanks to a canceled gig on Tuesday, that sort of broke the tension and the week has actually been… you know, fine. There’s a break point (no pun intended) where a packed week suddenly becomes a week with a just a bunch of things in it. When the week is REALLY full, the gigs and events and obligations on my calendars look like solid blocks, butting up against one another… but now, perhaps with the perspective of a slow Saturday morning, I’m very aware of all the breathing space between them.
We drove back from New England on Sunday, leaving Phoenicia, NY, exploring Woodstock, and then coming pretty much straight back. Monday’s Teavolve open mic was finally back to normal… the slow slow summer finally seeming to break with featured artist Jimmy Stewart existing in the centre of a really amazing night.
Tuesday I got the call that Busboys and Poets… oh Busboys and Poets who FINALLY remembered to put the open mic in their newsletter… (still no social media mention, but… baby steps) had a water main break and had to close….
Wednesday we got together with Ayreheart and did absolutely great things in preparation for November’s show, Thursday was a bar gig in Washington DC and last night was a wonderful outdoor shows in absolutely perfect Ellicott City, filled with friends and fans and an old friend of my father and whirling dervish children.
Yeah – weird. A woman came up to me and explains that she’d been a friend of my dad’s, and that she’d come out specifically because she’d followed my music for a long time and tonight we were just down the street so she wanted to come up and introduce herself… she told me a story of she and her husband and my dad all went ice skating, but since my dad didn’t ice skate he just stood on the edge of the rink and took photographs. She also talked about a business trip to Fort Wayne, IN where my dad insisted on going to a really cool optics museum in Chicago… I’ve been trying to figure out what it might’ve been. She said it “wasn’t really optical illusions, but a lot of optical gear and… ” not really much to go on – there’s a mirror maze at the Museum of Science in Chicago, the promising Museum of Illusions is a brand NEW thing and actually is only PLANNED for Chicago, and definitely wasn’t there 30 or so years ago – the virtual Illusion Museum planned by Illinois University didn’t exist, doesn’t exist, and when finally finished STILL technically won’t exist…. the Illusion Experience looks really cheesey (which my dad would’ve probably been into) but probably didn’t exist and the Museum of Holography… which given my dad’s interests actually seems really likely, is unfortunately permanently closed.
I think in my head it’ll probably be this last option.
Every once in a while someone will come up and introduce themselves and say “I was a friend of your father’s” and we’ll trade stories for a while. Jenine and her husband met while working with my dad on GOES (the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite that helped firm up some of our first empirical global warming data in the mid / late 70s) – apparently HE was a contractor and SHE was NASA, it all sounded very sordid… and they both knew my dad.
Well, Kristen’s off to play a wedding. Heather’s off to play a wedding. Who knows what the cat’s up to. I’m going to stay RIGHT here. It’s supposed to reach back up to 90 degrees today, but if I stay inside and just look at the low, glowering grey clouds from in here I can pretend that it’s a cool autumnal day…
