Christmas carols on a warm day in North Carolina. As Johny Mathis sings of the slow fall of snow, the sun sinks slowly to the horizon as we round Chapel Hill, headed towards Concord. I do Love my Christmas songs – and though it’s totally inappropriate for November to hit us with such warm 70 degree days, we’re rushing swift and pretending that the cloudless sky cold produce flurries over night. Maybe when we turn in tonight I’ll mash up some ice with a hammer and throw it up in the air and try to catch it on my tongue before it melts.
Last night, Heather and I played with Chelsea and Beau at Taylor’s in Midlothian, VA, delaying our travels yet another day – but it was really, really worth it. I’d almost forgotten how good those two are, and I Love the fact that we both have a sort of mutual admiration verging on intimidation. Swapping off with them over the course of the night to an enthusiastic crowd who’s attention came and went (but their attitude about whatever they were paying attention to, whether it was us or whatever, was always enthusiastic… see?) and playing our hearts out and watching Chelsea and Beau work just as hard… it’s like looking into some sort of optimistic mirror-selves. Light and optimistic where Heather and I are dark. I Love the combination. Next time we play together, we’ve got to figure out how to set up two opposing stages and swap song after song after song, joining in with one another on occasion, and just pummeling the audience with our noises.
It would be a good game.
The sun is almost gone as we’re passed by truckers twenty miles short of Concord, NC. Phil Collins is a little perkier than I care for, but he IS a good drummer, partaking in a little referencing of disco rhythm as the song fades to some radio call sign or another. I’m hoping to get into town early enough to hit the music store across the street from the George Washington Bookstore Cafe where we’re playing tonight, but my hopes are fading with the light.
Ha! We win. We got there just as the guy was closing up shop, played some guitars, bought some strings, forgot to buy a guitar slide, which is just fine, as I’ve displayed absolutely no talent for playing with one anyhow.
With a couple of hours to kill, we decided to wander the sparsely populated streets of Concord and accidentally stumbled across heaven in the form of Kitty City. Heather and I were walking out of the music store on Union Street and I glanced across the street and spied tiny moving forms in the large glass windows of the shop across the street. I tried to keep Heather from seeing where we were headed and rushed her across the street and up to a big display that mostly consisted of an alarming number of kittens roaming and romping and generally cavorting. Heather’s long dreamed of finding a type of therapy that included being inundated in vast vats of kittens, and lo and behold, here in Concord, NC – we found just that. Working with all sorts of local community groups (yes, including Boy Scouts), Kitty City is part cat shelter, part adoption centre and part cat activist locus where they work hard to get feral cats spayed and neutered while also finding homes for the creatures they’ve collected.
I’d been past their storefront before and noticed that a rickety second set of wood and wire doors were placed just past the glass front doors as if the interior was meant to contain creatures sans doorknob actuating opposable thumbs, but the dim interior gave me no real clue as to what existed within. Finding this tiny space (a former coffeehouse, actually) filled with extremely friendly felines made me feel pretty bad about watching that “weird foods” show with Chelsea and Beau where the guy was advocating eating more roadkill kitten.
After spending about three hours with the kittens, we met up with our friend Ben at the George Washington Bookstore and Tavern’s open mic, and actually met up with a couple of other friends as well. Played strongly to a really receptive audience, and I have some vague hope of a semi-decent turn-out for tomorrow night. Lane, the owner, was really excited to see us and enthusiastically retold the story of meeting us – about how he’d been working in his office on the night of the first open mic we’d played there and heard us through the ceiling… he’d glared upwards and thought “what the HELL is THAT?” and rushed upstairs to see… he said he’d sensed “a change of energy” in his bar.
We followed Ben home, like little lost kittens ourselves, got a quick tour of his house, and collapsed gratefully into bed after conversations of fending off men while dressed in drag and Aqua Teen Hunger Force.
