September 14, 2004

10:53 p.m.

And the Return (appended)

The mojo worked, and Ivan went elsewhere.

So, very nearly, did my bass.

We arrived without mishap in Orlando by supper time on Thursday. A quick stop at baggage claim produced suitcases, keyboard and guitars but no bass case. Sometimes it's left in the luggage office because it's large. The first time I flew the bass, American damaged the case enough to make it inoperable for a future trip. They bought me a new one. The second time I flew it, it was nicked but otherwise all right, and the bass was fine. This, the third time, it didn't make it onto the connection.

They gave me a slip marked, and I am not making this up, "Luggage Irregularity Receipt." Not "Lost Luggage," or "Cluelessly Misplaced Important Career-Related Equipment," or even "The 'Oops' Report." The Luggage Irregularity Receipt gave me a claim number and a phone number to call if someone didn't show up at our lodging within a few hours holding my bass case. We got our rental car and drove to our host's house.

I wasn't too worried.

Stan has a cute little two bedroom bungalow in Orlando which he is renovating. It's got nice woodwork, great floors, wonderful old windows. It's also filthy. I mean, the kind of filthy that if you walk across the room in your white socks, the bottoms will turn coal black. He has a friendly dog who has been trained for tv commercials and will do lots of cool things by hand signals. The dog also hasn't had a bath since perhaps 2003, and what with the pervasive high humidity and the house being shut up for Hurricaine Frances for a few days, the smell of close, wet, unbathed dog was offensively palpable upon entry.

But, y'know, people don't smell their own dogs after a while.

Stan met us at the house; he was staying with his girlfriend for the weekend so we'd have the place to ourselves. He'd booked us for the Sunday afternoon gig, and as we were flying out on Monday, we'd planned to make this our last stop. Meanwhile we were in Ft. Lauderdale on Friday, so this was an overnight stop before driving south.

After giving us the tour, during which we were afraid to touch anything for fear of getting sooty, he pulled out his Fender bass ($150 at a pawn shop) and said I was welcome to borrow it if mine didn't show up. We were already borrowing a keyboard stand from a friend of his the next morning, and a phone call ascertained that said friend also had a tuner I could buy for $20 if I needed it for the borrowed bass (my tuner and cables were also in the bass case). Then he left with his dog.

I pulled my sheets out of the dryer -- thank goodness at least the bed didn't smell doggy -- and felt the first sneezes coming on. Dust, animal dander, and mold -- these are a few of my favorite things... to be allergic to. The house was rich in all. We organized ourselves for bed, and at 9:00 I called the phone number to get an update on my Irregular Luggage.

"Pending." No further information. Now I was worried, and also pissed that my gray fleece MSPCA vest was packed in the bass case, which I won in a little raffle when I joined that esteemed organization a few years ago. Not only my Star Trek silver bass, AND four quarter inch cables AND my tuner, but my VEST??! It's the last straw!

By 10:00 Chris decided to go to the airport and inquire. We call him Bulldog for a good reason. He and Carol went and I stayed in case it was delivered. At 10:30 I got a call from Chris: they were at the airport and the bass had just arrived. The delivery guy seemed a little put out that he wasn't going to get his fee for bringing it out.

So the bass came home and I was glad to see it, and the vest was there, and then I opened the pocket inside the case and it was empty.

Where the hell were my cables and stuff?

My mind hearkened back to the TSA inspector who, at Bradley airport, had inadvertently opened the case upside down on the counter, and everything had spilled out of the pocket. With a sinking feeling I realized that, in the confusion of turning it all over, he must have forgotten to put the contents back in. My cables never left Hartford.

Shit.

Now, it's been a stressful month. I already had a lot on my plate, what with the upcoming move (and being worried about a gas leak in the new apartment which I hadn't had time to deal with), and financial drain, and the whole car business, and touring, and now this.

I went to bed worried but slept okay, aside from waking up rather congested and itchy-eyed and not being able to breathe. But aside from that I slept okay. Mostly.

In the morning we went by the friend's house who wasn't there and I ended up forking over $20 for the new, unused tuner which he'd left on the back porch in the original box (oh, I hadn't brought much cash either, and it was already getting depleted, and I thought, why couldn't he loan me the damn tuner instead of insisting that I either buy it or leave it?) and had time to see a couple of cool lizards on his screen before getting into some kind of mild argument with Chris who was noticing that everything I was saying was bitchy and negative, and I felt so umbraged and violated that someone had had the gall to lose my stuff, and then I had a meltdown on the stranger's porch among lizards and moist patio furniture because I just couldn't deal with anything else and I cried and cried and felt like the worst possible person and the lamest bandmate and also we hadn't had any breakfast so I had low blood sugar to boot.

That was the low point.

So we found some breakfast and I cheered up a little, and we drove to Orlando to the big beautiful Sunrise theatre, and on the way there was tree devastation and some very unlucky buildings and the Crown Plaza hotel was in very bad shape indeed. And by that time I felt better, and we set up on the big stage and for the first time I didn't use my bass amp but went directly through the system. I'd only brought one guitar as well, so the setup was quick and so easy, I thought, OH why don't I just tour like this? I use two guitars because I use several tunings, but for this weekend I planned the sets so all my regular tuning songs were in one set and all the rest were in the other set where I could go from one tuning to another logically, changing just one string or two strings at a time. It worked very well, and even better, we had a great gig.

Not a ton of people, but enough to make it lovely and what a sweet audience. They were with us from the first moment, and we just couldn't do anything wrong. We sang well, sold well, and got a lot of mailing list signups.

And I never talk about fees here, but just this once I'm going to, because it was our highest paying gig to date, and it was $2500.

Don't you respect me more now?

(Just to put things in perspective, one of our Sunday gigs was for $75, and the other was for $150.)

********

Saturday we had off, so we drove to Stuart where Carol's parents have just moved. Just in time for Frances. They'd been without power for several days. They're in their 80's so it's really a hardship for them. Being between two places now, their condo which they've had for some years, and the new, sort of assisted-living place they're gradually getting into, they did have the recourse of going to the new place during the day which had power. But their special beds haven't arrived there yet so they have to sleep in the condo still -- no a/c, no fridge working, etc. No hot water. The whole trauma of moving and then dealing with the hurricaine has left them just immobilized -- they can't even unpack. We helped them get the office set up, moving some furniture for them and unwrapping all of Carol's mom's tchotchkee. Oh my God, the figurines alone! There was so much dustable, ornamental crap -- and every third thing she'd unwrap and say, "Oh, why did I keep this? I have no place to put it!" Finally, knowing my own move was imminent, she looked up at me and said ruefully, "Throw it out before you move!"

We also helped organize their storage cell, got rid of some packing trash, and brought them an ice chest filled with ice so they could at least have cold drinks and keep a few things chilled. They were delighted.

********

I've run out of steam. The rest of the story will wait until tomorrow.

********

The Rest of the Story

We left Stuart in the late afternoon and continued back up to Orlando, but this time we'd booked hotels. After the first hyper-allergenic night at Stan's House of Dog, we figured (well, I figured) it was time for some better air quality.

(Friday night was a little better; we stayed with someone in Ft. Lauderdale for whom we'd done a house concert a couple of years ago. He seemed very eager to put us up and wanted us to tell people we were staying with him, as if it were a point of prestige. I could be making this up, though, as he's now the head of the South Florida Folk Festival and we still can't get into the damned thing. He has three very miniscule dogs, the sweetest of which has a recurring cough due to a collapsing trachea -- don't even let me go there, it kills me -- and the tiniest of which sometimes barks so hard he knocks himself over.)

(I slept on a "blow-up bed" {as opposed to an airbed} which lost enough air during the night that, by morning, my ass was darn near on the floor. But it was a clean floor.)

Where was I? Back to Orlando. We chose the cheapest Motel 6 in the area and it turned out to be seedy, dilapidated and overly populated with lounging, laid back, strapping, beer-drinking African Americans with lots of kids who seemed to be waiting for their houses to be fixed so they could move back in. There was a lot of noise at the pool and Chris was certain he was propositioned on his way to the room with his guitars. Part of the bathroom wall and ceiling were missing from water damage. We crammed ourselves in and discussed the merits of staying at a better hotel near the airport the following night, so we'd be closer for our flight out.

Dinner was about the fourth in a series of incredibly over-salted meals to which we were treated this trip. We wondered if there was just too much salt around, you know, from the ocean, and they were just trying to get rid of it by feeding it to tourists.

We came back to the room and booked a Marriott for the following night.

What with last minute plane tickets, a rental car, and a couple more hotels than expected, that $2500 looks a little smaller now, doesn't it?

Chris saved a wee bit by coming up with the idea that he could return the rental car directly after our Sunday gig and take the free shuttle back to the hotel. We walked to dinner and took the shuttle back next morning to the airport. It worked fine and oh, by the way, the room was big and well appointed and comfy and clean and worth the extra money. Seabiscuit was on telly and we hadn't seen it yet. What a great movie.

********

Copious inquiries at Bradley produced nothing more than a local TSA lost-and-found number (at least they're admitting it's lost, not irregular), so I left a message which has not been returned. I'll go and replace my cables today. The tuner, I discovered, is even better in some ways than my other one, so I was glad in the end that I'd peeled off a sawbuck to get it. I like this travelling lighter, too, and I didn't miss my bass amp, ar ar.

Yesterday after several errands I went to Willi to clean, and spent the first hour and a half or so dealing with the gas leak, which turned out to be three gas leaks in the front room heater. The gas man came right away when I called the emergency number, and stopped the gas flow to that unit until it could be repaired. Within an hour the apartment smelled like fresh air, no more gas smell. I was hugely relieved. I spent several hours scrubbing the crap out of the place -- the previous tenant cooked greasy food and never cleaned up after, apparently, and also had two cats so in addition to the common evidence (hair, a little kibble, some bits of litter) there were those dirty smears about a foot off the floor on every single corner in the apartment where cats love to wipe their faces. I did it all with love, singing for joy and talking to myself about what a slob she was and how great it was that I was there now and would take care of the place. The bedroom Rose painted looks gorgeous. I'll do a few touchups today but the color is perfect and restful.

The other thing I did yesterday morning was talk to Toyota and tell them I'd decided to sell my car privately because I really need to garner a larger down payment, so they finally indicated they might be able to inch up their offer on the tradein. I'm therefore taking Tardis I to the dealership in an hour, dirty or no, to have them look at it. Then back to Mystic for the rest of the cleaning, hanging of curtains and moving of everything we've brought so far into the corners so the movers can place furniture on Saturday. The gas company is sending someone out tomorrow to fix the heater and Joliette will be there to deal with that.

I wanted to say more about the weekend, how it made me appreciate my band and how we talked about not doing this forever, maybe only a few more years, and it made us remember to have fun now rather than complain. It gets harder to remember that sometimes, as we get older and tireder, and feel inconvenienced. But the gigs were sweet -- I hardly talked about them, but they were all great and the people were so nice and appreciative. So much of our music is about healing after devastation, we felt it was the right time to be singing in Florida, generating solidarity and community. We got home without any problems. Here's a souvenir from the Orlando airport which I found amusing. Must dash now.