February 01, 2006

11:08 p.m.

Florida Tour, Second Half

Monday Jan. 23

There was a young man from Miami
Who sought the advice of a swami
Saying, "Look in your ball
And confess to me all:
Will my life be a blizzard, or balmy?"

I finally slept last night, propped up a little. Bronchitis dee-luxe this morning. Carol is popping out for some Pred, which Rose kindly prescribed by phone to a local Walgreens. She'll go visit with mum & dad and take our laundry over there, and I will play invalid and stay home.

We come upon the usual factors here, visiting her folks. Her dad hates it when Chris wears sneakers to dinner; he thinks all dinners should be suit, tie and good shoes affairs. Her mom obsesses over whether we'll have enough to eat in the other condo, and when we'll show up and when we'll leave each day. C&C invited them to see Cirque du Soleil but it's two hours away, and her dad can't really travel that far now. Plus he just doesn't really want to go. He complains about how boring life is, sitting in the chair watching tv, yet doesn't want to do much else anyway. We wonder whether we'll get that way.

On another subject, it's lovely here. The weather's been fine -- a touch of rain yesterday, but warmish. Humid enough to reverse the dry skin conditions imposed by New England winter. The condo, the back of which faces a big harbor, is fashioned in those white-and-sand colors so favored by coast dwellers. Touches of turquoise, teal and rose. Numerous plants by the rear sliding windows, which are watered by a housekeeper who comes in periodically to check on things.

A woman who lived in a loft
Much preferred the ah-choo to the cough.
"It's not that I mind
Thrills of bronchial kind --
It's just that the sneeze gets me off!"

********

8:24pm

We went out to dinner with Carol's parents. Her dad's bone cancer is in remission now, and though he says he can't remember whether he felt worse during the treatment, he does seem more chipper. I spent dinner trying to remember not to put my elbows on the table. The food was great... I had a "stuffed eggplant" which is kind of like a lasagna without the pasta -- just layers of vegetables with a little cheese and tomato sauce. I'm feeling measurably better after two doses of Prednisone. (Note: we have one of the back sliders open, and I just heard a fish jump. Crickets are chirping, and the lights across the bay are a very cheery sight.)

Chris said he found a really big and unusual frog on the slider screen last night. It was pale, and had eyes on either side rather than on top of its head, and long, long legs and toes. Cool.

I found a novel by Willa Cather, a writer of whom I've heard but have never read. She wrote early 20th Century epic prairie novels. Dar confirmed that this was a well reputed book, so I may delve into that tonight. I suspect I won't go to bed very early. Pred keeps me up a little.

********

I had the idea, which is only partly insane, of driving down next time we have a Florida tour. We've flown every time except the first, and while it makes the journey so much quicker, it means we have to leave some instruments at home and can't play certain songs because of it. So there are some things our Florida fans have never heard. Then we have to mail CDs down ahead, and packing is such a compromise with all the small equipment that has to be tucked in between socks and underwear. Shall I bring the credit card swiper, or that second long sleeved shirt?

So if I drove and my mates flew, I could bring both my guitars and Chris's electric, the CDs, our small house concert speakers, and all that other little stuff. Then I could stow my car at our first host's house and transfer everything to the larger rental vehicle. And I wouldn't be wearing my long sleeved shirt as pajamas after wearing it during the day.

Right now that sounds like such a good idea. After three days of driving it would probably look different, but there's something I miss about driving alone, as opposed to following them.

********

I spoke with Steve today, and his area got a snowstorm. It was coming down as we talked, four to eight inches. He's doing fine from his THIRD eye surgery, though it sucks to have monocular vision again. Today he was a little antsy. He said he felt sour. I asked him if there were anything sweet in the house to eat? He laughed and said he thought he could scare something up. Later I spoke with Dar and they got about four slushy inches in Boston -- again, not enough to break out the new snowblower.

He has a staged reading of The Iceman Cometh on Monday.

Tuesday, 1/24 10:03am

The fog has rolled off and I can see the opposite shore of the harbor. I hardly slept at all. Prednisone gave me wild imaginings of world peace most of the night, and travels to distant lands. The bus never left the station, but there were at least some good movies to watch.

Today we'll take Carol's mum shopping, and try to get a few things for ourselves as well. I need sneakers and gig clothes.

********

3:26pm

Wheeeeeee, I'm on Prednisone, I'm all sleep-deprived and I don't feel like sleeping! Wheeeeeeeeee!

Ahem.

No dice at the mall. I did find Emergen-C two for one at the vitamin store, but nothing else. It reminded me I want to put together a care package for Ducky in L.A. It was mildly fun to look at everything but the mall just isn't my place. Then I was dropped at the library to check email while my mates went on other errands. Now Carol is visiting with the folks and I played my guitar for a while... I'll definitely be back in voice on Friday. Chris swam in the pool here, and we're watching fish jump in the harbor. They're so vigorous! And I saw a little black salamander.

What a good day, aside from all the sneezing.

********

8:14pm

One stuffed sea bass later... I am struck by the proliferation, here, of family pictures of Carol's brother. I've met the family a few times -- they live in Texas -- and it's always rather awkward and strange. Forgive me if I've written about them before; I can't remember. They're devout born-again Christians; his wife has MS and is wheelchair bound. They have two daughters and one son, pre-teen I believe -- the son might be thirteen now or something. I don't know how to describe them except as sheltered -- they look totally naive, unformed, blank. They've been home schooled because dad doesn't want them mingling with worldly kids. Their clothes look rather prairie-ish. The kids' arms are painfully thin. The boy, I hear from Carol, has been laxative dependent since he was four. C&C suspect he's gay; he loved to wear his sisters' dresses and, when younger, had to be instructed about when that was inappropriate. I don't know if he still has the preference or if it's been squeezed out of him. Anyway, they've come to gigs a couple of times, and her brother always addresses me as "Miss (last name)" instead of my first name.

When we go to Texas, C&C go over to their house for an overcooked dinner, served on scratched up plastic plates from when the kids were little. Then Mark gets terrible indigestion and doesn't sleep. Somehow I get to be exempt from these strained affairs.

Anyway, the irony of all the pictures is that Carol's dad doesn't want anything to do with Brother. I gather he came to visit the folks recently, under much opposition from dad. But I guess they have all these family portraits done, and he just keeps sending them, so mom puts them out. There aren't really any photos of the other kids here. (Maybe those went to the new condo.) But everywhere I go, there are the skinny kids with protruding teeth (the older girl smiles with her lips pursed and her chin all tucked up, so the teeth won't show) and babydoll dresses. All I can think about is how repressed and unprepared for life they are. That could just be my perception and not the truth; but it persists, and it troubles me.

After dinner we went over and played Hearts with the folks. I scorekept; I do not play hearts, or any competitive game (with one exception in Gray, Illinois.) Carol is very lucky at hearts.

Tomorrow? I have no plan. It feels good.

********

Wed. 5:18pm

Just about to leave for dinner. I took a hot bath late last evening, reading "My Antonia" aloud long into the night. Cather is a beautiful writer, a perfect writer. I try to get the accents -- the Virginia boy who grew up in Nebraska -- does he sound Virginian or Nebraskan? And the immigrants, the Norwegians, the Russians? How has their pronounciation of English been affected by having learned it in the Midwest? And the little Bohemian girl who learns English from the Virginian-turned-Nebraskan? I try to remember how my dad's ex-wife sounded. She's from West Virginia, and had a very particular way of speaking I find hard to duplicate without a reference.

9:58pm

We ate at the elegant little French place that has the unassuming name of "Plaza Cafe." Last year I had the best crab cakes of my life there, and this year I branched out into the sweet potato-encrusted red snapper with toasted almonds and banana ginger rum sauce. Who knew bananas and fish were such friends? Carol had a chocolate mousse with real whipped cream for dessert, while I indulged in a private narcissistic smug party over not having a sweet. Today's the first real day on this tour that I've had sugar cravings. I found some ancient chocolate in a glass jar in the kitchen here, specifically "golf ball truffles," a standard chocolate affair with white chocolate around the outside, of course shaped like golf balls, and tried half of one of those. It wasn't satisfying. Old, substandard chocolate never is, but I had to see for myself.

I do have one fat free brownie in my suitcase for an emergency.

When we got back tonight I played my guitar again. This is unusual for me, to pull out all the older songs I love, the ones I wrote ten and twenty years ago, and practice them as though I'm going to play them sometime soon. I wonder if I will. They feel good to play, like I'm finding something of myself again, an autonomy, a throughline. I think I'm searching for my identity. Who could know that, as the years pass and pass, one must keep locating oneself?

*******

Thursday, 1/26, 4:04pm

Huge breakfast at Cafe Madeleine. Did me in for most of the afternoon. Read my book in a carb stupor, took a nap, took a walk. We did some more laundry this morning and discovered that the dryer does, in fact, work.

I had possibly the worst sweats and chills night ever last night. Could not get out from under the clamminess.

Friday, 4:21pm

Here we are in Coral Gables. We cleaned up the condo, did the wash, and remade the beds. Had a bit of lunch with the folks, took some pictures and said goodbye. Voila, 2nd half of tour.

This is a house concert we did last year. We play in front of a big window-wall that leads to a pool courtyard. It's too chilly to swim right now. People have been apologizing to us for the coolness of the weather -- though for us it still feels much more acceptable than home. None of us can remember the woman's name yet. The man has the last name of a famous deceased actor, so we keep reverting to the actor's first name instead of our host's. He doesn't seem to mind; we just laughed about it.

Last year I stayed in the little girl's room, and she had a friend over during the concert and they wanted to play in her room the whole time, so I didn't have much privacy. This year the son is away, so I get to stay in his room, sleep on his very high twin bed, among his skateboards and "Arizona Rx Memory Herbal Tonic" beverage bottle collection. There is, for some reason, a long skein of yarn hanging on the wall, from which I want to knit something before I leave. Wouldn't it be funny to leave a sweater hanging on the wall in its stead tomorrow?

So we have about an hour to kick back before dinner gets ordered. We have our set list, we're all set up, and I've been playing a lot this week so I feel pretty practiced. The sky is cloudy today, and it might rain over the weekend. I'm looking forward to being home soon.

Sunday, 12:04pm

The skein of yarn turned out to be a hammock.

I got almost no sleep last night, owing to the diminutive nature of the bed and the potholder nature of the pillow. Uch! Til about 5am I lay there with a headache and no room to move, throwing the sheet off, pulling it back on, too hot, too cold. May I say that sleeping on this tour has, for the most part, fuckin' sucked? I'm surprised I'm functioning.

But it's a nice day, and we'll leave in a couple of hours for tonight's gig, and come back here tonight. I scrounged some alternate pillows so I think things will go better. Also our hostess soaked real oatmeal for us overnight, so we had a lovely breakfast.

I have a feeling we'll have a good crowd tonight at the Main Street Cafe. They make five excellent soups a night, as well as serving the best wraps in the county. Someone from the concert last night said that the whole board of the Seven Seas Cruise Association was coming tonight. I don't know who they are but it sounds impressive, eh?

Our two radio stints last weekend seem to have had a measurable effect on attendance. That rarely happens in New England. In fact the scene is totally different down here. People actually make a habit of going to see live indie music, and a few of them are seeing us multiple times in a row.

After having one largish macaroon at lunch yesterday with Carol's parents, I was beset with sugar cravings all day and night. Good God, the buffet fantasies! It was astonishing. They're rather less now. But I'm more determined than ever to get back into a no-junk food phase.

I did my data entry today on Carol's computer, and she's making booking calls. I also called Wes to make sure he got into my apartment all right to check on the plants. Everything seems fine there. He and his partner, a well known folk duo from the 70s, are touring now with a Simon and Garfunkel tribute show which is doing amazingly well. Could be that late-life career... they've been playing together over 30 years, and have seen fame and money come and go, and just hung in there through it all. Now they have a new little cash cow to give them some more momentum. We should all be so lucky at that point.

I'm looking forward to the rest of the weekend, but getting a little bit homesick, too.

Monday, finally, 10:02am

So, night before last we were in Homestead, and it was a lovely gig -- one of those where we don't think enough people will come, but then they keep trickling in. The monitors in that room are appalling and everything sounds like a tin can, but the sound was less troublesome than in past years and we had some wonderful fans there. One young woman, a dance teacher and choreographer, had done a Magnet School program where she'd spent a couple of months creating a dance interpretation of one of my songs with the kids! I had no idea! They spent a long time working out the lyrics, defining words, figuring out the changing 5/4 and 6/4 meters. She said she'd send us a DVD of two performances, one which she had to dance herself because the lead dancer called in sick (ha ha, I accidentally typed "called in ick") at the last moment. She uses the program with kids who don't necessarily have dance training, but to teach them responsibility and accountability skills. She was very interesting and dynamic, and I was unutterably flattered that she'd chosen one of my songs to express in this new way.

By the time we got back to our lodging, I was feeling slightly funky. The next day (yesterday), Chris and I proceeded to come down with a 24-hour stomach/intestinal ICK, sharing Pepto Bismol like the true friends we are. I don't know how we got through the house concert last night. I felt like I'd gone to the gym for a long workout and then gotten a sunburn. My skin recoiled at the very air. Chris had it a little worse but for less time. We'd picked up this gig after getting to Florida. It wasn't a lot of money but it was a day we had off, and we used the fee to help pay for the van, which gets abominable mileage. We'd done a house gig for this couple two years ago, and they're very nice. They'd gotten a new puppy then, named Sonny, who is now 2 years old and does the funniest thing. When you pet him and he gets really excited, he literally folds himself up into a pretzel. Shoulder down and butt up in the air, he ties himself up in a ball with his legs all entwined, all the time wagging and smiling and trying to lick and play-bite. They call him "Foldy" when he does this. I only regret I was too sick to go and get my camera and take a movie of it.

Their living room is very small, and the smells of eighteen kinds of pork cooking and forty-seven scented candles made inhaling rather difficult given the states of our stomachs, but somehow we got through with dignity. Chris got to rush to the bathroom a couple more times after we finished... and, after getting a little lost, we made our way here, to Sarasota.

This is our last gig. The folks we're staying with are very active in the folk circuit here, and are responsible for booking us at the Sailing Squadron. They're pretty old, too -- I'd say eighties even, at least for the Mr. He has a plate on his skull, maybe 3" round, and grows pineapples and other tropical things in the back yard. They get up like 6:00 every morning and go to the gym for an hour. They have two yippy little dogs who would live on your lap if you let them. Their little house is completely panelled, with lots of rough wood beams. My bed's in the office. The house seems dark and cramped to me, but I got a better night's sleep here last night than I've done most of this tour, so I'm grateful. I caught up on all the dreams I've missed for not sleeping deeply enough!

It's overcast and damp today, and cool. Carol is going into town this morning for a bodywork lesson with a friend, and then Chris and I will pick her up and have lunch. After not being able to eat yesterday, food is a returning delight.

Our gigs next weekend are fairly local, so it'll be two or three weeks before we have to travel far again. I have a long list of things to accomplish in that time. I need a new kitchen table for one thing, one that will seat four. Rose confessed to me that one reason she and Mike don't come over that often for dinner is that there's no place to sit except on the floor or the small futon, with plates in laps. I was embarrassed. They've always been gracious about my bohemian setup, but I didn't know it actually bugged them. But of course! It'd bug me too.

In spite of that, after this trip in particular, my apartment is going to seem like a palace.

Wednesday evening, home since yesterday

I'll wrap this up a bit, at the risk of making it seem endless. Sarasota was fun; we had to set up inside owing to a threat of rain, and it was a little overfull for the room, but it was a nice gig and I found two heart shaped rocks outside where all the boats are stored. We had a few really good belly laughs during the gig. There was a long open mic before our set -- that's where people sign up to play two songs each, and it's generally non-pros or people just starting out and wanting some exposure. Everyone was pretty good, and it's such a loving and hardcore folk crowd, they were all very much encouraged. One little bluegrass ensemble played a very funny song about divorce. The hook was something about, when the magic is gone, the alimony goes on... I think one of the verses was, "I've decided to eliminate the middle man / every five years I give my house to some bitch I can't stand." Etc. So you can imagine what frame of mind everyone was in when we started playing.

A couple of songs into the set, Chris pulled out a glass slide he uses to make his acoustic sound like a steel guitar. There was some discussion about this, and someone asked why he didn't bring the steel. "Because," Chris replied, "you can only fly with two bags." There was a silence, then everyone looked at me and Carol and exploded in laughter. Chris tried to backpedal! "No, no! I didn't mean it THAT way!" he said, which made everyone laugh more. He's much too nice a guy to make a comment like that, but it was comically perfect and we got a lot of mileage out of it all night.

Ah, night... that night I had my last bad night's sleep. The little virus came back after I'd gone to bed and I was up all night with an iffy stomach and a raging thirst. Next day we got up very early to go to the airport, and I could hardly eat anything all day again. Carol had a sore throat by then. We stopped at a 7-11 so I could get some more Pepto, and the plump, middle-aged woman with free-range teeth who rang up my purchase said, in a quite audible tone, "Is that stuff for DIARRHEA??" I looked her right in the eye without missing a beat and replied, "Oh, it's good for everything," not turning around to see whether every other customer in the store was now listening. "When I was growing up," she continued, "every time I came down with something, my mother'd give me Castor Oil! Remember Castor Oil? I took that all the time when I was a kid!" If I had felt better I'd have burst out laughing. I did not ask her if Castor Oil was good for Diarrhea.

We stopped at IHOP, and I managed a little breakfast. Then to the airport; the flight was quick and direct, all the instruments arrived cold but intact; I scarved my neck against the 36 degree Connecticut air, and in twenty minutes we were at the band's house. I reorganized my gear, switched the bass to the gig case, packed my car and headed home via the grocery store, where I picked up ingredients for chicken soup. I was depleted, thirsty, and very happy to be home. Wes stopped by in the evening and I fed him and he brought me tofu and chocolate. This morning I weighed in and have lost 5 lbs. since a couple of weeks ago.

I was going to stay in today, but after a FABULOUS night's sleep I did go on a few errands. Found a great bedroom rug for not too much, and a blankie that matches the bedroom decor. Watched some of the 2nd season of 6 Feet Under, caught up on a huge pile of work. Well, some of it.

And THAT is that.