October 18, 2009

2:24 p.m.

Pre- and Post-Giggle

Pre

It�s cold, cold and sunny. Guilt tells me I should be outside scraping the house. I will try to do some of that before it clouds up today. I slept in a little; the cold visiting me is a little worse today. Stubborn varmint. I can still sing through it.

How pleasant to sit in my little music room and listen to the wind outside. Most of it is outside, anyway. The head of my mattress is against the upstairs bathroom door, and when the wind blows outside a little cold air wafts in around the door. The radiator is off in there since it�s not usable yet. At least the house won�t get stuffy in this condition.

It�s supposed to rain steadily from this afternoon til Monday. YUCK. I�m waiting on Indian Summer, it seems, to get the rest of the outside work done. Trying to suppress the nervousness. State Farm lady didn�t call me back last week; why not? Was she giving me a story?

Still, there was a moment this morning when I got clear that being here with the loving attitude of a good Buddhist is the key to going through this journey with joy, mess or no mess. I can look around at all that isn�t done inside this house, how hard it is to keep things tidy when there aren�t many places to put anything, all the areas I still need to clean, and fret about it. Or I can rejoice that I�m even here at all, that I made it in, and within that make choices to become more organized. Love the mess, love the clean. Before enlightenment: chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment: chop wood, carry water.

I was able to stumble through the new bass part at rehearsal yesterday. I�m still in that amusing phase where I can EITHER play the bass OR sing the part, but doing both results in some interesting musical territory. We�re having such fun lately, too, goofing on our own lyrics and making each other laugh.

We get to see the musical best and worst of each other in rehearsal. It takes a lot of courage to work through these parts in front of one another. I love that I�ve known them so long and I can suck or be brilliant and it�s okay.

And even the sucky, uncomfortable, short bass rehearsals I had here in the evenings produced results.

My bass amp was crackling again. Chris took it apart and sprayed WD-40 on the button that was giving trouble, so we hope it�ll quiet down for a while again. That amp lived in my car for years in all temperatures, so it�s done very well. Now I keep it in the house until loadout. No longer must I bring everything down 2 flights of stairs.

Post

Carol and I fretted over what to wear. Nothing fits either of us any more. I was hurriedly putting on makeup trying to get out the door and she called. �My purple pants are too tight. Chris says the brown ones look frumpy. I�m defaulting to the black cordeuroys.� I picked these great black and amber wraparound pants that I only wear to local gigs because they don�t travel well and I can�t always iron. They look really good but are very hard to pee in. One has to disassemble half the ties and wrapping and hold the whole mess aside to sit. But they felt good and we wanted to be just a little fancy.

So we got to the church and set up our PA. It�s such a beautiful room, and acoustically fabulous. What a boon to have plenty of time. We ran a few things and they wanted to do this new song, so I said I�d give it a try and maybe wouldn�t sing everything, and that it might not be perfect. But they have a beautiful piano, and beautiful pianos make Carol giddy and she wanted to play it as much as possible!

A few minutes before we started I went through the lobby and saw old friends Linka and Yosh. I know them through Rose and her ex husband; they�ve been the family veterinarians for many years. I think I�ve written here about going to their house for Thanksgiving a number of times, the last being two years ago when I actually saw Rose�s ex for the first time since way before the divorce. Anyway, it was a happy surprise to see them! They brought a couple of friends who were visiting from Boston and specifically requested to come to our concert. My heart was warmed to the brim. I�ve always harbored a secret little crush on Yosh. I could as well say I had a secret crush on Linka as well, so beautiful and bright and strong a woman as she is.

There were a few other people we know personally, and a fair number of Mad Agnes fans from our mailing list. We ended up with something like 93 paid tickets, with maybe a third of those at the door (higher price). That meant we exceeded our guarantee. (We often get a guaranteed amount vs. a percent of the door, whichever is higher.) We�ll know the numbers today when they go through and see who paid what.

But the gig! What a great night! We held together quite well, had a lot of laughs, and no one noticed my cold or Carol�s vocal fatigue or the mistakes I made on the new song, tee hee. Our minister friend there, Ed, talked about the magical thing that happens when people of talent and spirit come together � the sum that�s greater than the parts. I just love him � he�s a very uncommon sort of minister. It would take nothing less to make me go to church if I�m not playing there, and I would actually like to go to services there when I�m less busy with the house. Nothing about his ministry is exclusive, and that�s what has bugged me about Christianity. He gets that Spirit goes by many names. And he�s like wicked erudite.

Anyway, this was just the sort of gig we needed to get back on our feet.

Now I just want to work on music for a while today. I�ll be making demos of a couple more new songs soon so they can work on them. But I have a long list too, and I want to go clean Rose & Marc�s house before they come back from their fibers expo. I hope they weren�t completely rained out. Here it is raining at last.