Puppets Up!

It was the annual Puppets Up! festival where I live, which is kind of like a huge Mardi Gras for kids.  Our band performed twice, and it was quite a success.  Both times we got a whole lot of "people stopping to listen who'd been in a hurry a moment ago," which is great.  Also, my landlord and downstairs neighbors all came out to hear, and were taking pictures of us.  In other years we have played nice but more low-key sets with some teachers we work with who we constantly struggled to agree with as to song choices.  For instance, they did Hootie and the Blowfish, which wasn't a direction we'd have been comfortable with, I don't think.  

   We did a song of mine this year, which makes it really worthwhile for me. Sat in the pub and chatted with bandmates between sets while women's beach volleyball from the Olympics was on.  Talked with Katie Mulligan the local photojournalista about how to take good pictures (because she's excellent) and the like.   My whole family except my dad came (arriving an hour after we played and leaving two hours before we went up again) but it was nice to see them.  Some high school kids came over to talk.  I had my newly-acquired 310 to Yuma/Lynyrd Skynyrd hat on, and looked very much the part of A Musician.  That's cooler than "the English Teacher" or "That Weird Jesus-looking Guy who seldom leaves his apartment all summer."

    

I don't have any pics yet, so take my word for it that I looked uncannily like the late Ronnie Van Zandt from Lynyrd Skynyrd, but without the big belt buckle or black jeans.  

   The sound guy looked cooler than ANYbody.  Puppets Up attire often involves wearing motley (court jester kind of wear) and Regan the Sound Guy had a court jester's hat, a vivid tie-dyed shirt, a beard, a pipe, big boots and a giant tan canvas utility kilt you can hang hammers and power drills from. 

   It rained pretty hard, so when we played before supper with the rain having just let up, we didn't expect anyone to listen, but what happened was the entire street suddenly went from completely empty, to being lined with people who materialized from buildings or came and stood in doorways in case the rain started again, so we were on this white open trailer bed at the top of the hill at the end of the closed-off street, and we were looking down at a street sparsely dotted with stragglers, but all the doorways had people leaning in them, smiling at us, and people who were scooting by in a rush all smiled and stopped.  Hoorah. 

   The really surreal thing was that a fairly cracked-out, not at all sober-looking middle-aged couple with headbands and tie dye (she quite apple-shaped, and wearing a perpetually slipping tube top) were shouting stuff about "this is just like Woodstock!" and dancing to every single song we did, right in front of the stage.  This was very cool, actually.  You can't buy that.  (or me getting to say "This is a song by the funkiest man in music today" and then playing a funky version of "Girl You'll Be A Woman Soon" by Neil Diamond.)