Friday night we’re going to a rock ‘n’ roll show, a good ol’ fashioned concert. Lights. Music. Happy people. Crowds.
(I can still count on one hand the number of frivolous things we’ve done around people since March of 2020. This weekend will involve numbers four and five. Maybe this sort of thing will soon stop feeling novel. Maybe it won’t feel like I’m breaking curfew.)
This will be our first concert since Covid came along. This is a show we should have seen in July of 2020. We bought these tickets in 2019. So, in two more days, we will see the Gin Blossoms, Toad the Wet Sprocket and Barenaked Ladies. I haven’t seen the Gin Blossoms since 1996. I’ve, sadly, never seen Toad the Wet Sprocket. We saw Barenaked Ladies in 2018. It was my third or fourth time I’d caught their act, but my lovely bride had never seen them. They were celebrating 30 years then, had just been inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame. They put on a great show.
Anyway, we’ll have pretty nice seats for a great show and we’ll wear masks and, I’m sure, have a great time.
So to get ready, here are a few BNL clips from the show we saw in 2018.
Worked today, doing work stuff. Enjoying the beginning of summer by getting ready for the fall. I had an actual lunch! We got takeout from Chick-fil-A and ate it in a parking lot between Panera and Fresh Thyme and a funeral home. It’s a glamorous life, to be sure.
After work I got gas. Paid $3.19 a gallon, which was a dollar off the sign price, because of the Kroger fuel points plan. This loyalty program is one of the three great things about our local grocery store. And, at the beginning of the year we took advantage of what is essentially Kroger Prime. Used to be that every dollar you spent was added into a formula for a reduced price at the pump. Since you’re shopping for groceries anyway, this was an easy and obvious thing. But now your dollar amounts are worth double in the gas reduction formula. We signed up before the war in Ukraine and inflation drove up the prices, and so this has paid for itself several times over already.
After that, and I know you’re riveted, I went to the hardware store. Got some tack cloths. At the house I sanded wood until it was time for dinner. (And almost all of the sanding on this ridiculously long-stalled project is now down.) And then I ate and washed dishes and did a very small amount of house chores until it was time to write this. And here you are.
Five years ago tonight, we were with the Indigo Girls.
I think that was the seventh or ninth time I’ve seen the Indigo Girls live. I don’t go to a lot of concerts anymore — indeed, I think I’ve been to one other show, in 2019, since then, and we had two others canceled in 2020 — but Amy and Emily, I’d never turn down. They never disappoint.
OK, the sanding isn’t done. Everything is done through 400-grit. Later this week I’ll do the ends to 800-grit. Then it’ll be ready to clean and stain and install. Which is good, because there’s an ever-growing list of other things I need to make.
So, this summer work, bike and build is how I’ll get ready for the fall.
Ever get fundraising letters and emails from your alma mater(s)? This 1922 copy circulated in newspapers around Alabama, a sad story that came from one of my alma maters, and it is more impactful than all of those donation letters.
This was part of an important campaign for my alma mater. Auburn was in a deep economic hole compared to the other schools in the state, which had been uniquely successful in creating a deep economic hole for all of its schools anyway. So all that spring of 1922 they prepared for this campaign that they hoped would raise $1 million dollars which would equal … quite a few more million these days.
It was a substantial ask, am ambitious plan and, if you’d be willing to listen to the whole of the tale I can draw a pretty clear line between that campaign and the institutional politics that still appear there, 100 years on.
Ralph Boyd appears in the papers one time before this syndicated piece, in a small brief about his death in Montgomery that February. His last surviving sibling passed away in 2017.
In the 1922 yearbook there’s a mention of the Greater Auburn campaign. They called it the greatest thing Auburn had ever undertaken. But there doesn’t seem to be a mention of young Ralph Boyd in that edition.
So there’s not much here today, but I did run across that, which is really an excuse to share the greatest century-old graphic you’ve ever seen.
That’s recyclable, is all I’m saying. It’s also amusing that they were using the Auburn name in the university’s campaign efforts, a formal usage if you will, decades before they changed the institution’s name.
Something a little fun … Penn & Teller!
And something amazing … The Punch Brothers!
More tomorrow, I assure you.
Friday / IU / music / video — Comments Off on Unlike last year, there is no Lion King in this performance 4 Mar 22
Yep, I’m ready for this to be over, too. And, finally, here we are.
Thirty-three percent of the people came to a morning meeting I run. And then there were two morning shows to oversee in the studio. That was interrupted by a tour. Immediately after I handed off the prospective new faculty member to someone else the singing show people stepped up with the latest news.
Two of the 18 people won’t be singing. That’s just live programming. Something will happen. But it requires a few changes to the script. So I had to go through the thing I set up yesterday and remove two people, and all the references to numbers. (The seventh contest was now the sixth, and the 11 was now the ninth and so on.)
This also allowed us to change the conclusion of the show, which was good. It was going to be too complicated, and this made it simpler.
And then suddenly it was time to do the show.
The singers came from campuses across the state, at least three of them. They were all good. Some of them were really quite spectacular. Goosebumps were given twice.
I wish I had the chance to photograph the other 11, but, again, they were all quite talented and they gave the judges a lot to work with.
The best part of the show is listening to the professional artists being so kind to the younger singers. Everything was a dose of encouragement.
There were two technical issues, and the usual sort of adrenaline a live show brings while you’re trying to wrap it up. Most importantly, everyone seemed pleased.
Before we’d even struck the studio they were already asking us to do it again next year.
Second-most importantly, I left campus at 5:30 today.
After 50.5 hours, eight shows, a field shoot, a photo shoot and meetings, editing, rewriting, meetings, tour-giving, other meetings and toner-fighting, the week was mercifully done.
On Wednesday I overslept because my phone’s battery died and there was no alarm. I was on time to my first scheduled part of the day but, nevertheless, it’s always difficult to shake that feeling. So, this morning I managed to overcompensate the other way. My brain insisted on waking me up several times throughout the night.
At some point, when that happens, I’d rather just stay awake all night. But despite the fitful sleep I woke up on time this morning. Good thing, too! I had a meeting first-thing. I actually had two of them scheduled at the same time. One of them was a meeting I was running, so I chose that one. It was the right choice.
It looked like this today.
That’s just the way of things.
On the plus side, I got everything off my card for the day. Each day I prepare an index card for the following day. One side has all of the known and planned tasks. On the back are things coming up on the radar, and things that could be cause for trouble, worry or concern. It’s a helpful and effective system. And, today, I got to it all.
I even had enough time to write a card for next Tuesday, but I never write them on Friday evenings. There’s no reason to unnecessarily clutter the mind over a weekend. So, instead, I left on time. I think that made twice this week.
I guess that’s what you get when you complete the catalog. I recently purchased her live show, The Tender Hour. It’s a live show, featuring a:
treasure of a night with a top notch country band and her “home away from home,” hometown crowd! With local hero Jeff Fielder heading up the band on guitar, dobro, banjo, mandolin and vocals, this record features all the songs from Goodnight Tender, as well as songs from her previous 4 studio records, plus a ripping rendition of the Bob Seger classic, “Night Moves.” Seattle’s Eric Eagle and Keith Lowe joined in on drums and bass with the rest of her core band, Adrian Carter on fiddle, vocals, and guitar; Matt Smith on pedal steel and banjo; and special guest Phil Cook on keys, banjo and vocals. The Tender Hour does what any satisfying live record should do-it puts the listener in the room and immerses them in the humanity of the show-complete with stories, blunders, an incredible band, and a energetic heartfelt night of music!
Haven’t listened to it yet. It seems a bit weird, but I feel like I have to wait, or at least I want to wait. I’m going to have to listen to it, eventually. When the weather turns I’ll certainly want to. How could I not? But Amy Ray is just not winter music. There’s too much passion and hope and nostalgia, too many breezes and sweaty, sticky nights in her sound and lyrics. Call it, I dunno, March through November. There’s too many places in her music I’d rather be, and you can’t get to any of them from here, particularly in January.
And, also, “Night Moves?”
But I appreciate the pick. Thanks, Amy! Now I need to pick up an instrument that needs a pick, I guess. Or, what else can you do with a single guitar pick?
Skimming my way through newspapers.com this evening and I found a page deep in a 1929 issue of a small town paper that had a lot of wire copy filler.
As I tried to find out more about Sparkes and Morehead, I discovered that this same copy was publisehd in an upstate New York paper…four years later. There’s evergreen, and then there’s evergreen.
King Zog? He was born into a bit of nobility, fought in the Great War, took some government jobs, became Albania’s youngest prime minister, and was then forced into exile. He went back, became president, and then, after this 1927 copy was written, he made himself a dictator-king. That lasted for about 11 years. Wikipedia suggests he might not have been well liked. “About 600 blood feuds reportedly existed against Zog, and during his reign he reputedly survived more than 55 assassination attempts.” But he held the proverbial crown until Italy invaded in 1939. He lived in England, Egypt, and then France, where he died in exile…in 1961.
His wife, Geraldine, was half-American. She lived until 2002. After the smokey Zog died, she lived in Spain, Rhodesia and then South Africa. Here she is 1999.
On 5 April 2004 her grandson, Leka, Crown Prince of Albania, accepted the Mother Teresa Medal awarded to her posthumously by the Albanian government in recognition of her charitable efforts for the people of Albania. Leka’s daughter Geraldine (born 22 October 2020 at Queen Geraldine Maternity Hospital in Tirana, on the 18th death anniversary of queen Geraldine) was named in her honour.
Most readers probably didn’t know that much about Albania. Some would struggle to find it on Europe’s Balkan Peninsula. You could hardly be faulted if this is all you knew about the people known as the Children of the Eagles.
I wonder what the reaction was, in 1927, when they read that little clip about the king of this sleepy little place half-a-world away. That’s a lot of cigarettes! Maybe it was a bit less imposing 95 years ago. Do you think anyone, back then, went to Wikipedia to look that guy up?
That last brief? I’m pretty sure that last one was optioned to HBO Max.
