Tuesday, August 07, 2007

K&W at Borders Tustin -- 5Aug2007

They're building a new shopping center on the now-closed Marine base in Tustin, and there's a huge new Borders. We campaigned for, and got, scheduled to play for the Grand Opening, which is the only Borders gig that pays money.

It's a nice store, huge, but the designated "Band Area" is really narrow -- shoehorned in between the side-exit "airlock" glass box, and a big square post in the café itself. This leaves about a 10-foot space for the band, which would be fine for one guy, but for the two of us, it was too narrow. We kind of cheated the configuration diagonally and got away with it, except...

My amp, to my left, was right up against the side door with its merchandise-control radar posts, which radiated out into the amp's circuitry, making a loud "whuh-whuh-whuh" noise. We had to quickly rebuild the setup, putting the amp on the right and the slave speaker on the left, which is fine except we're really used to what goes where when we build it the other way, and this was plenty confusing.

Anyway, the gig went pretty well after that. Lots of pretty nice people, and many of them left small tips, which is gratifying. I think maybe the tip jar itself was in a more-obvious-than-usual place, but it's hard to tell. I may have to experiment with that.

The General Manager, a late-20's, slightly punk kinda guy, sent over another guy to request "Mrs. Robinson" -- apparently after hearing other Simon and Garfunkel tunes. That was plenty unexpected, but I happen to have been poking at that song lately because of a Paul Simon TV special last month, so I dredged up what I could of it, and I thought it was a pretty acceptable job for a song I don't know. That was pretty fun, actually.

Then, at the very end, while I was making the "thanks for coming" announcement, a guy sent his little (grand?) son up to put some money in the jar, which was kinda up high for a 3-year-old, so his arm got caught in the jar and he pulled it right off the table, shattering it, and leaving a stack of crumpled money in a pile of broken glass. I just kept talking, and segued into "so we'll get a new tip jar and see you next time."

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