K&W at Borders Mission Viejo -- 14Nov2009

The terribly broken booking process that Borders was using to schedule the musicians into the various stores broke down entirely when the guy who marginally ran it quit. Since then, it's been hard to tell what's going on, and how to get scheduled. Long story short, I haven't played at Borders MV since the end of March, which has been OK with me since it's very hit-or-miss there.

This time: pretty big "miss". It started out OK, but with only a few people (usually the café is full, even before we get there -- the economy?). We got a little response at first, but that died out, and we were playing to stony silence for a while. Even that's OK sometimes -- I was enjoying being (a) warm, and (b) able to hear myself clearly. Besides, I'm getting used to it -- but it does get a little depressing after a while...

Towards the end though, it went from bad to worse. A group of developmentally disabled teens and their handlers come in. Some sat in the back corner, some (lacking anyplace else) sat at the table right in front of us. I won't go into it, but they started off polite and degenerated into some pretty loud, and rude, behavior. Not to mention distracting. Fortunately, it was pretty close to quitting time anyway, so I got through it for a while, and shut down.

To make it even worse, we couldn't rustle up a place to put the tip jar where people could get to it -- and nobody seemed to want to -- so we made literally $0. At least it was easy to split two ways...

My next opportunity to play there will be January 9. We'll see if the intervening 7 or 8 outdoors-in-the-cold gigs will change how I feel about attempting it again.