K&W at Borders South Coast Plaza -- 19Feb2010

A pleasant, quiet, and suddenly very short, gig. It had been two weekends (i.e., three weeks) since I'd played anywhere, so I was a little rusty, but not too bad. The worse part was that I had an inexplicably scratchy throat, almost from the very beginning.

But we had some very forgiving people, apparently, because we got a reasonably warm response, even with the lousy vocals. And I had the chance to try out some of the new songs I've been working on over the hiatus.

One that was a surprise to me is "Mister Postman", which is trivial to play, but I thought it would be a fun song to have, maybe for when little kids wanted to dance. I learned it a long time ago, but it just sounded terrible -- dull and lame. But I tried it out at home with the harmony box singing up a third, and Ping! It sounds great! Makes a *huge* difference. A guy was sitting down front and asked about what was making the harmonies (it's surprising how few people do), so I played that song as a prime example of how it works.

We also had a visit by a fellow singer/player that we met at some of the Yorba Linda places, Mark Hermann. He didn't say much, but he did put in some interesting requests...

Anyway, we were going along, expecting to shut down at the usual 9:40 so the store can close at 10:00, but, between songs, I heard the manager announcing that "It's 8:40, and we'll be closing in 20 minutes. Please bring any last minute purchases..." What?!? So I played a song while Warren went to talk to her, and sure enough, they close at 9:00 now. It's that darn Economy again! We barely got in an hour and a half! She said we could start earlier next time (gee, thanks), but it's already hard to start on time (7:00) on a "work day" (we have a standing date on the third Friday). I guess we can try though, next month.

On the other hand, with as bad as my voice was behaving, it was probably a mercy just to shut me up...