Keith at Irvine Spectrum -- Sun, 26Jun2011

So an hour after the end of the Foothill gig, I was supposed to be playing at Spectrum, but I didn't quite make it -- started about 20 minutes late, but who's counting?  I thought that playing 7 hours in a single day was gonna kill me, but it wasn't really bad at all, except that in the last hour or so, my finger muscles were so fatigued that they just weren't quite doing what I told them to do, so my playing got really sloppy.

I swore to myself that I'd quit at straight-up 8:00, no matter what, just to minimize the expected knee, back, finger, and voice damage, but at 7:50, my brother and his wife strolled in.  And, naturally, there were other people really listening by then too, so I kept going, even after my brother left, all the way to 9:35.  But frankly, I wasn't really doing anybody any favors butchering songs will my only-half-functional fingers.  And to make it worse, I (stupidly) started choosing obscure (and unrehearsed) songs to play for my brother, which I did even worse on.  I particularly botched "Copperline", by far my worst-ever performance of that one.  The very-cool guitar part has a particular clever srummy pattern and feel, and my almost-dead hands just wouldn't get into it.  Oh well -- I guess I can do about 7 hours, but not 8.  Good to know.

But overall, it went quite well. Daleen and Acacia came by and had dinner in the food court behind me. Lots of people were listening, and asking for songs, and buying CDs. A very cute little girl and her barely-mobile baby sister came and danced and danced. Sometimes it just kills me that I'm too busy to bust out a video camera and capture some of this stuff...

But the weirdest thing was the girl, looking, made-up, and dressed like a Playboy Bunny, who teetered up (with the requisite toy dog on a leash) and gushed "I'm a singer, too!". I was unable to make any comment on this revelation, since I was in the middle of a song at the time, and she was immediately distracted by a little girl who rushed over to ask if she could pet the dog. The dog wasn't hers, but belonged to her friend, but, yes, you can pet it. Then the friend came over, and the "singer" noticed my business cards, grabbed one and told her friend, "I'll email him", and off they went.  All within one song, so I didn't get to say a word...

She did email me -- a gloriously grammar-, punctuation-, spelling-, and capitalization-free message, telling me that she's looking for a guitarist, 'cuz, as noted previously, she's a singer!  I replied, as politely as I could, that I already have a singer in my "band", (me), and I'm pretty well booked up with the band in its current configuration. But, if she had some gigs lined up and wanted to hire me to be *her* band, I might have time for that.

Who knows? She might be a terrific singer, and with her looks, she might be able to get big-time gigs somewhere, though it's hard to imagine that she's looking to sing a bunch of James Taylor tunes.  So, I have a feeling that this'll go exactly where you'd expect -- nowhere. Which is pretty much all right with me.

I made $115, which, along with the $36 in tips and $100 in actual "pay" from Foothill makes just over $250 for the day, which feels pretty good to the unemployed boy. Not that it's a living...