A really good night -- great weather and lots of people out. Of course with the distance between me and the audience in the comfy chairs, there was the usual difficulty getting any audible response from anybody, but I'm getting used to accepting "attention" over "applause", and a lot of people stayed for long periods, and by the end of the evening almost all of the furniture had been adjusted to be pointing my direction, and that's a good sign.
It was the first trial of my new wireless microphone, which worked out pretty well. At first I was getting some "untuned radio" noise, but I moved the receiver around a bit and it seemed to go away. After a little while, I didn't even notice the difference, which I guess is the whole point -- there's no cable to fight with and "notice". Usually I'm fiddling with the mic cord on one side, and the guitar cord on the other -- with the mic cord gone, there's a lot less hassle. Win.
I could even get the matching wireless thingie for my guitar, but the guitar cord is a lot less trouble (since it's not hanging off of my head!), so it's probably not worth it. It's not like I do a lot of Mick Jaggering around the stage...
Earlier in the week, I got the notion to learn "She Loves You", for some reason. I usually feel like playing rock songs by myself on an acoustic guitar is kinda lame, but since I only play them for the little kids, I'm getting more comfortable doing it. And if the kids are happy, the moms don't mind. And the harmony box goes a long way to making the song sound "realer" (especially Beatles songs), even without bass and drums.
The first hour went by and it looked like the hoped-for crowd of kids wasn't going to materialize. But finally I got a pair of little girls dancing, which prompted some others to come out, and after a while we had a whole thing going, with a chorus of kids shouting "Another one!" after each song. I have 5 or 6 songs for this purpose now, but I may need a few more, since this is turning out to be a regular (and fun!) thing.
It was also the first outing for the new CD that I recorded, but I don't really hype selling the CDs, so I only sold one, to a sweet little Asian lady. I made exactly $100 (and 48 cents), and that was all in ones and fives, which means a lot of people "contributed". Unfortunately, with our cruise coming up, and a gig canceled because they're putting on an undisclosed "special event", it'll be 5 weeks before I'm back there again. So naturally, I played as long as I could, running over the 10:00 stopping time by an hour and a half.
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