Keith at Irvine Spectrum -- 27Apr2012

Finally! Wonderful weather, and the people were out accordingly. I had way more little kids dancing than ever before, to the point where I was running out of dance songs to play for them, and after the initial set was gone, a whole new set of kids showed up and I had to repeat a bunch of them.

Fortunately, I love playing for kids. I had one little thee-year-old blonde girl come over and stare right at me with a completely blank face, as only tiny kids can do. I stared right back and started up "Twinkle Twinkle", and watched her dissolve into an ear-to-ear grin, with a delighted glance back at her mom. You can just see their little brains click: "Hey! I recognize this!"

With the summer coming and the time change, I had to use the newly-printed paper copies of the iPad music book for the first couple of hours. It definitely feels primitive to have to flip though the pages looking for the right song alphabetically, but the pages/fonts seemed *huge* after I was able to switch to the iPad, so there's that trade-off...

Late in the evening, the Cutest Thing Ever happened. I was between songs and a young family stopped over at the side. The curly-headed two-year-old in the gigantic fuzzy purple coat wandered forward with a big smile and her little hand up in the air, in the universal "Hold my hand" gesture of all toddlers. I went over to the edge of the stage to meet her, and took her little hand for a couple of seconds, which seemed to be enough 'cuz she smiled even bigger and toddled back to her family. Made my night. Heck, made my *month*.

She and her big sister stayed for a long time, and were joined by a few more toddlers. Since it was finally dark enough, I crouched down and beckoned her and the rest of them over to give them some finger lights, including "Kimmy", who introduced herself with a classic quarter-turn, head-down, one-toe-up gesture that they must have studied to animate Tweety-bird, and who asked for "'Laddin and Jasmine!" over and over the rest of the night after I had played it the first time. Anyway, the lights delighted the lot of them and I got to watch them run and dance and play with them for a long time. Worth every nickel.

The night went by really fast -- by the time it was starting to feel "late", it was already 9:30. Since I'm playing two nights in a row, I didn't want to overdo this one and be too tired for the next one, so I knocked off at 10:15, the "earliest late" in a long time. It sure is nice to finally have some warm weather, which brings out the people.