Keith at CALB -- Saturday, 28Mar2015

Well, another nightmare gig at the Shoreline Village annex of the Cultural Alliance of Long Beach. There's a stage down on the actual boardwalk, and the CALB guys talked the landlord into booking me there, instead of trying, again, to play upstairs in their gallery. Or so they thought.

When I got there, someone else was already half set up, and wasn't going anywhere. The CALB guy, Tom, didn't know how the double booking happened, but we had no choice to just try again upstairs.

And it was as bad as usual -- only a few couples came up, though my brother and his wife came, so that was better than nothing. And the last hour or so, for some reason, a couple of families came by to play with the Legos, so I got to play a bunch of kids' songs.

But all that was after the parking nightmare. As usual, the Village parking lot was full, so I had to park a half mile away in the city lot, and pay a fortune for the two hour max.

And since I thought I was playing an outdoor stage, I had to haul the whole "Big Rig" in. Tom said that all you have to do is circle a few times, and when we went down, there was a space right out front, so he stood in it and waited for me to go get the van.

I half-jogged back and drove to the gate, but the ticket machine was jammed and wouldn't let anybody in. After getting everyone in line to back out, I got in the even longer line at the "far gate". Tom must have stood in that spot waving people away for half an hour, but at least I didn't have so far to haul the stuff back out at the end.

But that was pretty much the Third Strike for that place. Oh well.