Keith at Sister Cities Tea -- Sunday, 01May2016

The city of Laguna Beach has three "sister cities", one in France, one in Mexico, and one in England. They put on a May Day tea as some kind of gesture to the English one, St. Ives, and the lady in charge hired me to play. It was held in a (desert) garden at the art college, and there were about 25 people there, mostly older ladies and a few dragged-along husbands.

They had tea (of course) and lemonade and champagne punch, and cookies, finger sandwiches, and (of course) scones -- carefully pronounced "skaahns" to be properly British.

I started off trying to play British songs, but I only have so many of those and after the first 5 or 10 they're not my best material, so that went out the window pretty quickly. Especially since, as soon as I passed out some song lists, the requests weren't aware of the attempted theme.

So it started out like a typical party gig, with me being "background music", but after a while, some ladies migrated to the table in front of me, and got into making requests. More ladies came over, and the chairs all filled up and got moved to become a semi-circle around me, actual audience style. Nice.

I played out the rest of the afternoon with these ladies making request after request. At one point I grabbed a handful of business cards and tossed them on the table, saying, "In case you want to find me again...", and those disappeared into purses, so maybe something will become of that.

Finally, a lady in charge came over and said, "Don't hate me, but can this be your last song?", which was perfect 'cuz it let me quit (nearly) on time, without it being my fault. (Not that I really wanted to quit on time, but I had a date at Disneyland afterwards.)

Overall, it was a perfect gig for me -- nice setting and weather, with rich old ladies with nothing much else to do (and in its first outdoor trial, my new amp "worked a treat", as we say in Old Blighty).

Sign me up for more of these!