Anothery Bakery Night

Last Friday night, the acoustic band had our second gig at the bakery. The first gig was a complete success, and we'd been looking forward to playing there again (though with some last-minute uncertainty.)

Chip, Sandy, Dave

I left home around 5:00, looking to be there sometime after 5:30 for a 6:30 start. I had brother Chris with me, and Darling Wife would be coming directly from work to join us. I arrived to find multiple voice and text messages on my phone. It was our guitar player, telling me that our singer had canceled. What??? Really?!? Noooooooo....

I went into the bakery, and found him deep in discussion with a woman behind the counter. It turns out that she didn't cancel. Apparently the bakery got a call saying something about canceling, and assumed it was us. But things got straightened out, and we were playing. Whew.... So the evening started off with anger, disappointment, and exhilaration.

Issue #2. Darling Wife had called and reserved a table with 8 seats. I looked around and saw that the tables had name cards on them. But none with my name. There was one table of 8 labeled "Wyeth" - perhaps they got the name garbled. I asked, and the woman got out her book - yes, the Wyeth reservation was under Darling Wife's cell phone number. But she firmly insisted that she listened to the voice mail 3 times, and it was definitely "Wyeth." That's disappointing - I would have hoped that after 12 years, Darling Wife knew her new last name. But apparently there's still work to do there....

Anyway, once the false cancellation and the reservation name issues were resolved, it was all smooth sailing. Our singer's voice was improved from the night before, and there were no vocal issues. We did play the songs in the revised lower keys, and it all worked out fine for the most part. For me there was one exception - we recently added Jewel's Forever and a Day, which is a *gorgeous* lullaby. I have the song down, but it's not a simple three-chord song. Our singer asked for a key we hadn't practiced it in, and I wasn't able to transpose it on the fly. After a few clunkers, I simply stopped playing.

The two hours went by in a flash, and next thing I knew we were packing up and accepting kind words from the patrons (some of whom weren't even family or close friends!) Oh, and I had a chat with a young guy who was obviously a bass player. He came in as we were setting up and doing a sound check, and he looked at my bass and mouthed something. It took me a minute to realize that he was asking "fretless?" I gave him the thumbs-up, and he smiled.

The bakery again treated us wonderfully. We had all the food, drink, and desserts we could handle, and they gave us each a bag of treats as we were packing up. And once again, we split the contents of our tip jar, and went to the restaurant next door for a celebratory glass of wine. We calculated that if we did 20 of these shows every day, we could quit our day jobs. I'd do it in a heartbeat!

I'm basically out of superlatives to describe how much fun it is, first just to make music with talented people, and then to actually play out in public. I'm not sure there's anything better.