A WILD Weekend!

This craaaaazy weekend started at 6:30am yesterday morning. We accidentally got up an hour early- I (Blythe) had unknowingly pushed the clock an hour ahead while setting the alarm the night before. It's a good thing I did because we needed all the time we could get to drag our zombified selves to the van to rearrange the seats, take out the trash, and load-in the gear.
We picked up Brian, MK, and the-best-merch-man-ever Kevin in Frederick at 9:30, breakfasted at beloved Sheetz and hit the highway by 10am. Good ol' Kevin had found a route that avoided the dreaded Jersey Turnpike and took us through a section of PA I had never seen before. I highly recommend a visit to Easton- it's full of beautiful bridges and home of the classiest McDonald's I've ever been in- it seconds as a Dick Schisler gallery- see if you can find his paintings online!

We also found this rockin' rest stop that had these AMAZING pinball machines: Star Wars and Creature from the Black Lagoon!

And this bizaare scale:

After shooting some aliens, livestock and gophers,

we were back on the road.

We got to Brooklyn by 4:30 via the stunning Verrazano bridge

and went to Bushwick to rehearse with Captain Ronzo before the show. He learned our songs in about 2 hours (!!!) so he could play rhythm guitar with us, then off to Ace of Clubs. Poor mis-informed GPS timed the drive into Mahattan at 10 minutes, but it's Manhattan so it took us about an hour :).


The club was a beautiful basement space with a great hardwood floor. We had a shyt-kickin' evening playing with Andy Miller and Boxcar Abandon, Captain Ronzo and I'll be John Brown. The crowd was very friendly and danced during our set, which is our favorite thing ever! John the sound man gave me a board to stand on so the bottlecap stompers sounded extra good. An all in all lovely night, and then back in the van to MD.

Willie drove us sleepy people home- we rolled back into Poolesville at 7:30am, completeing our 25 hour day. It was a long haul for a 45 minute set, but what won't we do for a show?


Then some sleep, some showering and back to Frederick for the closing party of the Frederick Film Festival. We were thrilled to be playing in The Weinberg Center- it's a gorgeous old theater run by wonderful people.

We started out a little rocky- it was tough managing the sound in a marble and tile room. We had not planned on plugging in since this was an acoustic show, but someone requested "more uke" after the first number so I half-remembered a few songs to sing while Willie ran back to the car for the amps.

People were all in now that they could hear us. This was an awesome group we could really interact with. The room had a great energy with some people listening to us and others talking to each other about the Peter Riegert movie they had just watched. It was the perfect casual setting. And we had just as much fun talking to everyone after the set. We learned about a cool new band playing in Frederick- check them out!

The Jug Band

The bottle caps caused a pleasing stir- good thing I reloaded my shedded shakers before the show!

Before:

After:

I talked to a woman who's going to pass the idea along to her daughter to use for music therapy! Sweet!

This really was one of our funnest shows ever. We can't wait for next year's festival- hopefully we won't have an out-of-state date the day before and can actually catch the movies!

So now I'm winding down to The Empire Strikes Back (the vastly superior non-remastered version) and basking in the glow of a glorious couple of days. After yesterday, 4am is gonna feel like an early betime!

Good night and good luck.