#557 Bits & Pieces

Saturday, 02/04/06

NO NEWS! NEWS GO AWAY!! Well, the Muhammad cartoons thing has managed to leak through my barriers and into my head, and I really really really don't want to know about it. Everybody, absolutely everybody, on both sides of the issue, right from the start, has handled it in the most incredibly stupid way imaginable. What are people thinking? DO they think? How would Muhammad handle this? (Actually, that may be the wrong question to ask - I understand he was a rather ferocious man, in a ferocious time and place.) Whatever. Just make it go away, please?
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I went to the Twisted Tassels performance this evening, and it was over at a little after 7. I did get up and dance a teeny bit at the end. I was stiff. I guess working on the machines is stiffening me up, so maybe I should fit in a dance class occasionally. Perizad teaches in Woodstock on Sundays, early afternoon, and it just so happens that the drumming group also meets in Woodstock, right after Perizad's class ends, so maybe I'll try both. If I get up in time tomorrow.

The drumming group looks like they have a lot of fun. I'm not sure whether it is all female, or if it just turned out that way tonight, there were like 15 women on the stage drumming up a storm. I asked one of the women (she looked very male, I had to wonder) when and where they met, and if there were lessons or was one supposed to already know something, and she said just come, you pick it up from others, no big deal.

Seven thirty seemed so early to go home. I got out on route 28, and saw a BBQ place ahead with a bar, and a sign that they had a bluegrass/folk band tonight, and I had heard that the bar at this place drew an older crowd, so on impulse I pulled in. It happened to be THE place where Roman held me and really kissed me for the first time, in the parking lot after a Mensa dinner. I thought maybe if I avoided the dining room and stayed in the bar I'd be ok, but I wasn't really. Damn BBQ smell. He may have ruined my favorite food forever.

So anyway, for the first time in decades I walked into a bar alone and plunked my behind on a stool, and ordered --- "do you have anything only slightly alcoholic?" --- a very fruity drink with that coconut rum in it. Older crowd? Mostly it was me and the bartender, a 25-year-old cutey. We chatted off and on for two hours until the band arrived. They set up in the dining room, but there were open double doors between, and I sat at the end of the bar right in front of them, a good seat, actually.

There was a guitar, a bass guitar (whatever that's called), and drums, and the guitar player and a woman sang. I don't know how to classify what they did. It wasn't bluegrass, and it wasn't folk, and it wasn't country, it was all original, and, well, sort of blah. (Nothing like the 10-piece jumpin' Cajun band of the night before. I may have been a little spoiled.) So I left a little after 10.

And here I am. Sigh.