Saturday morning, after a train wreck of a gig in Renton with my friend BT, and having stayed up until four o’clock in the morning the night before, I got up and nine o’clock and drove up to my brother’s house.  I got to see Niece #2 for the first time, and she’s almost five months old.  She was very quiet and smiley, and she instantly grabbed both my thumb and pinky finger in her tiny hands, which seemed to surprise everyone.  “She never does that with us,” they said.

It was great to see them.  The last couple of times I’ve been up in Seattle, they had been in Portland, so our paths hadn’t crossed.  We do talk on the phone regularly, but it’s not the same, especially when a new baby is involved.  We went for brunch at a delicious Mexican restaurant called Azul, then went back to the house and just kinda hung out for a while.  They were packing for a trip, so I just stayed downstairs and played with Niece 1 and Niece 2 while Nephew was upstairs sleeping.

We all went our separate ways around 1:30, and since I had no agenda for the rest of the day, I decided to take a rest from driving and go sit in a park for a while.  Naturally I had to drive for quite a while to get to the park, but the plan was set.  I headed down to GasWorks Park, in the Fremont district.  That’s the short version of the story.  The long version is that there were two or three large festivals in Seattle that day, and traffic was nightmarish.  I also took a wrong turn and ended up going across the short bridge to Eastlake (I think. . .?) and hung out in a tiny little park along Lake Union for a while, exploring and walking through the neighborhood a bit before driving back across the bridge to Wallingford, which is a neighborhood that I could quite easily see myself living in.  By the time I got to GasWorks Park, I was ready to relax.  There was some sort of folk arts festival happening, so I was glad to have gotten there early enough to check it all out.

Naturally, I had my camera with me, and I was very glad I did.  There were lots of colorful costumes, great gypsy klezmer music, naked people (some painted, others not), belly dancers. . .

(Can I just take a minute here to say that the naked dancing guy had a surprisingly gigantic scrotum?  I rarely feel the need to mention things like that (mostly cause I don’t see many scrota!), but I mean, jeez.  You’d find it worth mentioning too, if you’d seen it.  I’m just saying.  The security guy finally made him wear pants, which he grudgingly put on, but kept pulling them down as low as they would go, showing fully half of his ass and barely concealing him in the front.  Yeesh.  Anyway. . .I don’t want to devote too much time to scrota; I feel that I’ve done enough already.  Moving on.)

. . .and, of course, the gas works itself.  This is one of the weirdest parks anywhere, and it’s in one of the most beautiful settings in all of Seattle.   It’s slightly sinister, utterly fascinating, and endlessly photogenic.

I seem to remember signs posted around the park that said things like, ‘Wash Your Hands After Touching Grass’ and ‘Do Not Lie On Grass; Please Use Blankets’ and things like that, but I couldn’t find any of those this time.   The city must have cleaned the place up a bit more since the last time I was there.  It’s been a few years.

Anyway,  the day was lovely, and I was glad to have had the extra time to spend in such a leisurely way.  I love Seattle, and every time I go, I toy with the idea of moving there.   Here’s the view from the park.  If you click on it, you’ll see that it’s full-size so that you can really get a sense of it.  It’d be amazing after dark too.

I don’t know that I’ll actually move there.  I have good things going for me here (not to mention extremely cheap rent), but I do love it, and I always come back and look at apartments on ListByCraig in various neighborhoods, trying to decide which area would suit me.

Le Sigh.  Je t’aime, EmeraldCity.

My friend FlutistSusan came over tonight to try out an arrangement she’s been working on, which is an awesome and hilarious combination of two famous pieces of music, but we both thought it could use some tweaks.  It’s arranged for cello and flute (or violin), and she took some pictures while I made some notes, both literally and figuratively.

For the record, if I’d known I was going to have my picture taken today, I’d have dressed better and taken a shower, but oh well.  What can ya do?  Sometimes you have to just ‘let go of the outcome’ or whatever.  I’m sharing these pictures because I like them.

What a weird week.  Since the end of April, which was one of the busiest I’ve ever had, my schedule has been blissfully activity-free.  Andrea’s wedding (at which I played cello) was touching and beautiful, and I spent the rest of the weekend lying low.

IrishBand’s singer and I were going to see a movie on Sunday night, but I got a mass text message from one of my actor friends saying that he was performing that night, and that everybody should come down.  I called Singer and said, “New plan for tonight.  We should go see this play.  My friend’s in it, and I have no idea what to expect, but the group wrote it, so I’m sure it’ll be good.”  He agreed, and I drove to his apartment to pick him up.  We went to the venue (not an ‘actual’ theater, but a room in the Eagles’ Lodge) a bit early to scope the place out.  Turned out we were too early, so we sat in the bar, had a couple of drinks and shared a basket of surprisingly delicious fries.  It was funny and a bit strange to be the youngest person there by about thirty years.

The show was inspirred by Busby Berkeley’s productions, and even used old piano music and quoted bits from movies.  It was really entertaining and fun.  My friend described it as a ‘farce’, with elements of burlesque.  There were dancing girls and a woman-pretending-to-be-a-man, and a gay boy, and forbidden love, and my friend, who somehow managed to incorporate bits of all of those elements.  It was great.

From there we walked across the street to the Sapphire Hotel, which is one of my favorite places.  We went there and waited for ActorFriend to join us after he changed his clothes and stuff.  He was meeting a woman friend for what Singer and I thought was a date, but it turned out that they were actually ex’s, and were meeting to catch up on each others’ lives.  They invited us to join them at a table next to theirs, which was better for conversing than our noisy table, so we slid it over and settled in for a great conversation, as well as delicious food and drinks.  I hadn’t seen my friend in quite a few months, and catching up was long overdue.  His friend turned out to be a singer-songwriter, and a very interesting person as well.  Here’s to many more evenings like that one.

Monday and Tuesday I was exhausted and pretty much slept the days away, but yesterday I woke up early and felt great after finally getting a full night’s sleep.  I called my friend J to invite her to the Japanese Garden, which she felt was too expensive, so I suggested the Chinese Garden, which I had a couple of complimentary passes for.  It was an offer she couldn’t refuse.

I hadn’t been there in years, but I used to have a membership there, which is how I got the free tickets.  A couple of months ago, I got a letter in the mail saying, ‘Come back!  Renew your membership’, et cetera, so I took the opportunity to take J, who hadn’t been there before.  Naturally, I brought my camera, and here are some of the results.

In one of the buildings was a chest of drawers with a jar full of numbered sticks on top of it.  The idea was that you shake the jar of sticks, and whichever one comes out first is the one you were meant to have.   Mine was number 23, so I found the drawer marked ’23′ and pulled out a single piece of paper, which read:

In case you’re one of the people who reads BFS&T from a feed or something, it says, “You have made a deep impression on someone dear to you.”  I love stuff like that, as you may already know.

Lovely place, lovely day.  From there, we left the car parked at the Garden and walked to the MAX train to ride downtown to the bank for cash, then walked back up to Old Town to an incredible little Thai cart for a super-cheap dinner, of which I have some left over and will happily finish tonight.  After that, we drove around aimlessly for a while, and I headed up to the Alphabet District in Northwest.  We both felt like walking some more, so I drove us to Macleay Park, where we ditched the car and hiked into the woods.  I took no pictures, because we were having a pretty deep conversation, and I wanted to pay attention to her.   We hiked a mile or so in, to the abandoned Stone House, climbed all over it, then turned back.

We left, exhausted, and I dropped her off at home, because I needed to learn a bunch of songs for tonight’s rehearsal with a new songwriter with whom I’ll be playing accordion occasionally.

That’s why I’ve been so absent from blogging lately; it’s because I’ve been out there living.

Time for Thai food!

This month has been one of the busiest I’ve ever had.  Recording and/or rehearsals wish IrishBand almost every night, and one night Andrea came to visit and rehearse a song she wrote for her wedding, which is happening on Friday.  I’ll be playing cello and her sister will be playing piano.  From there we went to dinner at Por Que No (one of the best and most authentic (and least expensive!) Mexican restaurants in town) and then went to have coffee and play Scrabble at Palio, one of my favorite little coffee shops.

She won, by the way, but it was really close.  330-something to 314.  There will be a rematch, but I’m not sure when, since we won’t have a chance to hang out again before her wedding, and then of course she’ll be going to Canada for another ceremony with her family and then back to Switzerland, where she lives.

A couple more nights of rehearsals followed, and then I headed up to Seattle on Friday to play bass with my friend Brandon’s classic rock band.  Super fun to play and hang out with him again.  In the morning we went to breakfast and then I raced the three hours’ drive home to Portland, in order that I’d be back to set up for the IrishBand show at 4:30.

The show was a complete blast.  It featured a pair of dancers, an aerialist, a ukelele player, a sword swallower/fire breather, a martial arts/juggling/comedy group (Nanda; check ‘em out.  They’re the coolest group ever, I promise you.), then IrishBand finished up with a set.  Oh, and then there was dancing for an hour or so after that.  It was a great time.  I’m not even going to attempt to describe everything, cause it would take too long, but my modus operandi is that if people do cool things in front of me while I’m holding a camera, it’s my duty to capture those moments.  Behind the scenes is where the real show always happens, anyway.

After partying for a few hours everything was set up and ready, we went out front and mingled a bit.

This picture is fuzzy (or was it just me?  har har) and terrible as far as quality goes, but at least you can get a sense of what the people and the main room were like that night. . .

. . .and then I handed my camera off to Whit, who took some pictures of the actual event while I climbed upstairs and sat in the balcony with the rest of IrishBand to stay out of sight of the audience and watch the show.

After Nanda were finished, we set up and rocked the house for about an hour.  Oh yeah. . .and then I danced.  Yes, believe it or not, it’s true.  I did some moonwalking (both forwards and backwards. . .dang right!) and a whole bunch of ‘normal’ dancing too.   A good time was had by all.  Those of us who were left at the end of the night had the pleasure of helping clean up the place and empty all of the risers and seats and everything out of it by loading them into trucks, but even that somehow ended up being a good time.

In other news, I’m going to see Yann frickin’ Tiersen (you know, who wrote the frickin’ Amelie soundtrack!) on Wednesday night here in little old frickin’ Portland.  And he’s not even playing at a huge venue, either, but the frickin’ Wonder Ballroom, which has about a 400-person capacity, and where I MYSELF HAVE PLAYED.  I can’t even begin to tell you how excited I am about this.  I play the accordion because of him.  It’s true.

Le sigh.

That might be the weirdest title I’ve ever written for a blog entry, but all I ask is that you bear with me on this one.

I got a text message from a friend yesterday that said, “Turn on NPR right now.”  I did, and heard a story about a bunch of bizarre medical conditions that afflict musicians, like that badge-of-honor rash that violinists get on the left side of their necks from rubbing a violin across it for years or decades.

I didn’t hear anything that would have caused my friend to write with such urgency, though, so after the story was over, I wrote back and said, “Caught a bit of it. . .musicians’ ailments.  What’d I miss?”

“Cello scrotum.  You need to hear the whole story.”

“Holy crap!”  I had to find out more.

As it turns out,  an English medical journal back in the 1970′s reported about a condition called ‘guitarist’s nipple’ that is (supposedly) an irritation caused by a guitar rubbing across your chest.  I suppose that’s assuming that you’re not wearing a shirt.  I’ve played guitar for many years, and my nipples are fine and dandy, thank you very much.  (TMI?  NEI?)  My ribs do go in a little bit on one side, where the top of the body of the guitar rests against your chest while you’re sitting down with it.  Oh yeah, and the calluses on my fingers are thick enough that I can touch a hot pan or something for a while and not feel it.  (“Mmmm, what’s that smell?  Smells like bacon.  Oh. . .it’s my finger.”)

So.  Anyway.

Around the time of said nipple affliction, this English doctor and her husband thought it would be funny if they one-upped that condition, so they dreamed up ‘cello scrotum’, which they said was chafing in the scrotal area.  This is, of course, impossible, because when you play the cello, you hold the instrument between your knees, which are spread far apart, which also means that your nether region is getting plenty of air, so there’s no opportunity for chafing.  Not to belabor the point, but. . .

. . .there, you see?  No chafing.  You DO get sore sometimes from sitting on the edge of a chair all the time, but that’s about it.  The cello is one of the most ergonomic instruments out there.

Apparently, though, the myth of scrotal chafing persisted for decades, until another journal mentioned the condition last December, which prompted the doctor to write to the journal and put the matter to rest once and for all.

The money quote of the article was this:   “Perhaps after 34 years, it’s time for us to confess that we invented cello scrotum.”

Here’s a link to the story.

I had a ball writing this entry, by the way, but ultimately I find this subject to be completely nuts.