Ready to Show Our Faces Again

Thanks again for all your well wishes. I'm doing much better, although I still have a cough that seems to have taken up permanent residence in my lungs. Where the heck does all that gook come from?!

The big news around these here parts is that the band Ted drums in, the Tim Lowly Ensemble, got to open up for Rosie Thomas at North Park University. Rosie just happens to be one of my favorite singer-songwriters. Her latest album called These Friends of Mine is a collection of songs recorded pretty informally, mainly with her good friends Denison Witmer and Sufjan Stevens. It's probably my favorite album of hers to date.

Tim was missing his pianist, Maestro Matthew Ganong, and his violinist Ethan Adelsman (who's too busy playing for a gazillion other bands), but Danny Bracken from Anathallo joined in on mandolin, and Rebecca Miller added another guitar. I missed most of the set, as I was playing in the hallway with Cadence, who decided that it was a great time to pretend she was a barking dog while we were in the show.

Rosie's shows are always a mix of her beautiful and often serious and sad songs with her hilarious comedic antics and stories thrown in throughout the set. If you only listen to her CDs, you wouldn't think her shows would be this fun. It would kinda be like if Adam Sandler were performing an all Nick Drake concert, I suppose.

Rosie even performed what almost seemed like her own version of a burlesque show, except it was more like calisthenics and consisted of things like sit-ups, leg-lifts and the like. Only at a Rosie Thomas show will you witness something like that...

Cadence was actually in a good mood all throughout soundcheck (which started at 6:30p) pretty much until we went home close to 11pm. She didn't run amok as much as usual, and she actually did try to be quiet because she had told us she wanted to go to the show, and we'd told her she would have to be quiet. I think she spent so much time being quiet during soundcheck that when it was actually time for the show at 8pm, she was all quieted out and needed to do little kid things like crawl on all fours and bark. Totally understandable. Ted and Dave took Cadence outside to play during most of Rosie's set so I could enjoy the show without being self-conscious about my squirming-crawling-barking 3 year old.

Anyhoo, good times, good times...