Good & Plenty

I've been busy for the last couple days - too busy to write anything worth reading. I could have managed a diatribe or two, and a plethora of grumpy shit, but nothing worth looking at, so I foisted some of my old photos off on you and called it an entry. Sigh.

Both of the photos, and several hundred more, were taken at Jekyll Island two years ago when I ran away from my family for a whole weekend to write, shoot endless photographs of trees, shrubs, buildings, and any other oddities that caught my eye. I needed to collect the tattered edges of my sanity and try to stitch them into something resembling a human being again, and I've always loved that island and the nature there. The history's cool, too. I'm hoping to get back there in the next year or two and spend some time in the salt marshes and delving deeper into the historic district and some of the architecture there.

Sunday and Monday, I had band rehearsals for our gig this coming weekend. One of our band members quit a week ago, and another one discovered a scheduling error too lat to change it and now can't come, so we had two days to adjust our song list and our arrangements to make up for the sudden absence of male voices. Yep, this coming weekend, we're a girl band. Woo-hoo! Luckily, we are singers and drummers...if someone can't come to a gig, it's not like we suddenly don't have bass or keyboard or something. The six of us will do our best not to disappoint the nice folks who invited us to sing for them, and maybe they won't notice that we don't sound anything like our CDs. Heh.

I am excited about the coming weekend for several reasons: first, it's a new event with new folks and a new audience, which means we can trot out some duty oldies and make 'em shiny again without boring anyone but ourselves; second, I will be Evil Genius free for three days - OK, so I have a five-plus hour drive to get there, I don't care - the kid will be blissfully at home, happy to be missing out on five hours of containment in the Booster-Seat-of-Doom; third, we are introducing three new songs I wrote this for this season, and I'm really happy with them, so I'm hoping the audience likes them, too. One of them even has guitar with it, our first ever song with instrumentation. I'm hoping that we can manage some more pieces with guitar, if only because it does a fine job of keeping us in tune. One of the toughest part of being an a-capella group is keeping in tune - it's so easy to go flat!!

So this coming Thursday we may be playing at Zoo Atlanta for the opening of the new Naked Mole Rat exhibit. One of our members did the background mural for the exhibit (cool, huh?) and they might be interested in having us come drum, give it an African feel. Never mind that we're all so freakin' white, we could have been carved out of cream cheese...we have African drums and we know how to use them. Mostly. Sometimes. Well, anyway, I play a mean shaker, and I can keep a basic beat on my very large, exceedingly heavy, loud as all get out, drum that's either Ivory Coast or Senegalese. There seems to be some difference of opinion on that. If you ask me about it...it's wooden and goes boom when I thwack it. It's big enough for me to sit on it while I play, although I really do want knee pads or something if I do that, because kneeling/sitting on a drum for any length of time isn't comfy at all. The band members who can make it to this are all fine drummers and percussionists, so we can make it work.

The whole band can't do the Zoo thing, because it's the night before we all leave for the other weekend thing. Yep. The night before I am supposed to get up at oh-god-thirty and drive for five-plus hours, I am doing another gig. Well, why not? It's feast or famine, and how could I resist being a part of Zoo history? A tiny, really very insignificant part, but a part nonetheless.

I am siting here slowly munching on Good & Plenty candies and hoping I can think of something more engaging to write about soon - otherwise, it'll be all those bazillion pictures I took of Jekyll that I hope to make into note cards and sell some day.

Y'all ever run dry like this??