Thankfully the smoke has started to clear from all the Canadian fires. This week has been like living in the Denny’s smoking section. I couldn’t even see the city yesterday while driving over the Walt Whitman Bridge.
I figured I’d be waiting by myself for a long time for Grape Street to open so I brought along John Irving’s “A Prayer for Owen Meany” since my girlfriend gave it such a good review. I probably wasn’t there 5 minutes when two people got in line behind me. We were finally let in and I snagged the slot right after the host, Tom Gillam. A lot of people don’t like playing first, but at Grape Street you won’t go on until 10:30PM so there is a decent crowd and everyone is bored enough to appreciate the opening act.
There were a few artists there I’d seen before, including the famous Ray Naylor, but I don’t know most of their names yet. I met a few guys from the Next Big Thing and they sounded really tight. Their name gives Tom plenty of corny joke material and I know if I was in that band I’d probably get sick of that after a while. If anyone from NBT is reading this, here’s a free band name alternative from Ben Garvey: The Neck’s Big Thing. Just think of all the cool flyers and album covers you could make with a picture of a neck and something growing out of it. I also met a guy named El who swears his hip hop group, the Wild Bulls, will be out in force at Grape Street next week.
El had just finished his thing when I got a call from my girlfriend. She had to go to the hospital because she messed up her foot at the gym and couldn’t walk. So I drove home and hung out at the hospital until 2:30AM. The highlight of the trip was trying to guess what a bunch of doctors and nurses were looking at in a container at one point. It looked like it could be a little fish or a severed finger, and I got the impression someone had just passed the oddity. We never found out for sure what was in the container.
Thankfully the smoke has started to clear from all the Canadian fires. This week has been like living in the Denny’s smoking section. I couldn’t even see the city yesterday while driving over the Walt Whitman Bridge.
I figured I’d be waiting by myself for a long time for Grape Street to open so I brought along John Irving’s “A Prayer for Owen Meany” since my girlfriend gave it such a good review. I probably wasn’t there 5 minutes when two people got in line behind me. We were finally let in and I snagged the slot right after the host, Tom Gillam. A lot of people don’t like playing first, but at Grape Street you won’t go on until 10:30PM so there is a decent crowd and everyone is bored enough to appreciate the opening act.
There were a few artists there I’d seen before, including the famous Ray Naylor, but I don’t know most of their names yet. I met a few guys from the Next Big Thing and they sounded really tight. Their name gives Tom plenty of corny joke material and I know if I was in that band I’d probably get sick of that after a while. If anyone from NBT is reading this, here’s a free band name alternative from Ben Garvey: The Neck’s Big Thing. Just think of all the cool flyers and album covers you could make with a picture of a neck and something growing out of it. I also met a guy named El who swears his hip hop group, the Wild Bulls, will be out in force at Grape Street next week.
El had just finished his thing when I got a call from my girlfriend. She had to go to the hospital because she messed up her foot at the gym and couldn’t walk. So I drove home and hung out at the hospital until 2:30AM. The highlight of the trip was trying to guess what a bunch of doctors and nurses were looking at in a container at one point. It looked like it could be a little fish or a severed finger, and I got the impression someone had just passed the oddity. We never found out for sure what was in the container.