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.