Part I: Morning
Two things had to be done this morning before I opened the store at 11 am... 1) I had to drop a DVD... one which I didn't watch... back at Video King on Regent St. But I had to drop it off before they open because it's a day late and I wanted to delay paying the fees, given that this is the logical, patriotic video rental etiquette. Only I don't know if they open at 10 am or 11 am. 2) I had to make my way up to Future Shop because I have a couple of customers who pre-ordered the new Kate Bush CD, "Ariel." Given that it's her first new album in 12 years these people are righteously stoked. Unfortunately a blip in my ordering schedule has made getting it from our distributor on time imPOSSible... so, since Future Shop's sale price is a mere fiddy cents more than our wholesale price (damn you box stores!!!) I go the extra 3/4 mile for my peeps. However, to get to the top of the hill first thing in the morning is a physical feat my physical form no longer performs... but to take a cab up further bumps the financial viability of this endeavour downwards. The two birds/uno stone epiphany comes: walk downtown for around 9:30 am... drop the movie off in the movie holey-hole at Video King, then truck over to King's Place and take THE BUS uptown. Yay!!!
So it went. I took the 16S up through campus. It was the first time in a long while that I've been on a Fredericton bus where people had to stand for lack of space. At Future Shop I grabbed 3 copies of the CD... and if you buy multiples of any one thing they give you the retail stink eye... but I can get as good as give. The downhill trip was done on foot... easy peasy. Cross the parking lot at FHS then down York all the way, listening to The Most Serene Republic yelp about sad songs made sadder. I'm pulled to the curb by a man and son in a pickup truck travelling up York who ask my advice on how to get to the airport. So I confidently send them back down the hill, all the way to the corner of Queen and tell them to follow it all the way 'til it turns into Waterloo Row then all the way up Waterloo row until it forks into Forest Hill and Lincoln... look for the Airport sign indicated there. My good samaritan feeling slowly evaporate a few minutes later when I realized I'd sent them the wrong way on the Queen St. one way. Not the first time I've done that.
Part II : Afternoon
The store's been a little slow this week... cold snap + slow slide out of Rocktober and into Xmas generally cools things off. A few small orders trickle in including one unexpected COD from Sonic Unyon who shipped 5 CDs in a little box and charged me $16.00 for the shipping. HuH?? A call was made, gripes were registered. My daily fun phone call was from a woman who asked if we sold "Vinyl Record Albums." She'd obviously been taking a class in advanced redundancy at the College School Institute. The other minor chuckle of the day was from The Playhouse. They are putting on a show by "Legendary British Folk/Rockers" The Strawbs as an acoustic trio. Apparently the tickets sales have been "sluggish" so they asked us to have our customers fill out ballots for a draw to give out some freebies... fill up the seats, y'know. The promotions person grabbed the filled-out ballots around 1 pm... then around 4 pm I got the first of 5 phone calls from customers telling me they'd won the draw. Wow. The house must be pretty empty.
Part III: Evening
I had a short evening up at the lab... I had scheduled to be off at 7:00 pm. A week and a half ago (or so) I'd gotten an e-mail from a friend/ex-classmate in Montreal saying a friend of theirs was travelling from MTL to Halifax on this date and wondered if I could either a) entertain them for a little bit on a stopover or b) put them up overnight on a longer stopover. Where I am sometimes less of a bastard than others I agreed. I didn't hear back from anyone during the ensuing week (and being the laissee faire kinda guy people pay to be friends with I didn't make any effort to find out if all of this was still on until the night of). So I cabbed down at 7:00 pm only to discover a message saying the person had driven straight through, having left early in the day and drank lots of coffee (ideally). So there I was with (part of) a night off!!! But what to do??
Normally this precious free time would have been utterly squandered watching E-Now or Entertainment Tonight Canada or The Paint Drying Network... BUT... as of Monday I've imposed a moratorium on TV. Nay, more than moratorium, I've in fact banished my television to the ROOM I NEVER GO INTO of my apartment. In the first day of cathode-free living I've managed to read two thirds of a short story collection by Z Z Packer called Drinking Coffee Elsewhere. Tonight, however a different thought occurred to me. In the course of deflecting the seemingly innumerable pre-holiday charity solicitations I'd been sufficiently weakened to fall sucker to a Red Cross appeal. Oh Conscience, My Conscience. Part of the donation gave me entrance to An Evening of Country Music at The Royal Canadian Legion Branch #4. Soooooo...
In my mind this is what I heard (i.e. my left brain/right brain bored brain/beer drinking brain kicking up a little electrical storm): Why not go down... hang out at the back of the bar and see what a night at the Legion is like. Hell we went to the 20/twenty club at Hallowe'en... this could be the only uncrossed frontier left for a nearly young man to break though. My mental picture poofed once I got there and found out the show wasn't in the bar but upstairs in what must be the Bingo Room. It's laid out like Amateur Night at the Church Social... all stackable chairs row on row and a smaaaaaallllll stage at the front. But, in for a penny.... You could buy beer, but I stuck with water... probably due to the systems shock. I waited for the room to fill up (capacity was 275), but it topped off around 60 people. I thought: well at least it isn't only the indie rock shows that have off nights in good ol' F'ton.
The show went down like this: A KHJ lady introduced the evening and the first performer... a local act I'd never heard of... who did two songs. I thought: That's nice, giving an up-and-comer a brief taste of the big time. Then the first of the five headliners came on and performed two songs, introduced the next performer who did two songs... y'see the pattern??? Four of the five were male artists with acoustic guitar and all five were backed up by a second seated acoustic guitar player and an electric bass player. There was a brief intermission after the cavalcade was finished and after the break all five artists got up on stage together and each did a song, passed along to the next, then did a second song when their turn came back around. The second song had a Christmas Theme. Finally they all sang a song together recorded as a fundraiser last Xmas during the first similar X-Canada tour (this was the second). And that was that. It was about 10:30 pm.
The thing of it is... during the intermission I spoke with a few people sitting around me in the audience and everyone was so g-ddamn nice!!! I was mentally readying myself for the mockiest of mock-fests... but my irony essentially got the shit kicked out of it. One grandmother in her early 60s talked with me about how she was a little disappointed with the turnout, wishing it had been better promoted and maybe put in a bar like the Rockin' Rodeo instead of the Legion, which was a good venue but with a stigma that only "Old folks" might attend a show there. Essentially it was the same conversation I have with a half dozen indie and/or punk hipsters every week at the store. She had a deep deep love for Duane Steele and brought her grandson, who looked about 12 or 13, to the show with her. Yep.
Moments after the show ended all the performers were back out front among the small crowd shaking hands, signing pictures and CDs. Since I'd stuck it out through the whole extravaganza I figured I should at least say hello to one of the artists... so I picked Diane Chase for reasons both practical (she was nearest to where I was standing), and epicurean (see for yourselves). She is a nice lady from Sudbury whose mom lived for a while in Bathurst... does a lot of these charity show, including just getting back from a Red Cross tour of Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf... and somehow manages to look simultaneously born to be watched on stage and then like a nice (but hot) young aunt at a wedding reception. And humble, of course (it's a Country Music gene likely already copywritten by Garth Brooks). We talked for a bit, then she took a second to sign an autograph for the 3 year old daughter of a lady-fan, sitting with the kid on her lap while she did it. I'm sure this is how Interpol's aftershow ritual usually goes too.
Finally it occurred to me this would be a great opportunity to activate my recently discovered alter-ego of "Joseph." I'll explain this development to you a bit later... but for now I'll just say that Joseph has discovered he is a Diane Chase fan.
Then home to bed.
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