All of my teams are doing well in the playoffs. The Patriots, the Colts (any team with a Manning at quarterback is one of my teams, except for Eli who is a big wuss), and the Saints in their amazing new incarnation. Here's the January mix, a story behind each selection. Quetzal: Lura meets Rodrigo e Gabriela; Eric Lindell is our Jan. 27 show (I was surprised to see my note to the editor as a letter in Offbeat Magazine); Papa Mali who is sooo dark but is producing Ruthie Foster's next album due out Feb 6, not that I'm counting; Terrance Simien changed the word Mississippi to New Orleans and suddenly it was all about Katrina; Chris Bergson is my neice Jeanne's discovery, an old black voice on a twenty something white boy from New York; and some old stuff that I realized (during my iTunes conversion experience) hadn't made it onto a monthly mix. John Sullivan (theater manager) got a 30 GB iPod for Christmas and asked me to put music on it. I'm not an iPod user; instead I have mp3 players in every thing else. So I cranked up iTunes on my box and pointed it to the 50 GB of music that lives there (yes, backed up onto 2 external drives), put it on shuffle and heard things from my own collection that I hadn't heard in years. So I'll be adding some of those treasures to the monthly mix. Melissa gave me a small, hopefully simple, sewing machine for Christmas. People seem surprised by this. My old treadle machine has been sitting in the basement for years, but on it I could sew anything with straight lines. The project I have in mind for it is to make a quilt out of our collection of tee shirts that we don't wear but which commemorate something or other. I'll document my progress. The first step, I'm thinking, would be to take the sewing machine out of the box.

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