It's true we are all living on a bubble. We know it and skate merrily on. Sometimes we catch accidental images of ourselves on the shiny surfaces of our lives.
Our Mary Gauthier show last week was just great. All the parts of the show experience were top rated. The press photos show Mary as tense and edgy, but offstage she turned out to be down-home, funny, open to people, with just enough of Baton Rouge left in her. And onstage she was one of those performers who holds the audience in her hand, who makes the crowd love her.
It's fun to watch the crowd in the midst of that massive parallel processing with horizontal overflow; they smile unconsciously; their eyes glow. Her guitarist Thomm Jutz was like Gurf Morlix in a box. They did a spectacular job on the Louisiana trilogy (Sugar Cane, Mama Louisiana, Wheel Inside a Wheel).
Mary gave me a DVD of a slide show of Katrina photos with Mercy Now as the sound track. She was right; it did make me cry. I gave her the Southern Places mixes for the road.
Melissa, Faith, and Deb put together a photo sale in the gallery and sold over a thousand dollars worth the first night. A few of mine were in it; Deb cleans them up in PhotoShop and mats them. Funny to see someone walk out with a picture of a brass band parade at JazzFest.
New songs I like: Dar Williams and Ani DiFranco doing Comfortably Numb; Steven Stills' Feed the People; Bonnie Raitt doing the Emory Joseph song Trinkets, with its mention of Dumaine Street and the tai chi lady on the levee.
