Because of course that sounds fascinating…

An ad on Yahoo Launch’s main page: “See Pink play with her dogs on her new reality show.”

Holy moley.

Why can’t reality shows please just die?

Caught up

So, I’ve been playing oodles of shows lately, but now I’m in a little lull and it occurs to me that I don’t post much about the shows themselves. I will do that now:

The past few weeks I’ve played a couple shows at Fantasia, one of which was a rowdy Ladies’ Night that featured two poets (Anna Wolff and Jessica Lohafer, who was brilliant and hysterically funny), a woman on the autoharp (Stephanie Kontournos) who played old folk songs and sang in this rich, throaty voice, Kat the Unsinkable and her gorgeous voice and me and my guitar and my tamborine.

After that I played at Three Trees, all on my own, and it was wonderful–a small audience but an enthusiastic one (which I’d take over huge and indifferent, thanks), and now I’m gearing up for another show at Fantasia on the 11th.

But here’s the exciting thing: I’ve had more fun arranging songs now that I get to play for an audience regularly. Arranging? Yes. See, I am my own percussion section, which makes for a whole lot of fun as I figure out where I can possibly snap my fingers, pound a beat on my guitar, and so on. I play the tamborine with my foot, and now?

Oh yes. Now:

I’m playing the egg shaker. Which means, at the craziest points, I am playing the egg shaker, the guitar and the tamborine, while also singing. It is such a weird rush–like amateur juggling. Inevitably I’ll drop something, but what? And when?

Mostly I practice all this in my bedroom, yelping in frustration and laughing at myself in turns, which then starts Mitch laughing at me as I keep each song going for so long and then fumble, and the whole mess comes crashing down. It’s great. It’s especially colorful after a few glasses of wine.

So on the 11th expect color–a few new songs and one very, very old one (written when I was 16 and recently revived–and revised), and a new trick or two. I’m stupidly excited.

But all this is to say nothing of the lovely and bizarre encounters I’ve had with audience members–that is possibly an entry unto itself. No, it definately is. That will come later.

The perfect summer day

Contains:

A lengthy breakfast of Mt. Bakery granola and fruit, black coffee and an almond croissant, all eaten with one hand while holding a book (The Joy Luck Club, by Amy Tan) open with the other.

A likewise lengthy perusal of my favorite bookstore, which is composed of several rooms (so many, in fact, that I somehow managed to lose my dad the last time we went to the bookstore together–after searching every possible room that I could find, including such unlikely sections as Popular Romance and Self-Help, I finally had to go up front and ask the clerk if he’d seen my dad. He had. He steered me to Music, where my dad was scanning How to Play the Blues Harp Today). In one of the rooms (containing Poetry, Women’s Biography, Theater, Theology, Travel and more), the lights had been accidentally left off, and I snuck back in the darkest farthest backest corner for a few minutes, feeling the store big and silent and dark around me, the bookshelves looming and indistinct, before tracking down the aforementioned clerk and informing him about the outtage.

An afternoon at home with the kittens, practicing playing the guitar and the egg shaker at the same time (that’s right–the egg shaker. And the guitar. At the same time) while the kittens climbed in my lap and attempted to nibble on my fretting hand.

A trip to the river with a sweaty, grumpy and fresh-off-work-from-the-farm Mitch, where we hiked out to a nice swimming hole and met Morgan and, by coincidence, Morgan’s parents, and splashed and swam and floated in the current for a nice, long while. It was hot enough that we dried off in a matter of minutes after getting out of the water.

Stopping by the farm on the way home and harvesting salad greens, cherry tomatoes , cucumber and cabbage, to be used on Sunday for a scrumptuous farm-fresh lunch with friends.

Stopping by a berry farm after that and picking over some rather picked-over raspberries for a nice after-dinner treat that we later forgot to eat.

Spending the rest of the evening at home, drinking beer and eating veggie-rich quesadillas and playing with the kitties.

Going to bed sunburnt, slightly drunk and completely tuckered out.

Sick kitty no more

At least, he’s not puking and he’s back to his spunky little Gunner-self. Hoorah!

The first review of one of my shows…

…was written by my brother. A bit biased, yes, but dang if it ain’t sweet. Here it is:

I think God messed up on my sister.

Okay, well he didn’t mess up so much in her personality, talent, or integrity, but more on her packaging.

I’m sorry, but she should be fat.

Fat, and huge, and possibly black…well at least Melado.

I can not believe the pipes on this girl.

So for those who don’t know, my sister is a musician. She plays guitar, sings, and stomps on a little tambourine with her foot all at the same time. There have been times where she’s also been known to tickle the ivories, rock the bass, and bust out on the egg shaker. But nowadays she seems to be investing the majority of her energy into the first three, and I am consistantly amazed at the her talent.

Since moving to Bellingham for the summer I have become a groupie for my sister. Playing in coffee shops, market places, and any other venue where the owner has heard her play because, honestly, that’s all it takes for them to want to book her. I can only imagine what would happen if P. Diddy heard her. He’d want a reality show like *that. ‘Course she’d have to ho it up a little.

But I digress.

She’s been doing these shows and I think I’ve been to all but one of them and I am astonished at how EVERY time she plays she performs better and better. Integrating finger snaps, guitar drumming, and any other number of auxilary instruments into her performance, you can hear her songs evolve each time she plays them. I can barely talk on my cell phone and walk at the same time (without seious complications), let alone sing, strum, stomp, and snap all at once. It’s incredible.

So at last night’s show at the Three Trees Coffee house (not the most performance condusive atmosphere, because while they did have a stage, some people *cou-employees-gh* didn’t seem to think it was appropriate to censor the volume of their voices while in a tiny room with a live performer), she rocked the house with an hour and fifteen minute long set that sent a man back to Chigaco with a new found appreciation for the Bellingham music scene, left a coffee shop owner feeling like the next big live venue producer, and a family feeling very proud of their little girl (who’s actually older than me).

So I’m now going to take it upon myself to relay to all of y’all when my sister’s next shows will be because everyone needs to hear this kid. Check out her myspace for a sample (she’s my number one…go figure), but you haven’t heard anything until you’ve heard her live.

So while God may have messed up by not making my sister a fat, Melado woman he’s certainly made up for it by cramming her tiny frame full of amazing vocal and songwriting talent, and making her one of the coolest people I know.

I leave you now with a list of some of my personal favorite songs of hers (some of which I don’t totally know the title to, because it’s not like she announces the name of every one before she plays it):

-All is Well
-Gray and Cold
-Red Shoes
-Shortcut
-That one about Morgan
-That one about a city
-And there are many, many others, but those are the main favs of mine.

Sick kitty (cont.)

Yup. He’s still sick…Now we get to feed him pills, the poor guy.

Sick kitty

Nope, didn’t get much sleep last night. Not with the boy cat, Gunner, throwing up twice an hour from 3 AM to 7 AM, at which point I finally rolled out of bed and called the Animal Emergency Center (but not before losing several hours of sleep 1) taking it in turns with Mitch to clean up after Gunner, and 2) fretting that Gunner had come down with some rare parasite that would quickly hop from him to Sparrow to Mitch to me and take us all out quietly before the vet opened for regular business hours on Monday).

Instead of a leisurely Sunday morning breakfast and a walk to church, etc., Mitch and I wound up in the waiting room of AEC with an eerily quiet and wide-eyed Gunner tucked away in the back corner of his cat carrier. We shared the waiting room with a labradoodle, the labradoodle’s young, quiet owner, and two sleepy looking ladies who informed us, in a lengthy monologue, that they saved abandoned cats and were here with two kittens who had heart trouble but had outlived even the doctor’s most ambitious guesses (“Wouldn’t last the month, they said, but here she is, a strapping six-month-old kitten!” and so on).

By the time we got Gunner into the exam room and out of the carrier, he started in on his best contortionist tricks, wriggling out of arms and under hands and hopping from table to counter and (almost) into drawers. After the bit with the thermometer, he was quite distrusting, but once the assistant left to fetch the doctor, Mitch and I won him over with belly rubs and ear scratches and games so that when the doctor arrived Gunner was on his back on the exam table, paws up, purring at top volume.

“He really is sick,” we told the vet, “we swear.”

She checked him out, wrapped him up in what she called a “Gunner burrito” (a towel) and whisked him away to give him some shots. We took him home and he promptly threw up three times in the middle of the living room before disappearing behind a wingback chair for the better part of an hour–but now he’s curled up on the couch with Sparrow, out cold. This is an improvement over the pacing and the melancholy lounging that he was doing this morning, and it is certainly an improvement over the regular puking. Hopefully this bodes well.

An evening at Nimbus

We don’t leave the house much, and most times that is just fine. But the other night, after making plans with my brother that fell through, Mitch and I decided that an outing was in order and we headed out for the fanciest restaurant around in jeans and sneakers.

Nimbus is a sleek, classy joint with red walls and a glossy black ceiling. There is a mirror behind the bar that makes the rows of bottles seem to extend back indefinately; the servers wear black pants and aprons and pretty shirts and they smile a lot. Perched atop what is currently the tallest building in Bellingham (The Bellingham Towers: 14 whopping storeys high, and soon to be surpassed by some 18 story monstrosity full of glass-fronted condos), Nimbus lets you look down on the tarpaper rooftops of the stores and offices and apartments of downtown Bellingham in a way that is a bit disconcerting at first: everything looks black and gray and industrial, but gracefully interrupted by trees and glimpses of the silvery bay and the watery violet silohettes of the San Juan islands.

We pick a table in the bar and order pints of the very best beer around (North Fork stout). We sip our beer quietly and look out the windows, pointing out landmarks and remarking on how small the people, cars and houses are from Way Up Here. We also laugh at ourselves and our pretty little town: we are not that high up, after all.

I feel like I know them now

This morning, we helped my mom and stepdad move into a house that they own and have been renting out(through a rental agency) for the past two years. Here are a few of the things the renters left behind:

Various bits of broken crayons, in an assortment of colors

A journal titled “My Letters to You”, which was stashed on the top of some cabinets in the laundry room.

An economy size bottle of Jose Cuervo tequila

A regular size bottle of Jose Cuervo tequila

A half-empty (or is it half-full?) bottle of marguerita mix

An unopened bottle of wine, complete with a fancy-pants corkscrew

A return slip for a $2500 engagement ring (purchased on credit) to Kay Jewelers. Reason for return? “Changed my mind.”

Oo la la!

New pictures of the guitar-in-progress:

Rosette | Braced Top

(Old pictures of the guitar-in-progress.)