SHARING THE SHOWS
Through my own impulsivity, I’d set up a gauntlet of five shows in two weeks. What was I thinking? was the refrain going through my brain. But I’d committed. And I’d never seen Jerry Tripsters, a Jerry Garcia Band (JGB) cover before, despite having heard about them. And I had this Saturday night free.
My friend Sarah fell ill, so our plans of dancing, making pet noises, and laughing at our own jokes for extended periods of time fell through. She did “miracle” her ticket to Rolf, whom you remember from last week’s Uncle Jesse show. I love Saturdays; I spent the day reading student journals, finalizing lesson plans I’d been putting off all week, reading, and conceptualizing my book on how discourse in cinema perpetuates singles. After that, I took a huge power nap, and yet I still woke up tired. So I pounded a 20-ounce Cherry Coke Zero on the Metro ride to Pearl Street Warehouse. Sometimes you hear a song that gives you such goosebumps (or a “skingasm” as we call in the jamband scene) that you have to play it over and over again. “Eventually,” off the new String Cheese Incident album, was that song. I had in my headphones, playing on repeat, as I walked to the venue. But my musical reverie was interrupted by Kathy; we spotted each other and chatted, as I made a pit stop at Colada to give Rolf his miracle. Once inside, I chatted with Lisa, a fellow Deadhead educator. We discussed our beginning-of-school year adventures between songs and agreed that we teachers need these shows to keep us centered. And Richard was there with his harmonica. I wasn’t all that familiar with JGB’s repertoire until I saw Dark Star Orchestra (DSO) cover a JGB show in Baltimore (3/31/18) when guitarist Rob Eaton couldn’t play with them. It turned me onto them. Some songs played by the Tripsters included:
During setbreak, Rolf and I had a nice intellectual dialectic about the political writings of George Orwell; Down and Out in Paris and London is now on my queue. I also got to talk about my work in Singles Studies and explained why singlism is a societal problem. Of course, “Second That Emotion” interrupted that discourse, and I was there for music. I started to fade at around 11, but told myself I was gonna hang on until 11:30. During that half hour, Kathy, Lisa, and Rolf had tapped out. But Richard was still blowing on that harp, and I was determined to crawl toward that finish line. And they stopped right at 11:30. My orange Dead/Mets tie-dye made me stick out like sore thumb (pardon the cliché) among all the well-dressed club-hoppers pervading the Waterfront. But sometimes it feels good being on the outside; I’ve always prided myself on going against the norm. On the Metro ride, I had a good chat with a dude named Ben, a realtor in the area. I had seen him wearing a Bruce Springsteen shirt at the venue; apparently, he’d been at the Patti Smith show at the Anthem and wanted to do a twofer. I dig that. We talked music and real estate, the latter of which has been a slight obsession of mine recently. As for the former, he’d been to a bunch of shows in New York, as well as that Gathering of the Vibes festival I attended in upstate New York back in 2001 and 2002, during which I had a transcendental experience that led me into education. Solo travel rocks. Once home, I flipped on an episode of Only Murders in the Building, which my friend and colleague Elizabeth delivered a presentation on at the Northeast Modern Language Association last year. I’m looking for the pro-singlehood angle, and all I can say is that Mabel annoys the hell out of me. Perhaps material for my book. We shall see. Show four of five complete.
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