Went to Cowboy Junkies last night, comps from Blair, their manager.
As per riders, Margot had her fresh flowers next to her mic stand.
And she had less of the snarks than usual.
The new material was fine and about halfway into their gig I felt like I'd had the CJ experience, and was essentially waiting for their Sweet Jane.
From there went over to Liz's, for the tail end of her writerly meeting.
Everyone was in the proverbial bag when I arrived, as writers are wont to be all toasty when gathered, when discussing such arduous things such as serial commas.
Off to see those cute Canadians, Sloan, tonight with Annie and Michele, or Mish, as she prefers to be dubbed.
Sloan, the foursome most famed in the mind of Yours Truly for onstage instrument swaps.
In mere minutes I'll be running over to Trinity Church with another art donation that will hopefully fetch a good price so the joint won't have to shut its art-encouraging doors.
All for now and over and out the door.

Rock on Canadian rockers Love.

The Middling City News today is so slim that I believe an average PennySaver is beefier - section A today is several pages of ads, wire service stories, a few pages of hard, local fact.
If You were motoring in a west to easterly fashion down Hertel Avenue last night you, if You glanced into the convoluted window displays and saw beyond the neon and piñatas and such of that rather awful cheese fiesta known as Gramma Mora's, You may have noted a person wearing a sombrero the size of a golf umbrella, outsizing any respectable Parisian café table by at least 125%.
That was Yours Truly.
Met the Art Mentor last night at the Mexjoint and noted a stack of sombreros and asked barkeep about said stack. He tried to warble out a tune about how you had to imbibe a certain amount of tequila or whatnot to earn the right to wear a sombrero. I would have none of that and wrangled the largest onto my head.
The thing was heavy, a real neck workout.
This was sort of an r&d foray as one of my back-burnered concepts is to market public laptop work sombreros for those who wish to be unnoticed, undisturbed whilst working on their machines. A rollable, flexible sombrero.
Last night's sombrero was not only heavy but inflexible.
It also prevented me from watching the end of the Sabres game properly as looking up at the television over my head to the left was a slippery slope.
But, mark these words.
If I do ever acquire a burro I am definitely getting that Gramma Mora's sombrero.
The Sabres won, I won.
Today, in mere moments, Yours Truly is heading down to the very bunkeresque and uncheering MC Convention Center for a rubber chix lunch, a charity event honouring several for their community contribs, including one of my art pals, Gerald Mead.
Something for Your mulling pleasure.
Doing the (rubber) chicken dance wearing an XL sombrero would be quite a feat, a test of will, neck, derring-do.

Obliterated Love.

Big and great Middling City news - in grand banner style - is that the Bike Path Rapist has been apprehended after over two decades.
I had a gig out at Middling City U this fine morning and was informed by an official there that this very rapist (a wily, sociopath who was a church-attending, lawn mowing, model dad in cahoots with his dark self) registered to run in the annual Linda Yalem Memorial Run - named for his first victim who he also murdered.
I said Incomprehensible.
And just now, with all that horrid news somewhere in the mind, wrote a one-page artist statement full of joy and love and hopefulness about making art and such for a grant. Granted, the thing was due yesterday, on Martin's Day, but there were no po's open and so they should just say What the hell, c'mon in and let us have a look, and then, oh then, they should cry Eu-fuckin-reka, give this woman a grant.
Well, now that I have blogged about this all it will not happen, as that's how these art things work. Say and reveal too much and *ka-poof* there it goes.
Planning a Girlie Roller Outing via eVite which is so very new millennium. This event is a mere handful of dollars and all the dollars go to the Middling City roller derby team.
Everyone has a bat story. Everyone has a ghost story. Everyone has an I got my heart smashed like an atom story. Everyone, seemingly, also has a rollerskating story.
Mine.
I was an athlete. I was very thin. Read between the lines.
All the other girls lined up against the wall would get picked for the boy choice skate. I would be nearly the last but, You know, the boys were usually so bad at skating and had such gross, sweaty hands that it was usually, in retrospect always, better to skate solo and emulate Raquel Welch than be subjected to that nonsense.
And everyone has a song or bevy of songs they attribute to skating.
On all these divergent notes I end, skating away to the post office to get this hopeful packet of documentation and such off to wherever, whomever.

Rolling, Love.

First things first.
Happy Martin Luther King, Jr. Day's Eve.
There is a movement to make this holiday a national day of service and at an event shot by Yours Truly on Friday night there was big emphasis on literacy and helping non-readers to love words.
Tomorrow was the actual b-day and, renewing knowledge of MLKjr Fun Facts, retrieved the one that notes he began college at the age of fifteen.
Just read the harrowing tale of a former child soldier in Sierra Leone, Ishmael Beah, in the NYT mag.

Sometimes I feel that living in New York City, having a good family and friends, and just being alive is a dream.

There was just, it should be noted, a Middling City skyclatter, thunder like nobody's business. Today it hailed. This is NOT snow, I shouted into the sky. It's time for snow. The snow shovel looks bereft and I do imagine that all the plowing guys are digging their long run of contracted coffee breaks.

It is time to edit like the wind, like the blustering wind in the dark Middling City clouds.
It should be noted that YT will be at a press junket for VH1 soon for a few out in the freaky desert bowl that is Las Vegas. In Spanish that means The Chips.
Scouting out shooting ops, the sort with rented guns, not the other, renowning sort.

Scouting, hailing Love.